Thalass

I just read this news item about a Kiwi company that is building 'jetpacks' (more like 'ducted-fan-packs', but anyway) for sale in the USA. The article claims that you won't need a license to fly it either, which is obviously not going to be true in Australia. But according to the company's classification page, the FAA class it as an 'ultralight', with various restrictions but no license required. I suppose if they ever sell it over here, you'd need a helicopter license for it. It's still nifty, though. haha!

You need a license to transmit on airband from the ground for exactly the reason countryboy said. We all know how 'cultured' CB is. How could anyone get anything done in the air if the frequency was choked with those sorts of peoples' chatter? hahaha Nothing illegal about listening, though.

VHF airband is not CB - you can't just chat away. But I think if you have a pilot's radio certificate then you can communicate from your car to aircraft - if you have a legitimate reason. Listening in is a good idea to learn the pace and phraseology pilot's use, if you're training. I suppose if you were ground crew in a chase car, or coordinating a temporary landing strip, that'd count as a legit excuse to use airband on the ground (legalities of being an ATC without airservices approval aside). We use airband at work to talk to incoming aircraft for ETA and any defects to report, etc. But like I said: Legit use. As far as chatting goes: Is there any reason you couldn't use UHF CB? I imagine flying in convoy would mean a fair bit of chatter, and IIRC the regs say that even selcting an unused airband frequency for chatting is frowned upon.

Pity the iphone and the ipad don't have usb ports, only the apple proprietary plug. Though I don't know if the device can be a host itself. If it can act as a host, you might be able to get an iphone-usb adaptor, and use a usb gyro as the horizon source. That'd need a more perminant installation, though. :P

Oh gods help us. The iCult is spreading to aviation... hahaha They are amazing little devices, but in order to get one you have to do unspeakable things with Steve Jobs, or so I'm told. It's not a bad system, I guess. No doubt they'll charge a fortune for it. The things that can be done nowdays are quite amazing, really.

Why not go all the way? Imagine a ballistic flightpath from here to Canada. My wife would love a 90 minute flight compared to a 36 hour journey! RAA would have to be renamed Recreational Spacecraft Australia, of course, and they'd have to allow engines other than internal combustion propeller drivers. I would be a happy man if that was the case.

That's on the way to Toodyay! (sort of). My cousin lives in Toodyay, so next time I go up there on the weekend I will call in and see if anything is happening. Awesome. :-D

I wonder if its legal to remove the passenger seat, and replace it with a fuel tank with a total weight not above that of the seat+passenger? Another 90kg of fuel could go along way. But yeah, to go to NZ you'd need a raft, epirb, life jacket, probably some kind of drysuit to keep hypothermia at bay. And with only one fan at the front you'd have to be brave!

Oh, i'm in Ellenbrook so Bindoon isn't far for me at all! But there doesn't seem to be an airfield on the map, that i can see. I might see if I can have a wander this weekend or next. Thanks!

Hi folks. It's been nearly ten years since I've flown in a light aircraft, and as I would like to get my ultralight ticket eventually it might be nice to have a buzz around with someone, even as a passenger. So if anyone is looking for some ballast for a flight or something (haha) I would love to come along - barring work commitments, of course. I work shift so quite often I'm unavailable on weekends. Even just to come along to the airfield when there's something going on would be pretty neat, I think. Anyway, thanks. :thumb_up:

I just checked, an RV6 has a MTOW of only 748kg, though the RV8 can take 815 or so, and that's a two seater. So this Cougar is fairly close, and has the option of two more seats. And it looks alot nicer. The RVs look like plain old 90s aircraft. No character, I say

That's kinda depressing when that happens. Spend ten years earning your stripes in a job you enjoy, and some mug goes up north for a while and earns triple what you're paid. And he uses the aircraft you fly (or maintain, in my case) to get there! No wonder the pilots were going to go on strike a couple of years ago.

Nice. It looks pretty good from that one photo. I like that layout, I've thought about buying a Rans S-7 kit, but I'd rather something Australian. I like the old-fashioned open cockpit layout, too, but with the exception of the Bakeng Deuce there isn't anything out there with a high wing, too - and the Deuce is flown from the back seat which I don't like. So I'm going to keep my eye on the Bushman's developement. It'll be a while before I can start building my own aircraft, anyway haha.

Hey folks. I saw on the Australian Aircraft Kits website that they have a new aircraft, a tandem two seater. But the only thing on the aircraft's page is one photo - no details or anything. Is there any news about it yet? Is anyone building one or is it too soon? It appears to be a smaller version of the Hornet, with tandem seating. It looks like my kind of aeroplane, but I can't find any details.

Have you thought about engineering? :P I wanted to be an airline pilot when i was in high school (doing the aeronautical course at Melville in Perth), but fortunately i saw the light and got an engineering apprenticeship. haha When you talk to the careers day defence guys, keep in mind that they are the advertising team - so take what they say with a grain of salt. They'll play down the bad things and talk up the heroism of being a fighter pilot and all that. For a more accurate run down of life in the defence forces, talk to some guys that do the job you want to do. They'll be harder to find, but worth it. It'd still be worth it anyway to join, I think, while you're single without kids so you won't mind moving around. :P I think the guys who want to be airline pilots once they get out gravitate towards the freighter side of the air force. Lots of hours on large, slowish multiengine aircraft. The fighter pilots might be the poster boys, but they don't do that many hours. That'd be better for you on civvy street.

Qantaslink pilots are generally a pretty nice bunch, and I'm sure that after the flight you'd have a decent chance of having a look. Not that there's much to look at on a 717. I don't know about other airlines, though. But in flight I don't like your chances. They even tried to ban off-duty employees (pilots, even) from visiting the flight deck. Thankfully that was canned in parliment, but it shows the level of paranoia that those who govern (but don't know anything) have right now. But like others have said: It can't hurt to ask. If you mention that you're a student pilot that'd help. You might be lucky and have a couple of female pilots, who would love to encourage another to join their ranks.

Haha awesome. Congrats! Now I have that song stuck in my head. *hums the tune*

I quite like the Dornier flying boats. They still use this config for the Seastar amphibian, too. Though I suspect the company no longer exists.

Ah thanks! I don't have one myself, so I can't fiddle with the settings or anything. But I'll see if I can find the model from work and maybe I can have a go. Mostly I've gotten about as far as I can go with hardware only electronics. Well, not as such but suddenly the old evil of software is starting to sound interesting. Pretty much anything can be done nowdays for little money if you have a decent chipset and the right code. And besides, I can use this knowledge for my own ultralight one day! haha Its good to know it is possible. At least then I know its me when it doesn't work, and I can try again from another angle or something. Rather than it being physically impossible :P

Hey guys. I've got a question about the hand-held gps units used with ultralights. One of my coworkers recently finished a vans rv-6a, and apparently his efis/ahrs system interfaces with his gps via a two-wire connection, and the gps just sends raw NMEA data down that, which the aircraft uses to position the flight director bars and display other information. Now I haven't seen this myself, but the coworker who mentioned it is reliable with that sort of thing (He's my boss, avionics LAME, and he installed the avionics on the rv, so he ought to know). He also mentioned that one of the pilots flys some kind of ultralight, and that he wants a minimalist FD system for his aircraft. I think I can do it, maybe, but it all hangs on what kind of data the gps unit can send. I've only ever seen hand held gps units with PC serial or USB ports, not a NMEA port. The vague idea I have in my head is a picaxe chip monitering the data stream coming from the gps (specifically the data from $GPXTE), and convert the distance and L or R components of that sentence into a binary figure, which can be sent to a binary decoder, to drive a series of LEDs. The middle LED means you're on track, and the LEDs on either side mean fly left or right. Possibly I could also have it sniff for $GPAAM, which is a waypoint arrival alarm, to flash a separate light too. Of course I have no experience with picaxe, so my chances are slim - and it doesn't help that the picaxe forum apparently doesn't like me even before I sign up... But anyway, have you guys, who have used aeronautical handheld gps units, seen such a data port? Thanks :)

Bummer, man. At least when you get your results CASA tell you where you were deficient, so you can concentrate on those sections a bit more for next time.

Haha I won't get into the whole spiel here, it'll seem like I'm evangelising. But in a car you ought to come close to breaking even vs petrol car costs over the life of the pack. Aircraft are different, though. But while you'll get less range for a given size of pack, in a decently designed aircraft you could soar for a great distance given the right conditions. So an electric self-launching glider will be where things start to happen, i think. (for more info see diyelectriccar.com or the "fossil fuel free" part of the ecomodder.com forums, or of course you can ask around the Australian Electric Vehicle Association's forums (Australian Electric Vehicle Association)) Evangelising over :P

Ozzie: at a rough guess ten thousand dollars would get you 12kWh of battery capacity, which would get you approximately 50km in a decent small car. Can't remember what that pack would weigh, though. I was budgeting for 18kWh, which with my car should get me about 60 or 70km, though there's alot of fudge factor in that so it could be better. That pack would cost me $14,000. It sounds expensive, but this pack would last for possibly 3000 discharge/charge cycles, which would be around 140,000km. It's like buying petrol in advance, and still cheaper because 140,000km worth of petrol would cost me around $17,000! - and that's assuming petrol doesn't go up again. :P But I don't have the price list in front of me, and most of my numbers for the EV are guestimations with a large error built in. Hopefully it will work out better (less than 200wh per km, rather than the 300wh/km that I'm estimating) Anyway, your cranking pack should last quite a while, if you treat it kindly.

Andy: that would have been the old days of constant wave dish antenna radar! haha. Nowdays radar puts out a few hundred milliwatts, a watt or two at most, and with the good decoders and high sensitivity receivers you can see the clouds some 200+nm away. Not that you'd stand in front of it, still. As far as beacons go. With our commercial planes its red beacon on when moving on the ground (engines on/about to start, or when towing), or when running the engines. Strobes on at the holding point of the runway on takeoff, and strobes come off once you're off the runway. Red beacon can also be used as a general warning, for radar testing, or some other thing. Generally we just poke our heads out the doors and make sure everyone around us knows the flaps are coming down, or TRs are deploying, or whatever. But anticol (red) beacon is for the ground and air, while strobe is only for the air.

Generally speaking LiFePO4 batteries aren't designed for hard cranking like that. Though they will take it. The main disadvantage of these cells (other than the price) is that they require a good battery management system to prevent undervolt cell reversal during discharge, and to manage charging. It could be that the system they gave you wasn't expecting such a sudden huge discharge current? The BMS will extend the life of the battery pack quite a bit, so it is worth the effort. The main advantage is of course the weight saving. I'm planning an electric car conversion and swapping from lead acid wet cells to LiFePO4 cells halves the weight with an increased range! But it'll cost me $10k+ If you're just starting the engine and then letting it charge up, it shouldn't be too bad. A BMS is still advisable, but you aren't relying on it to stay in the air, as such, so it shouldn't be too bad. The kinder you are to them, the longer they'll last.