onetrack

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.

.....the reasons the SES were in Afghanistan, instead of attending to natural disaster cleanups in W.A. and Victoria. "This is an abominable move that really needs to be exposed, to show the dark underbelly of the SES management!!" he thundered. "This is an organisation charged with repairing storm damage for Australians, and here we have them doing overseas junkets into 3rd world countries, and swanning around in taxpayer-supplied vehicles, and using..........

Peter is spot on with the ID. Spartan Executive NC17665 - 36 built, 34 survive, and one of the most desirable "executive" aircraft of the 1930's, owned by oil barons, sheikhs, and even Howard Hughes owned one. https://www.tvrphotography.com/index/G0000Ao7gunHtqmE/I00007_ESfNh8Qm4

And if the frog jumps out?? .... does it mean you do the same??

And what kind of ABANDONMENT are we talking? Jumping out of it after an emergency landing? Or jumping out it of whilst airborne, and you've packed a 'chute for the occasion?

You're looking as flash as a rat with a gold tooth, mate! - Congratulations! - an achievement to be proud of. 👍

Nev, a Drott skid shovel is primarily designed for loading trucks and excavating in hard soils, such as making underground garages on sloping ground. You can't level evenly and over long distances with a Drott, like you can with a motor grader. A motor grader can mix soils at the same time as it levels, producing an even airstrip base, or road base material. Often, a satisfactory airstrip base/road base material can be produced by mixing topsoil with clayey underlying soils. You can produce a satisfactory airstrip/road base with a mix that can range from 15% sand to 85% clay, through to 85% sand to 15% clay, provided the clays have fine binding components in them. Some clays lack the necessary fine binding clay components, thus the reason for farm dams that leak. Graders can not only move soil sideways rapidly, they can also move it longitudinally, this is all dependent on the moldboard angle. If you want to "carry" material to fill in depressions, you reduce the moldboard angle and pitch the moldboard back. This produces a longitudinal levelling effect and removes "swoops" and waviness from the surface. If you want to mix the soil materials and move them sideways to produce cross-levelling, you angle the moldboard steeply and pitch it forward. This sends all the soil material sideways and does mixing and levelling in one pass. In addition, the heavy rear wheels of a motor grader provide an ideal rolling/compacting motion. The only final requirement is a good level of moisture, which can be acquired via recent rainfall, or by a water truck. The moisture is necessary to aid in binding as well as compaction, as the water acts as a lubricant between the soil particles, and ensures that voids between the soil particles are substantially reduced.

There is only one machine to build an airstrip with, and it's called a motor grader. An old Cat 12 "knucklebuster" (mechanical lift) grader will do the job just fine, if you can source one.