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kgwilson

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Everything posted by kgwilson

  1. kgwilson
    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.
  2. kgwilson
    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.
  3. kgwilson
    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.
  4. kgwilson
    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.
  5. kgwilson
    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.
  6. kgwilson
    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.
  7. kgwilson
    Getting back to this unfortunate crash it has been reported that the aircraft was flying low along the river and the occupants were waving to kayakers paddling there. As I said the surrounding land is relatively flat but there will be power lines that cross the river given the number of farms in the area. Hitting these cross river power lines would have resulted in a crash on the river flat gravel or in the river so it is a reasonable guess that while his attention was distracted by flying low & waving at kayakers, the power lines appeared very quickly and there was not enough time, height or power to avoid them.
  8. kgwilson
    I fly over that area all the time and have been there on the ground several times. Lillydale is a popular camping spot on the Clarence river. The area is relatively flat and is grazing country with trees dotted around. There is no comparison to the crash a few years ago when an aircraft flew into low strung wires across the Clarence and a young girl was killed. The pilot was prosecuted & imprisoned. This one flew in to power lines & crashed on to the bank. How and why we will probably never know as at this stage there are no specific eye witnesses and no survivors of the crash. Campers heard the crash and saw the subsequent smoke from the fire.
  9. kgwilson
    The driver at Daylesford had over 30 speeding tickets though only 1 actual conviction. He didn't mean to run over & kill these people but he had a medical condition and was very aware of it but chose to ignore 9 warnings that his blood sugar level was dangerously low. He does not deserve to get off on the basis of medical misadventure.
  10. kgwilson
    Good grief. You don't need any tools. Cut the old one off & roll the new one on.
  11. kgwilson
    Simple. Remove the valve. Push and twist the spring loaded shut off valve so the bar sits in the open position seat, remove O ring & fit a new one, flick the bar back & it closes.
  12. kgwilson
    Liquidators are there to sell the assets and distribute what's left after their exorbitant fee. Administrators are there to to run the business back into profit if possible. That's why businesses go in to voluntary administration as per my earlier post. If that doesn't happen then they turn in to liquidators. Either way they extract pretty high fees.
  13. kgwilson
    Chapter 11 in the US is a bit like voluntary administration here. In the Australian case an administrator is appointed to oversee the situation and hopefully get the company back to solvency, though more often it is a wind up & then working out the cents in the dollar to secured creditors and unsecured creditors after other things like wages, salarys etc have been worked through. Vans has a fantastic reputation and their designs are as valid today as they always were. Just like the Cessna 172. I understand that owners of Vans aircraft are going to leap to the defence of the organisation, but you do not reach a point of insolvency through bad luck. This is through some bad business decisions often in response to a market downturn or shift in customer needs or demand. Sometimes what may seem at the time like overly harsh measures have to be taken. It is owners of companies they have founded with a high level of emotional attachment who most often fail to see the wood for the trees. My earlier comments still stand.
  14. kgwilson
    He's not, just advising a replacement. And yes I have a curtis fuel drain valve. I have replaced the o-ring 2 times in 8 years. These things are pretty much bullet proof.
  15. kgwilson
    And?
  16. kgwilson
    Once the writing is on the wall companies often take ever more desperate measures to keep afloat and sometimes these measure come back to bite them. For example getting parts laser cut was a very bad decision but I presume because it was fast and relatively cheap they did it but suffered the consequences.
  17. kgwilson
    The 60 cent deal disappeared some years ago in NSW. This started the rooftop PVA revolution and nearly sent the Labour government broke in 2010. In NSW you got a subsidised rooftop PVA system. Then a 1kW system cost around $10,000.00 installed & used all Australian panels & inverters. Early adopters were paid 65 cents/kWh for all power they produced including what they used themselves. This was at a time when peak power prices were less than 30c/kWH and most ended up with huge credits and eventually a cheque would arrive in the mail. Crazy but true.
  18. kgwilson
    My average daily usage is 7.5kW. I installed a grid connected solar system 11 years ago. It is 2kW. Tiny now but average at the time. My EV has 64kWh of storage and has V2L. The cars inverter is capable of delivering 32 amps. The induction cooker is the most power hungry appliance followed by the electric jug, toaster and aircon. The 520/175 litre fridge/freezer and upright 305 litre freezer operate 24/7. Hot water is from a heat pump that only runs from 9am to 4pm, consumes 450 watts, 95% of which is from the solar supply. Theoretically my cars battery with appropriate management could supply all of my power needs for 8.5 days. There are 2 of us in a 200 sq metre modern insulated house but with single glazing in a sub tropical climate on the coast 30 deg South. I still give about 40% of the solar energy back to the grid & get 5 cents/kWH for it. I have looked at a battery but there is no cost benefit & now that I have a mobile one it is no longer a consideration.
  19. kgwilson
    25 million panels & 3000 wind turbines on 15,000 sq km is able to produce more than the current output from everything we have now.
  20. kgwilson
    Trevor Jacobs is a complete idiot. This has been a long time coming. He is lucky he only got 6 months.
  21. kgwilson
    The problem in Australia is that each State has different laws so what is a requirement in one State in not a consideration in another.
  22. kgwilson
    I don't think there is an age limit for a CASA medical. I read of a 90 something year old still flying Tiger moths in the Melbourne area & the CFI at Coffs was still training at age 90, and he smoked like Chimney. That's (lung cancer) what got him in the end.
  23. kgwilson
    Whether windmills will withstand a cyclone or not doesn't matter. There are none in Australia. We do have quite a few wind turbines though and as far as I know none are actually in cyclone zones. The owners of Eraring, Australias biggest coal fired power plant, Origin refused a takeover offer due to a major Superannuation investor tipping the vote. Eraring is losing origin a fortune as like all coal plants it has to run pretty much flat out all the time and during the day green energy from solar and wind has reduced the spot price so much it sometimes goes negative. The price of coal is hastening its own demise as it cannot hope to compete with cheap renewable energy. I reckon that if Origin invested heavily in huge battery storage close to Eraring it would be able to use the existing infrastructure both to store cheap renewable energy during the day and supply it at night.
  24. kgwilson
    Brendan, your position is quite clear and I respect that. I visited Calder Hall, the worlds first Nuclear Power Station in Cumbria in the 70s. It took 3 years to build & was originally built to produce plutonium for nuclear warheads. It was shut down in 2005 and full decommissioning will not be complete till 2027 when radiation shielding is completed and it will remain like this forever. 3 years to build, 22 years to decommission and 3000 years before the waste decays to its half life and no-one can go near it for that time. The UK has 7 Nuclear submarines that have been decommissioned & they are stored in Rosyth dock in Fife & another 14 in Devonport waiting for someone to figure out how to get rid of the nuclear waste. Locals are very unhappy about this and the official line is progress is being made but they have been there for years with no end date in sight. The problem is worse in the USA & in Russia they don't care. Do you really want a similar situation here in Australia?
  25. kgwilson
    Nuclear fission reactors are now old technology. No-one is building them any more as the capital expenditure, operational risk, timeframe to build, operational cost, disposal of waste cost, water supply required, as well as opposition from the populace are all far too high. None of the so called new technology has been proven in practice yet. Rolls Royce have a modular small reactor that will power a submarine for 30 years but it won't run even a small town & the sub has all the cooling water it needs. Scaling such things presents usually far more problems than they resolve. Now if you are talking Nuclear Fusion I am all for it and we already have it. It is just 150 million km away & provides us with more energy in a day than we will ever need in a lifetime and it is called the sun. There is a proposal to set up around 15,000 sq km of solar with 25 million panels and and 3000 wind turbines somewhere around Esperance in WA which would produce more energy than all of the current combined coal and renewable energy along the Eastern seaboard combined and use a lot of this energy to produce 3.5 million tonnes of green hydrogen a year. A MOU has been signed by WA & Korea Electric Power Corporation. It is a 20 year project, will employ thousands and there is no waste or fallout.
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