sain

I went with the RAA site and also the BAK book from the Aviation Theory Centre.. I found it pretty poor compared to the older Trevor Thom book somebody leant me briefly, but still perfectly useable. My main issue with it was the number of errors, but they are for the most part easy to pick up. Ask your instructor (when you get one) when in doubt. The RAA site is definately a great resource.

but damn close: http://www.geocities.com/lornahawley/skycutter40.asf

Thanks again - thats great

I'd make use of a trial instruction flight for both to see what you like - thrusters arn't everybodys idea of fun, though I personally loved the only flight I've had in one (a T600 Vision). You may prefer the teaching of one instructor over the other too. That said I travel about that sort of distance/time to goulburn to fly and the petrol costs will make up that difference quite quickly unless you do a couple of lessons while you are there. I'd advise against trying to do too much though, especially at first. I've tried a combination of different options while out there, and the one that seems to work quite well is to do your first flight fairly early on in the day, followed by a break (looking at planes, chatting to others, studying theory, eating lunch in town, whatever) followed by another flight in the mid to late afternoon. Then camp the night in the hanger (no campfires!) or somewhere closeby, repeat the next day and drive home. The main thing is to give yourself quite a rest between flights - otherwise you'll run into information overload and wont learn as fast as you otherwise would. Also if you get motion sickness (:confused:)as badly as I do you'll want at least a couple of hours break to let your stomach settle. Ginger tablets help a lot with that for other sufferers.

Thanks for the info guys - much appreciated ;). I've been seeing this a lot in aircraft ads recently but nobody I've asked seemed to know and I couldnt find the answer on the rotax site. One referrence I did find was to ducatti dual CDI, which didnt really help either. anyway, cheers!

Im probably showing my newbism here, but can anybody tell me what DCDI stand s for? As in Rotax 582 DCDI?

Interesting date stamp on that photo.

Wakefield park may also be quite a good site. A couple of good straights which are probably fairly close to what you want. They'd be used to film crews too, which might be helpful - they host a round of the V8 development series I think.

Congratulations John - great job!

The OODA loop is Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_Loop for a more detailed explanation)- it just describes the decision making cycle. If you affect one part of it then the other parts are also affected. I.e somebody mechanically inclined may pick up that their engine is sounding a trifle funny, so they may decide to abondon their flying till its been checked out. Here the Observe and Orient parts have been affected (they observe the slightly strange noise, and their training helps them interpret or orientate it) so their decision would be different to somebody with no mechanical expereience. Anyway, what i was suggesting was that training in dealing with emergency situations would help people deal with emergencies more effectively. After all if your used to the big noisy thing up front going all quiet on you then you'll have a tendancy to react to it better than somebody who its never happened to. That inital "oh " moment is a lot shorter and the first response will tend to be better.

I should probably point out that those 13 deaths listed above are over 12 months, not 6. Still not a good statistic though. As i mentioned before, some of those were also GA aircraft, though they were reported as being ultralights on the news. This sort of thing doesnt really help our image as a safe users of the airspace. I'm pretty sure the RV-4 was GA, and also at least one of the QLD crashes (though i dont remeber which). Unfortunately this passtime we all love so much does have some associated risks and in some cases no matter how well the pre-flight checks or maintenance has been done something will go wrong. On the other hand doing acrobatics in a non-rated plane probably isnt going to help your chances survival too much. I'm not sure what the fix is, but I believe unless things start to change soon we are going to lose some of our privileges, which would be a crying shame. With regard to the "human factors" being discussed above it may be helpful to use the military concept of the OODA loop (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_Loop). It is a simplistic way of looking at the decision making cycle used by pretty much everybody - you Observe a problem, you Orient your observation (based on your learning), you Decide how to react, and you Act. Anyway, its an interesting concept which gets used by the military to help train their pilots in decision making in unusual/emergency situation. They do that by creating unusual and emergency situations for them to deal with. Maybe incorporating more system failure (i.e radio, electricals, gyros, engine) scenarios into our training would help lower the death toll in the future.

I dont think its just RAA having a problem at the moment - a lot of GA planes seem to be going in as well. Some of the "ultralight crashes" reported on the news have been VH registed light aircraft, which I dont think helps our cause much either.

Get him to link directly to the forum, rather than going through the front page i.e use http://www.recreationalflying.com/forum/index.php another option would be to disable the shockwave flash plugin, or if hes using firefox use the adblock plugin to specifically block the swf stuff on this site.

Some of the hirth engines look pretty interesting too, and they weigh in one hell of a lot lighter than the similairly powered jabiru engines (42kg as opposed to 60kg). Pity they are 2-strokes.

The Privacy Act must be frightening CASA a fair bit considering all those lost applications. Techincally they have to be able to produce the supplied documentation again on request, and face some painful fines when they dont. Still, I guess if people dont have a receipt or otherways to prove that they sent the documentation in they dont have too much to worry about.

For me the intrest was stirred as a young kid reading the various adventures of Biggles, and then Reach for the Sky. I never got around to doing anything about it though, as it was always "too exepensive", and the rest of my life kept getting in the way. Then a problem with a really bad boss at work forced me to re-evaluate life somewhat, and I decided it was time to do something for me. Learning to fly got elected. Tentatively I broached the subject with my girlfriend, who without hesitating said "Great idea! you should go for it.". god love her. I had another chat with a friend who instructs for the RAAF who suggested ultralights might be the way to go, so I called up the local ultralight flying schools to chat with them about it. Soon after I found myself driving up to Goulburn for a TIF, barely able to contain my excitement the whole way up. Teraya, the CFI at goulburn, loaded me up into the tiny Gazelle and then proceeded to explain how it all worked. Soon she had me taxiing around, and going through checks. Then before i knew it we were tearing down the runway and i was easing back on the stick and we were airborne. Absolutely fantastic experience - I dont think i stopped grinning for a week. My first comment once we were off the ground was "i wish i done this years ago". Since then i've been getting out to continue my flying lessons as much as possible, and enjoying every minute of it.

Interesting looking system. I wonder if its just a pc with terrain height data pulled down off the net (cant remeber the gov site which hosts it), then co-ordinate and direction data grabbed from the gps system. or maybe gps and electronic compass. I dont know that i'd want to rely on it to navigate through canyons in the middle of the night, but it might be a useful as an aid - especially if you could scroll around through the terrain. I imagine most of that cost would actually be the software, and perhaps licensing of the topographical information if they didnt use a free source. After all people build pc based car computers all the time for a few thousand.

Hi Everyone, I've recently taken up flying ultralights (had my 4th lesson a few days ago) at goulburn and i'm enjoying it immensely. I wish I had taken this up years ago. The forum here seems an excellent so I thought i'd come in here and introduce myself. I've particularly enjoyed the guess the airstrip thread. Thanks