ianboag

The original stuff looks like spring steel (it's magnetic). The replacement wires we have put in for now are bronze. We had some suitably sized (fatter) bronze wire. It's not going to wear out or break in five minutes and I will be replacing the hinges anyway in the not too distant future.

Replacing the pins did make a big difference - the hinge slop (rattle the aileron up and down at the hinge) is just about all gone. The replacement wires were 2.4 mm and the ones they replaced were something like 2.2. There is still appreciable slop aileron <-> stick, so I will replace the cables and see where that gets us. I have bought new hinges, but replacing them is a major PITA. If replacement cables sort the problem I will defer hinge replacement until winter .....

That's pretty much what was done except we held the stick and moved the aileron. Aileron hinges wear too.

Done all that. That's why I am replacing the hinges and cables.

Agreed. Good idea. That's why I am replacing the hinges and cables. I was just wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience. This is a factory-built J160C. No to both questions.

I have a high-time (1500-odd hours) 160. Recently we have run into a problem at >100 KIAs which we think is (incipient?) aileron flutter. Rattle clatter, vibration in stick and wing shake. A bit on the scary side. We found that the aileron hinges were pretty sloppy, so we tightened them up with fatter pins which dealt to most of the hinge slop. However, a subsequent test flight showed the problem was no better (arguably a bit worse), so we looked at the aileron cables. These also seem to be a bit on the sloppy side and will be replaced. Has anyone run into this sort of thing? I have since heard that cables are supposed to be replaced at 1000 hours ..... ?

I wrote the thing around area forecasts as they include location stuff, TAF/METAR/ATIS the lot. It does a bit of checking to make sure you copied/pasted the whole thing.

Sorry Scott - I thought I fixed that one.

Like I've always said ... a 65-year old Kiwi did this for nix because he could and it seemed like a fun way to pass some time and learn PHP. Should any public servant feel bad about this? Dunno. Does it affect the length of their smoko break or whether they get paid or the safety of their pensions? :-) The translations are not ICAO-compliant because there is no ICAO standard for translated weather forecasts ...... Only the gibberish is ICAO-compliant and of course the manufacturers of the gibberish have zilch liability for any of it :-)

Just so you know ... those disclaimers were from me and put up before it did the translate. I figured that since BOM don't guarantee their forecasts, noone guarantees the pig-latin and CASA is not liable for anything I might as well join the CYA team :-) If the people who write (and pay/get paid for) the source have no liability why should I? It was moved from my host to Ian's but there's no way that should have made any difference. When you do the paste you should see the tail end of the NAIPS stuff in the paste window. I would guess that there has been a problem with the copy/paste. Was this done on a PC, an iThing or an Android device? IB

yeah I put that at the beginning on

It sank quicker too. The J200 used to sometimes give me a bit of a problem on finals - you could easily descend and it wasn't hard to slow down. The tricky bit was making both happen together ......

Dunno - I had a J200 once. The 544 kg limit two (not small) guys, about 40% fuel and two hankies for baggage. So as we headed into the sky with full fuel and about 50kgs of baggage (maybe 650 kgs AUW) we murmured to the aeroplane that it should pretend it was a (700 kg max-AUW) J400. We must have been convincing because it took off/ flew/ landed just fine. The takeoff/climb was a bit slower than we were used to, there was a bit more throttle needed for speed and landings were a bit quicker. But we knew the airframe was not about to disintegrate on us ......

[/quote=dutchroll, post: 306868, member: 5732] In the latest study by the ATSB on ELT effectiveness which was conducted this year (only 12 weeks ago) it was found that they functioned correctly about 40-60% of the time, but that in addition to impact damage, there were also instances of flat batteries, not arming the ELT correctly, and not installing it correctly. I read the report. As the authors point out, the data are full of holes - hence the 40-60% range sort of statement. Their interpretation of the data is pretty reasonable given all the holes. In about 10% of crashes the ELT is how the SAR people found out about it. Also they describe a number of crashes where the ELT did not work - there was the burn/flip/drown etc problem and others that were unexplained. My reading of these was that Spidertracks would have worked - and had the SAR people on the job a lot quicker - for all of them ...... I'll park the soapbox and give this a break now :-)

Unless one end of the cable ripped out of its attachment .... this is a crash we are talking about. And CASA wrote up a generic AD that said every ELT has to be fixed like this? Probably not. CAA here made noises about operators "taking steps to ensure antennae would survive a crash" but that was about it. This sort of tack-on to ELTs is a good idea, but basically it is just polishing a cowpat. Upside down, burning or drowning will still kill it. Ask yourself - if the industry standard was cost-effective active monitoring (satellite/GPS) and someone proposed ELTs as an alternative, would the idea go anywhere?

Spot is not top-grade technology - uses GlobalSat - a second-class satellite system (IMO). SpiderTrack uses Iridium. See www.spidertracks.com for info. SpiderTracks gives me total peace of mind for about $20/month for the flying I do.

The Spider people watch your flight as part of the service. A no-brainer in my book.

There was a study done in NZ a year or three ago about the effectiveness of ELTs. Seems that in roughly 20% of crashes the ELT gives a meaningful signal after the crash. The sample size was bout 100. In 80 cases of the 100 looked at the ELT burned, smashed or drowned. Admittedly drowning is a bit less likely in Oz. There was a celebrated case where a tycoon crashed his helicopter in tiger country in bad weather. After a couple of weeks searching by half the nation's choppers, the wreck was found. The ELT aerial had snapped in the crash. CAA explained that the ELT had worked just fine and sent about 2000 distress signals. Only they never made it more than a metre or two because of said broken aerial. I would called that "failure" but what would I know? We won't go into the other good stuff about TSO'd ELTs. The one that caught fire in a 787 at Heathrow recently. The fact the Artex ELTs in NZ have a humungous G-switch failure rate. CAA and Artex have been working on the problem for three years (the ELTs are still sold here) and a solution is expected Real Soon Now. The batteries in an ELT are a set of standard alkaline D cells packaged in heat shrink. The kind you buy for $2 each at SuperCheap. Only $200-odd for the certified version :-) If you are serious about being found when something goes wrong .... buy an EPIRB to meet regs and get a SpiderTrack unit. Monitored active tracking blows ELTs into the weeds. The unit is about $800 and tracking is $20-50 or so per month. It's like cellphones - they have plans based on different levels of usage. I don't work for them. What you get. Live web tracking of your flight - the normal ping interval is two minutes. There is a distress button function that does what it says. You can send pre-programmed text messages to pre-programmed recipients. All via satellite of course so cell coverage is not an issue. When you end a flight you sign off. If the pings stop with no signoff, the Spider folk generate texts/phone calls to a heirarchy that you specify. Mine goes first to me and a friend (10 minutes after the pings stop as I recall). If this does not resolve things the alert goes to the search and rescue people something like 15 minutes later. I am a bit ashamed to confess that I have had a couple of calls from them when I forgot to sign a flight off, They did explain that being as how my last position was a Feilding airfield and zero knots, they thought that if I was a smoking heap someone local would have noticed it. There are other services like this - TracPlus comes to mind. There are also free (or very cheap) breadcrumb apps for smart phones. Active tracking rocks!!

It's all there a couple of pages back in this thread

Do you want the domain name too?

Well guys (and gals) - I just got my annual bill for $140 - the domain name and the DNS option. It all seems to work OK - haven't had any bug reports for the last six months or so - now I'm a bit over it. Anyone who feels like taking it over can have all the code plus the domain name etc for nix. Don't all speak at once. I have offered it to Ian but haven't heard back. Cheers IB

How do I get in touch with the SA factory? I imagine they have drawings .....

Here is what I know. It has been done on a couple of 19- J160s. Jabiru had nothing to do with it - the paperwork to do it on a 24- aircraft is deemed too hard. Understandable. I have been sent some pics of one of the jobs. Have a look at the for-sale J160 from Adels Grove on the Jabiru site. It appears to be a mod that the South African assemblers offer as routine.

Who knows anything about having a cargo door in a J160 ..... ?

Air going past the fins picks up heat by forced convection. The faster the air is moving, the thinner the boundary layer (resistance to flow) so the more heat gets transferred. The heat gets from the engine to the fin surface by conduction then into the air by convection. Radiation in a confined space goes from a source to a sink - source cools by losing heat and sink warms up. If there was significant heat loss by radiation it would make the baffles hot. I would guess that if you let the fins "see" the outside world and paint them black then there would be more heat loss by radiation BUT the airflow round the fins would be less because it is no longer confined in a duct. So you can have (a) black paint, motor in the outside world (no ducts) or (b) silver with motor in a duct (baffles). The world seems to go with (b).