onetrack

Imagine the massive hue and cry if the heli had been full of Govt VIP's or politicians, and a dozen of them died, too? There'd be immediate upgrades of flight planning and ATC operations, on a huge scale.

Original newspaper articles are linked to, below. I'd have to opine Richard Rowe built himself a box kite in the same style as Lawrence Hargrave. However, it's interesting that Rowe got airborne in 1889 and Hargrave didn't fly in his box kite until 1894. There was a lot of interest in building kites that could carry a person in this period, the 1880's. Australian aviation pioneer Lawrence Hargrave celebrated 130 years after first heavier-than-air flight - ABC News WWW.ABC.NET.AU Australian inventor Lawrence Hargrave created history when he was lifted off the ground in a flying device he created in 1894. Now, 130 years later, he is remembered as a generous pioneer whose... AN AERIAL VEHICLE. - Cootamundra Herald (NSW : 1877 - 1954) - 12 Oct 1889 TROVE.NLA.GOV.AU AN ingenious young man named Richard Rowe, of Whitton, has constructed an aerial machine which bids fair to become an unparalleled success and entitle his name to be ... A FLYING MACHINE. - Ten Miles an Hour. ALBURY, Friday. - The Australian Star (Sydney, NSW : 1887 - 1909) - 26 Oct 1889 TROVE.NLA.GOV.AU The Riverina Grazier publishes an article from its correspondent at Carratliool to the effect that a young man, named Richard Rowe, of Whitton, has succeeded ...

I rebuilt the trusses to 8M span with new SHS, because the originals were only 4.8M span, and they were open at the ends and iron ore dust had got into the SHS and caused corrosion. I was originally just going to extend the trusses, it was easier and quicker to just buy some new SHS and cut the brackets off the old trusses and weld them to the new SHS. Yes, you're right, I'm slowing down, too, I'm 75, but you have to do something to keep yourself occupied! I'm fortunate in that I picked up an old Fowler tractor crane for $1500, it's just the shot for lifting stuff around. Not pretty, and it has its limits, but it's still very handy.

Cue Airport is a designated airport, not just an airstrip, so it comes under Federal laws relating to airport operation and ownership. I can't quickly find the ownership status of the land the Cue airport is on, but all the Shire information states that they own and run the Cue airport. There are two land titles involved in the Cue airport location, one inside the other, but it appears the larger outer one comprises the airport land boundaries, The airport land title may be freehold, or it could be simply leasehold - you can apply through Landgate to acquire all the ownership details, but you have to pay a fee, I think it's around $25.00. All the Council planning revolves around plans that indicate the airport is a Shire asset. The airport title is Lot number P092062 93. You'll often find in the old Govt Gazettes, that land was allocated to the likes of "Recreation, Racecourse, Showground and Aerial Landing Ground", with an identifying Govt Reserve number. Many of those Reserves have since been changed to freehold titles or leasehold titles. Leasehold titles are more common in the Goldfields and Pastoral regions of W.A. https://www.cue.wa.gov.au/documents/22/corporate-business-plan-2023-2027 Landgate Map Viewer Plus MAP-VIEWER-PLUS.APP.LANDGATE.WA.GOV.AU

Steel is horribly expensive today, and shed kit suppliers and builders don't care what they charge, they have more work than they can poke a stick at. If the Cue Council is agreeable to the construction of a used shed, then picking up a dismantled shed or used shed frame can be an attractive option. The sheds built from lipped channel are flimsy, they will buckle up in a willy-willy. Go for portal-frame structural steel. I'm currently building an 8M x 12M x 4M shed using modified portal frames made from structural steel, that came from a powerhouse at Koolyanobbing. Stratco want $25,000 for a shed that size, made from pressed metal. I'll do it for less than half that figure and that includes buying all new Z-purlins and girts and new Colorbond sheeting. I found a young bloke in Darlington who does draughting, structural design and council planning, and he's knocking up the plans for the shed, doing the structural calculations, and drawing up all the paperwork for the council, so I can get a building permit. You have to do all this yourself in W.A. today, there was a big change in 2012 as regards building construction permits and procedures. Before 2012, you submitted plans, and the council had to do all the assessments, now YOU have to provide all the engineering certificates, calculations, etc, so the council just has to check it all out on the submitted paperwork and then approve or reject the submission. It reduces the amount of work the council has to do, and throws it all on your shoulders. There's a FB page called "Best Sheds of W.A.", but it's set up by a shed builder who specialises in pressed-metal sheds, and all the followers want the cheapest pressed-metal shed they can get. But the group is full of useful information and contacts. Log into Facebook WWW.FACEBOOK.COM Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know. The wreckage photos shows what happens to pressed-metal sheds, when a decent storm comes through. It can be pretty devastating.

Submissions page ..... /images/template/Default_Classified_150_90.png Review of the Transport Security Amendment (Security of Australia's Transport Sector) Bill 2024 – Parliament of Australia WWW.APH.GOV.AU Review of the Transport Security Amendment (Security of Australia's Transport Sector) Bill 2024

What Skip is better off doing is approaching his Federal MP and asking if a review of the ASIC system is overdue, and whether the ASIC system is still RELEVANT to todays world. All security systems need a regular re-assessment to determine whether they have developed security holes, or whether new threats have emerged that aren't being addressed, and how much of previously-identified threats still exist. There's little to stop a determined evildoer acquiring a fake ASIC card and presenting himself airside to do damage. That's probably the weakest part of the whole ASIC system. The secret to security is having people around who are alert to new people appearing, who shouldn't be in critical locations, and those alert people acting on their suspicions. 90% of crimes are solved by some member of the public becoming suspicious of unusual activity, and alerting authorities or providing vital evidence.

An interesting little story here, showing how even small tweaks to proven designs can add up to improvements in airflow and substantial reductions in fuel costs, over time. It'd be good to find out what level of money and effort they spent on designing and testing of the vanes, just to see what went into them in total, but I guess the effort and money was repaid within a relatively short time frame, with overall fuel savings. Tiny vanes glued to planes promise big savings for US Air Force NEWATLAS.COM A surprisingly simple tweak is making a venerable military transport aircraft more efficient. Literally gluing a few microvanes to the rear fuselage of a C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane can result in fuel...

Don't work that old Gay-lion too hard, the last rigid-frame Galion was built nearly 40 years ago, and sourcing new parts might be a little difficult today!

iBob, the height drop of the CRJ700 is uninformed conjecture. The NTSB says the airliner was at 325 feet (+ or - 25 feet) and was doing nothing wrong. Crash data suggests helicopter flew too high, plane tried to climb in last second WWW.SMH.COM.AU One second before impact, pilots of the American Airlines plane had a “verbal reaction” and the plane increased its pitch – indicating they pulled back on the controls, trying to climb.

.....remembered stepping off his trawler and getting a cab to the local uproarious FNQ boozer, the "Sailors Arms" (you know, the one with the flashing neon sign of the barely-clad girl, that features on the tattoo on the forearm of most sailors?) - going into the front bar and having a gorgeous and delightfully-scantily-clad girl bring him a large drink - then from there, things got very hazy, and bull struggled to remember how he managed to end up at the Kappoka Writing Room, and how he was speaking (well, slurring, anyway) on a subject that was..........

1 U.S. gallon is 3.8 litres, so 820 U.S. gallons is 3,116 litres = 3,116kgs. That's a lot of payload to be trying to climb rapidly with.

And at that point, the CRJ700 crew are on final, and focusing on landing and instruments, and most certainly NOT expecting ANY aircraft to be anywhere near them. And ATC procedures are poor there, by not giving specific advice to the heli crew, as to where to look for the location and direction of the CRJ700. Finally, the bottom line, why would you have no vertical separation between the aircraft? It's like ATC set them up to collide, instead of keeping them 500 feet apart.

......calls from the audience of "GINA!, GINA!, GINA!!", as they all wanted to see her proficiency with a ping pong ball. So Gina got up on the stage, held up a ping pong ball and said, "This is a ping pong ball, we don't have many of these in W.A. - but what we do have in W.A., is lots of these!! - and at that, she whipped out a huge iron ore rock, and held it up with a grin like a Cheshire Cat. The audience went wild, they wanted to see Gina do the Iron Ore Rock trick. But within seconds, the roars turned to boos, as Gina whipped out a big silver texta with her free hand, and wrote on the rock, "Ha ha, Suckers and Losers, I've got all the Iron Ore and all the money!", and her grin got bigger and bigger, until........

U.S. rescue authorities have retrieved 28 bodies from the wreckage of both aircraft and they are stating there will be no survivors from the disaster, so the death toll will end up 67 in total. RIP to the victims and sympathy to the distraught families, there were quite a number of young people on the CRJ700, nearly an entire team of figure-skating professionals. Trumps response has been to issue an executive order banning DEI hires in any Govt Aviation authority, but there's no proof at this point, that any DEI selection process had anything to do with the crash.

It was a training flight for the helicopter crew, and this "training scenario" is starting to rear its ugly head more often recently in air disasters. Too much looking inside the cockpit, and not enough looking outside?

The graphics that show visual separation at low level, at high-traffic locations, at night - where there's a huge amount of ground-level lighting - just doesn't work.

Some confusion over the passenger aircraft load. Some information coming through, that only 38 seats were booked. A small saving grace is that the Potomac is only 3 feet to 7 feet deep where the wreckage landed. Then of course, there's the major question of what ATC were doing, when they must have sighted emerging collision courses - and what was a helicopter doing, flying through an approach lane at low altitude?

I'll be surprised if there's any survivors. You can see the aircraft exploded upon impact with the helicopter, and hitting freezing water at possibly 250kmh, would mean a lot of fatalities instantly - and any survivors would be struggling to escape the wreckage before they froze. I think you get about 10 mins in freezing water before you start to get hypothermia. The aircraft was a Bombardier CRJ700.

The PT6A can put out up to 1940HP. They have a staggering reliability record, 1 shutdown every 651,000 hrs! They were first built in 1958.

Wow, that Airtractor on floats is certainly a very imposing machine! Does it lose much capacity or abilities with the floats, as compared to a standard Airtractor? I see them quite often in the wheatbelt here in W.A., doing cropdusting. Fast, manoeuvrable, and powerful. 1300HP to 1600HP makes them very impressive to watch.

Nev, I'd be quite happy to be given one! Just as long as someone else was picking up the fuel tab!

I've got a car called the Rolls Canardly. It rolls down one hill and canardly get up the next.

Aw, c'mon Nev, you can't get much more reliability than a P&W Wasp engine. It appears I have to readjust the numbers of Spartan Executives built and surviving. The initial figures I got, were wrong. The bloke below has done an exhaustive list of all the Spartan Executives and he says 38 were built, 10 were destroyed in crashes, war action, or fires, and Howard Hughes never actually owned one, he just rented it for a period. The Golden Age of Spartan – VintageSpartanAircraft.com VINTAGESPARTANAIRCRAFT.COM

Balance master devices have been around since WW2. My first experience with them was around the early 1970's, with them being used attached to truck rims, to dynamically balance the wheel and tyre assembly. Naturally, the company gave glowing recommendations and testimonials from users - but strangely enough, they never really "took off" as far as general use and acceptance went. There are multiple reasons for that, but I won't go into detail about those reasons right now, because truck wheel applications are different to aircraft applications. The Balance Masters fitted to truck rims contained mercury and steel balls. The principle marketed, was that the steel balls gravitated to the area that needed weighting, and the mercury added a little more weight, but also slowed down unnecessary rapid and constant re-positioning of the steel balls. Then came versions using silicone fluid, or just mercury alone, and applications covered everything from motorcycle flywheels to propellers. They were always marketed as the ducks guts to solve balance problems - but many users were not satisfied with their performance. The bottom line is, balancing is a black art, and a field all to itself. You can have imbalance coming from torsional whip in shafts, or imbalance simply coming from large rotating masses that have excess weight in one position. My best mate spent 30 years balancing tailshafts and that was really eye-opening, as to where imbalance could come from, and often, how little it took to cause vibration, and how little it took in correction to get near-perfect balance. RPM ranges can also produce harmonics that increase vibration - witness the RPM range of some aircraft piston engines that engines must not run at for extended periods. due to damaging inherent harmonic forces. A lot of people fail to understand that Balance Masters don't actually put rotating masses into precise balance. They operate by DISRUPTING the harmonic imbalance, by moving the imbalance around. The interesting part is the force amplitude of the imbalance with the Balance Masters fitted, is actually larger than when the Balance Master is not fitted. But because the variations in force amplitude change randomly, the amplitudes generated, don't affect any other components that might have some imbalance.