cscotthendry

If you're flying with an iPhone or iPad and getting noise through the radio while on the charger, first make sure the wifi is turned off. It seems like the apple devices go into a high power mode when they're on charge and if the wifi is looking for a connection, it makes a lot of radio hash. It seems to be worse on some frequencies.

The best thing to use for blocking part of your oil cooler is the Teflon sheet you can buy in the hardware store as a cooking sheet for barbeques. This sheet is rated to 260 Deg C. If your oil ever gets to that temperature, you'll have more problems than a scorched sheet. Also, I have tested this stuff with a direct flame. While the blowtorch was on the sheet it would burn, but if you take the flame away from the sheet, the burning stops. I'm not sure how the sheet would go if it was set on fire and subjected to high speed air flow though.

The D motor is an interesting one. Liquid cooled and very ancient, but proven side valve technology coupled to electronic ignition (and fuel injection I think). Slow revving and if other side valve engines are anything to go by, nearly bulletproof. Unfortunately they haven't been in use for very long and there's not a lot of planes about that have them, so the reliability is still a little unknown.

So disappointed. I look forward to the Clifton fly in, it is one of my favorites. The predicted strong gusty winds made me stay away.

I think you summed it up pretty well there.For me, reliability is the most important factor in an aircraft engine choice. The purchase price of the engine is a one off cost. I've heard a lot of Jab owners say "Rotax spares are so expensive" which is true, but apart from consumables, the Rotax engines mostly don't require spares. As for the complexity of having a gearbox, that is also true and as the saying goes "more things to go wrong" but the Rotax gearbox has a lot of history of reliable operation. That's saying something because with a lot of other types of engines (particularly converted car engines) the PSRU is the part that seems most prone to failure regardless whether it's gears or belts. One of the side benefits of the gearbox in the Rotax (particularly the 100HP) is that it protects the crankshaft somewhat in the case of a prop strike. In a direct drive engine, a prop strike will most likely bend or possibly break the crank.

Mark: Thanks for posting that video. I had been considering buying one of these for a while, but had never seen anything like what you posted here with actual measurements. Were you able to notice the difference before and after through the feel of the airframe?

Shortly after I left high school, I was driving home in my FX ute during a storm. I saw a bright flash, then there was this huge ball of light barreling straight up the road at me. Before I could react and hit the brakes or swerve, it reached the front of the ute ... And disappeared. Scared the crap out of me. I had never seen ball lightning before that, nor even heard of it, and never seen it since.

Haven't done it here, but did a warbird flight in the US, on Fifi (t'was a birthday prez from the minister of finances:oh yeah:) Cost over $1,000US, but worth every penny!

In the European theater, aircrew had a higher mortality rate than infantry. Their war was cushy and clean (compared to the ground pounders) ... until it wasn't.

Too bad for the bombardier in the last pic.

I can just imagine the service bill for the Tesla: Dealer: How many miles since your last service sir? Owner: A bit over 300 million. Dealer: The estimate for the service will be ...

There's the trick right there at the start. If you start with a false assumption, you can make any kind of case you want for any intended outcome. The two airports aren't competing for the same services! YTWB has a completely different set of aircraft users to Wellcamp. I think this is a case of a developer seeing a nice flat clear piece of public ground that he/she wants to get their hands on and seeing $$$. Airfields are cheap land for developers to build on. No pesky trees to have to be careful about, lots of flat open ground that's easy/cheap to develop. And if you use the right arguments, (like woohoo look at all the lovely land taxes the council will get) and "No one uses it anyway, and oh by the way, here's a nice fat donation for your election campaign, the developers can "take that burden off your hands" for peanuts, then reap (rape?) millions out of it. PHUEY on greedy developers and lazy councils.

David: Uploading footage from the GoPro or any other camera is limited by the speed of the USB port. If your computer has a USB3.0 port and if you can find a card reader that has USB 3.0 interface, that will speed up the data transfer quite significantly, like by a factor of 10 or more. Editing is another matter, that takes as long as you like to make it. Doing a simple slice and dice from a single camera shouldn't take long. If you get one of the BacPac batteries for your GoPro, you can get about 3-4 hours continuous recording. Just about any modern laptop will do editing if you're not creating really long videos. The two aspects of editing that tax the computer the most are "scrubbing" that is dragging the edit point rapidly back and forth through the file, and rendering the final footage, especially if you apply a lot of effects and adjustments (like color corrections etc) to your footage. The disadvantage of laptops is not being able to upgrade your video card. The video card can have a substantial effect on render times. Probably the most important specs for a computer for video production are 1) A medium to high end CPU and 2) As much memory as you can afford and 3) as much disk space as you can afford.

Yes, it is cheap. But then GoPro cameras (except for the top of the range) are not exactly "studio quality" cameras. But point taken. I had a JB HiFi "el-cheapo" sports camera that didn't work out too well, and this may be no better, but I'll only be out of pocket $80. I'm ok with that. I thought about the 360 cameras for some time, but the incompatibility between 360 footage and normal footage has kept me away so far. But if they're this cheap, I can experiment. Even if it blows off the wing somewhere in the outback, I'm not going to be too worried about the loss of the camera. I'll be more worried that it hurts someone or that some officious person picks it up and tracks me down from the footage and wants to get my PC cancelled! :-) When I've shot some footage and posted it, I'll put up a link.

John: Yes, I shoot at 720 also, but I shoot at 50FPS to help reduce the rolling shutter distortion. That makes for more data, but the GPs with a bacpac battery only run for about 4 hrs and a 32GB card will hold that much data so all good there. I found these on eBay and I've been thinking of experimenting with 360 video. 360° WIFI 4K HD VR Camera Panoramic Camera Action Dash Cam LCD display Sports | eBay So I ordered one. 360 and normal video can't be intermixed, but the 360 gives the viewer control over what they want to look at. It will be interesting to see how long the batteries last in these things.

OK, I see a couple of problems 1) If you're working with MP4 files, the max size is something like 4GB. So if your flight lasts for a couple of hours, your GPs are going to split that into roughly 37 minute chunks. I 2) f you load the full two hours of footage into DW (if you can even do that?) and then try to render it all out at say 1080, your going to produce a file that will be waaaay bigger than 4GB, if that is even possible. 3) Now you have to load all that video footage into your timeline ... then you have to load your other footage as well. Now your NLE is going to be choking on data if it is even possible! 4) Now you have a full, real time timeline that you have to slice and dice to make the flight watchable, while still keeping all the video and overlay data in sync. Yikes! The NLE I use has a VERY good multi-cam function. I have tried a few of the "professional" NLEs and none of them comes close to the ease and flexibility of PD's multi-cam designer. It allows me to load up to 4 cameras, synch the footage and then do like a TV director would do, that is press record and then switch cameras while the record is running. BUT there's more, I can skip ahead with the record off, select a new in point and restart the recording there, again selecting whichever camera I want as I go. In addition, PD allows me to import a separate audio file and use that audio, or use the audio from one of the cameras. As I do clips in the MC designer, it marrys up the selected audio and when I press OK, it does all the cuts for me and places the results into the timeline. As I said, I tried Lightworks, DaVinci, Premier elements, Sony Vegas, Media Composer First and a few others. None of them do multi-cam as easy as PD.

Going the overlay route wasn't the answer for me. I start my GPs before takeoff and just let them run. So to do the overlay thing I have to A) Select which video files I want to put the gauges on, which is determined by B) Which segments of the flying leg I'm interested in, then C) Create the overlay for that which generates another video file which then has to be synched in the NLE. AND D) In order to create the overlay, you have to have a video file loaded into DW that is the correct length anyway, then create a special gauge with a chroma key background to mask out the video footage. On top of all that, my NLE (Power Director) is a bit sloppy with the chroma keying and in any case, using chroma keying restricts the color choices I can use in my custom gauges. tl;dr Too hard!

John: I tried doing the overlay thing with chroma keying, with mixed results. In the end it was easier to do it all in Dashware. If DW can read the video in your GP files, then you can import the GPS data separately. The best thing about DW is the ability to create your own gauges. When you look into how it digests the GPS data it is quite comprehensive. You can create extra calculated fields from the data your GPS generates and then use those calculated fields in your own gauges. I haven't yet got a full handle on how it interpolates between GPS data points to get frame-by-frame data to fill the gauges. There appears to be some lag in some of the calculated values that I'm still working through. But all in all, DW is a really useful program. Here's a snap of a custom gauge I made.

John: Yeah, I think you'll have more success with the Garmin files. The downside is synchronizing the data to the video. In your case, since the GP5 has an internal GPS, the files will likely be accurately timestamped and will sync with the Garmin data easily. In my case, if I forget to set the date/time in my GP3s, I have to synch the video and GPS data manually and Dashware doesn't make doing that precisely, very easy.

OK, I'm a bit behind with this. I'm not sure how GoPro store the GPS data in the video files. I wasn't aware that mpegs allowed for that kind of data. Are GoPro using a different file format now? A fallback position if you can't get Dashware to read the GoPro GPS data is to use the tracks from your aircraft GPS (if that is available). That is how I do it when I use Dashware. Sorry, I just assumed that you might have been a newbie with this stuff. When you say you didn't get a response from GoPro, was that from their forums or direct tech support? I had pretty good support from their tech guy.

BirdDog: Have you seen this? How to see GPS data new Hero5 - GOPRO SUPPORT HUB In the answers, it says that the Hero5 only stores GPS data for pictures, not for video ... yet

Eeww, I wasn't aware of that... That could be a bit tricky. Can you send me a short video clip that has the GPS data in it? Just take the camera outside, and shoot about 10-20 seconds of footage after the GPS has locked the satellites. (I'm assuming the camera shows you when it has lock???)

Hang in there puddy cat, GoPro acquired Dashware from the original developers (or from whoever acquired it from them). I have been in contact with the GoPro support people on a number of occasions and found them very helpful. Stick with it. Their documentation (last time I checked) was still the crap the original developers produced. I mentioned to them about it and the support person I dealt with was like "Yeah, we know and we're working our way through that". Dashware is an amazing program, which can be extensively customised and tailored to your needs. I have a fair bit of experience with it and can help if you give some more info about the problems you're having.

BirdDog: I'm guessing that the Hero5 has an inbuilt GPS??? If that is the case, try experimenting with the settings. Also, I'm guessing that the camera stores the GPS data in a separate file to the video files. Most of these files are text based. There is a program called GPS Babel that will convert GPS files (usually some form of GPX) to just about any other format. Instead of using the default settings in Dashware, try importing the video and GPS data separately. HTH

I use bifocal sunnies (non-polarised) and had the reading part calibrated to panel distance. I also had them set the break line between the reading and distance parts so that it lies in my vision line just about where the bottom of the windscreen is. When I look down at the panel, it's in focus. When I shift my eyes up out of the cockpit, that's in focus too and my brain doesn't even register the transition from reading to distance.