kgwilson

It is amazing that everyone aboard the A350 got off. The Japanese do seem to respond well to instructions as they were told to get out and not take anything & they did. I've see other scenarios that end up in tragedies where stupid passengers are grabbing their hand luggage and others falling over them trying to get out. The resultant chaos that ensues ends up with injured people on the slides from failure to follow instructions, crashing in to one another, falling off or being hit by idiots and their luggage. It seems ridiculous but it has happened and has all been videoed.

Well one of them was on the wrong runway at the time or ATC f***ed up.

I don't think personal flying cars or whatever you want to call them will be an authorised form of transport unless fully autonomous and only after a lots of testing and real world operation is able to prove at least 99% reliability, performance and compliance. First will come semi autonomous taxi style commuter transport with a pilot to make sure that the computers do what they are supposed to do and everything goes to plan. These are quite likely to begin as airport to inner city drop off & pickup points, much the same as what billionaires and executives do today with helicopters. Later will come fully autonomous aerial taxi services and lastly personal transport but with an automated computer as chauffeur.

I remember my first commercial flight in a DC3. I was about 12 years old and it was deafening. Heading to Europe in the early 70s everything was pretty good except for the smoking. Airlines in Asia and middle east were atrocious. In India they had people, chooks, and goats in the passenger cabin & the aircraft were dirty & didn't look maintained at all. This was on the internal airline Indian Airways. Almost all of the people of Asian & Arabic descent smoked like chimneys. I flew BOAC, BEA, TWA, & Pan Am & they were good other than smoking. I am glad I travelled over land coming home 3 years later. I had planned to fly with Indonesian airline Merpati from Denpasar to Darwin but the stories I got from Aussie surfers about crashes, luggage disappearing, delays, cancellations etc put me right off. We might be crammed in like sardines now but flying is infinitely better now than whatever the golden days were.

It surprises me how many recreational pilots get APs installed. I built my aircraft to fly it not be a passenger.

Hi Matt, PM me and I'll give you my details. My S100 is hangared at South Grafton. I went for a fly today in fact. I live at Corindi Beach. Kevin

Merry Christmas from me too. It does seem a bit ironic though, that an aircraft designed as a killing machine should be used as a symbol of peace and goodwill.

A quick search shows the LS1 weighs about 425lbs and an IO360 about 280 to 330lbs so it would appear to have a reasonable weight penalty plus the redrive and rear counterweight for balance.

What does it weigh? I turned the sound down as the redneck conversation drove me nuts. Single ignition so it would need to be very reliable. Also I wonder what the fuel consumption is.

Recreational Aviation Incorporated does not exist. It is Recreational Aviation Australia Limited and has been since 2016. https://raaus.com.au/about/

As RA-Aus changed from an Incorporated Association to a Limited Liability Company a few years back I assume it is governed by ACT Companies legislation. The discussion here seems to relate to incorporated associations and of course each State has its own legislation and rules vary. I assume this also applies regarding Companies legislation.

In NSW the original model rules became the "Model Constitution" when the Associations Incorporation Act 2009 was passed in to law. For organisations that adopted the original model rules, the new model constitution was initiated by default. Those who had their own constitutions had to modify their current one to address a number of issues. Our Club and Hangar Owners had to do this. Two of the issues that had to be addressed were the number of consecutive terms that a member could hold an executive position and unless specifically allowed proxy voting is automatically disallowed. There were a number of others as well. When I joined the club there was a lot of dis-satisfaction with the management committee and funds were being depleted. What would happen is that one or more of the committee executive members would contact a lot of apathetic members & get them to sign a proxy appointing that executive member so the existing committee had a continued stranglehold over the club management. That is now history with the process being more transparent and open with major benefits including the club assets going from around 25k to now over 300k in 12 years. The problem really is that a number of Incorporated Associations ignore the rules, and many have no idea what the rules are and just continue the way they always have, completely illegally. They get away with it because no-one ever challenges them and they just file the annual report. Unless someone makes a formal complaint to NSW Fair Trading nothing gets done about it. There is very little difference between an Incorporated Association and a Limited Liability company. The former has members whose liability is limited by law to the amount they owe the association, usually just the membership fee. The latter usually has articles of association dealing with all things they do and has listed shareholders with a specified limit of liability.

30 minutes drive for me, mostly on 110kmh highway. This is no problem. I also do a lot of aerodrome maintenance work so am there usually 3 days a week.

At the moment live in the dead of Winter Coal is producing zero energy. Wind produces the most by far, approximately 48%, Gas 25% & Nuclear 14%. The UK was exporting quite a lot of renewable energy to Europe over the Summer. Coal fired power is only there as a backup and it takes a lot of time to fire it up to production capability. It is the dirtiest and heaviest emitter of all of the old technologies which is why it is being phased out. Same here. https://grid.iamkate.com/

I was wrong about the US$1billion bailout. The bailout was $US85 BILLION shared between GM and Chrysler & then the US Treasury became the biggest shareholder of GM. GM sold a lot of its subsidiaries (Opel, Vauxhall etc) closed others like Holden & Chrysler & it's Fiat partner went on to eventually be swallowed by Stellantis now based in Amsterdam.. Neither company should have survived. They had become fat and lazy and were producing the same old stuff while Japanese car makers were producing vehicles that actually sold and they made a profit. GM though has morphed back in to what it was using its size & (too big to fail mantra) to try and bully the government in to letting them continue to produce stuff that the planet cannot sustain. VANS on the other hand is a miniature by comparison and their products are good. They just failed to keep up with changing market conditions and rising costs and continued to make bad decisions till eventually filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. If VANS does survive it will be a very different organisation to what it is now.

GM only survived because the US Government stepped in and decided it was too big to fail and pumped something like US$1 billion in as a rescue package.

I agree. Many pilots are weekend joy flighters or hire an aircraft and go for a trip once in a while. 800 hours is 20 hours a year and I know plenty of pilots who fly less than that. Life gets in the way of the majority of pilots who get their PPL or RPC. It is only a minority of amateur recreational pilots who would have anywhere near 800 hours over their lifetime of flying.

As i understand it the Cirrus is not certified for spinning and had to be fitted with a ballistic chute to attain certification. It isn't an optional extra.

I went for an early morning flight today and went down the river at Lilydale at 100 feet to check if there were any wires. Just kidding it was 1000 feet. About 1/2 a km North of the Lilydale bridge there are wires crossing the river. There are white visibility balls on these wires and they look pretty new to me. I have never noticed them before but then I have never looked for them either from the air or on the ground. They are not on the google earth map either.

I'd say that the current employees will be getting the jitters and probably looking around for other jobs which will exacerbate problems. Worst case scenario is the rescue package fails and the secured creditors take whatever cents in the dollar they can get and those who have paid for kits are at the end of the queue & not get much back at all as they are unsecured creditors. So what do you do if you have already paid for a kit? Pay up a whole lot more and wait, but for how long. If everything goes belly up you should get 100% of your new payment (after the chapter 11 declaration) but lose a large chunk of your original deposit. Apply now for a refund knowing you won't get it till the court deliberates. Either way you are caught between a rock & a hard place.

CASA seems to have the worst reputation of any aviation authority on the planet. I found this difficult to understand when I first ventured across the ditch. Most pilots treated them like the enemy. Same when going for a medical. Advice was don't tell the DAME anything otherwise CASA will take years, and it will cost you thousands if you say once I had a TIA and even then the class 2 will probably be refused. I have often used the metaphor "NZCAA acts as a Coach, CASA acts as a Policeman" (a bad one). That said I've met some nice CASA employees but they are hamstrung by a culture no-one has been able to unravel.

Not from my point of view. When I was learning to fly in the 70s the ratio was about 80% male 20% female. Not many went on to be airline pilots then but aviation was very male dominated by old chauvinistic dickheads that thought a womans place was in the kitchen & bedroom.

So what is the height when flying over water as in the sea or a big lake? I guess there are obstacles to avoid there too like cruise ships, tankers and yacht masts but they stick out like the proverbials.

Not only scary but stupid. Any problem, failure to see an obstacle or lack of power and a myriad of other things and you are toast. But of course this would never happen to me.

I flew hang gliders for 20 years and I remember in a competition there were heaps of us in a single thermal. In those days (1980s) we didn't carry radios & relied on see and avoid plus always thermalling in the same direction. I had no idea how many were in the gaggle until I got back from the competition & saw a polaroid photo taken from the ground of 18 gliders in that thermal. I could see the gliders below but none above & that was the same for everyone. I didn't feel stressed or concerned about a mid air at all. Everyone just respected the airspace of others.