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He's an idea...someone at the AGM put a motion forward that this web site be awarded with a Meritorious Service Award for everything that it has done for recreational aviation...I wonder how that would go down

Seriously though...the only other person to be awarded with such a distinction has been Tony Hayes who did so much for the Thruster Aircraft Owners so Carol is in great company and it is a thrill to hear it going to such a worthy person...good on'ya Cazza!

I offered to do it for them at a cost of $1 with a 100% discount if paid within 14 days...but they declined

Hi All

I am posting the below email that has been sent to Mr Steve Runciman, CASA and every RAAus Board Member to keep you all informed as to where I am progressing with this despicable action that was taken by Mr Steve Runciman and the RAAus Executive.

Dear Mr Runciman

When I applied to re-join RA-Aus early in August, I experienced an unusual telephone experience with RA-Aus. Instead of the process that other rejoining members have experienced, I was put on hold whilst the office staff member went to "check something" (her words). Upon her return the staff member proceeded with taking my details and credit card details for payment. Some days later, I noticed that my credit card had not been debited with the RA-Aus payment. I telephoned the office and was advised that my application had not been processed.

I subsequently received a letter from you dated 13 August 2012 which effectively denied me membership of RA-Aus and the right to fly until the Board met to review my application on 22 September 2012. The letter also contained some unsubstantiated allegations about me.

My solicitor sent you a letter on 15 August 2012 stating that your actions were contrary to the law in a number of aspects. The Secretary/RA-Aus did not respond to my solicitor.

You (not the Secretary) sent me a letter dated 6 September 2012. This letter contained no apology for the allegations in your earlier letter. I received the letter in the afternoon of 7 September 2012 which was too late for me to nominate for a Victorian Board position – a role I had previously held and, had I had the opportunity, would have lodged a nomination.

Three weeks is a long time to wait for a response to my solicitor’s letter and I am left wondering if your agenda was to prevent me nominating for a Board position.

You continue to demonstrate your unsuitability for the role of President and the action against me described above is despicable and you and your assistants in this action, Tizzard, Middleton and Reid should immediately resign. You should also publish an apology to me in the next edition (October) edition of “Sport Pilot”.

I require you, Tizzard, Middleton and Reid to resign within fourteen days of this email. If you do not, I will through my legal counsel, commence action against you personally, including criminal, and the RAAus for the wrong you have done to me.

Firstly I would like to say thanks to everyone for their understanding over the last week. Our Australian based server went down 4 times within the same week which is just not acceptable to me. As many of you would know we use to have the site on our own dedicated server in a data center on the West Coast of the USA for a very long time without any issues whatsoever. We moved the site to an Australian server in an attempt to make the site even faster then the already accepted speed of our US server. Whilst we try our absolute utmost to give you the best user experience we possibly can, sometimes, as I have learnt in this case, that it is better to just accept that we already had the best in an "overall" way.

We are now back on our US dedicated server, an extremely powerful server with 16gig ram, raid 10 hdd and 8 cores of processing power, so I am now very confident that we will be blessed with trouble free motoring from now on...incidentally, the server is pinged every 5mins automatically to ensure it is still up and running perfectly, and if by some chance there is an issue, a team of network and server administrators are immediately notified and with the necessary tools and login permissions, jump in and bring the server straight back up. This gives me peace of mind during the night and if I am away during the day that you will always get to experience, and use, the vast resources available to you here on Recreational Flying.

Thanks for your time, and for your understanding.

In fact I will send a follow up email to CASA about it now...thanks for reminding me

It is in hand to resolve however with most of the ADs not available on the RAAus web site it is hard to maintain integrity of them here. It has been on my radar for some time, since Feb this year, and recently I got so sick of it I made comments of it to a couple of board members but still nothing was done so recently I took the matter further and made a complaint to CASA about it...they know about it and the answer I got was "Guess who will be getting an email very very soon".

Hopefully the RAAus web site will be fixed up so I can get back to reporting ADs and ANs to you all as soon as I get notified of them automatically from the RAAus web site...please stay tuned

Just received an URGENT AD Notice email from CASA and thought I would post it here just in case...

The Civil Aviation Safety Authority has published the following urgent Airworthiness Directive:

Boeing 737 Series Aeroplanes

2012-18-13 - Fatigue Cracks - Aft Pressure Bulkhead - Inspection

This, and other Airworthiness Directives can be viewed at:

http://www.casa.gov.au/airworth/airwd/index.htm

Oops, I forgot I was able to vote ...I just faxed off my Proxy, 3 pages supporting each resolution and just in case pages 2 and 3 were confused on the receiving fax machine, I signed the bottom of each one so the office knew that pages 2 and 3 belong to my page 1 fax...I hope my signature in the bottom right corner on pages 2 and 3 does not null and void my voting

Dave:Brilliant vid mate!

FT, it is a disk i/o issue

Unfortunately the migration that was attempted throughout last night didn't go as hoped...there were issues with the imported data which I can only assume has come from the backups done from here...I will be talking to the data centre today asking for a please explain and why the site has gone done 4 times in the same number of days...not happy Jan!!!!!!

Fingers crossed that some stability will return to the site today

I think the answers that will be given to the questions will be a talking point themselves so do you think it better if we wait and see what those answers are and create the threads on each one...I am sure there will be a lot of attempts of white washing things.

To safeguard the site, its content, the domain names, hosting accounts, servers etc etc etc, ownership is all entwined, and setup by a Solicitor and Accountant, in a web that includes a Family Trust, a PTY LTD Company, a separate Registered Trading Name, Corrine, Myself and a mixture of leases and ownerships of different components and more...all this is done to ensure no matter what happens, the site can always continue for everyone.

Hi All

Due to continual issues that I have been experiencing with the Australian Data Centre that hosts the server we use for the site, I will be moving the site back to our extremely powerful server based in a West Coast USA data centre.

If you can remember, I moved the site to an Australian one for 2 reasons:

1. To try and provide the site much faster to you by having the least amount of latency (time delay) for the data to display on your screen

2. To reduce server costs, it went from $3,000 a year to $2,000

However the grass wasn't greener, evidence by the number of times the site has gone down in recent days. Please understand that the site continually has up to 150 concurrent users throughout the day and evenings, many images and a huge number of database calls due to the site's interactivity and with its popularity in being the highest ranked recreational aviation web site in the Southern Hemisphere, it becomes a target to many undesirables. This means that if you don't have massive resources to spare, totally NOT a financial option here in Australia, and you are running at the "only" what is needed in terms of server resources, then you are asking for trouble.

Our US server has massive resources, completely dedicated to us and as shown in the past, is extremely reliable having performed for a very long time without a single fault.

So as soon as I can organise an all nighter, I will be moving the site files back to our US server.

However, I will also look at another technology called CDN (Content Delivery Network) which uses other more local servers to deliver slow loading components like images and scripts to your PC. That technology decides at the time of loading a site page, from where is the fastest way to get the code on to your screen for you and if there is a problem with one, it automatically switches over to another etc.

The costs will go slightly above the $3,000 a year mark again but for reliability it will be well worth it for everyone here using the resources of Recreational Flying.

Flying Clubs play an important role in creating communities in our flying activities with events, general chat, learning etc. However, flying clubs can be hard to find close to our locations that make it easy for us to just pop in and chew the fat with other members of our flying fraternity.

So, are you a member of a flying club? or perhaps 2 even...

Sorry Guys, but I have had to do a little bit of cleaning up of the thread as there was some radio static effecting the photos

few more.

Here is a couple from Lachlan:

Woke up this morning to couple of balloons taking off...certainly an all types of recreational aviation event

Lachlan and I are leaving Melbourne right now...see you all there (Bubbleboy, Lachlan wants to know if Jack is with you?)

Well irrespective of who the perpetrator was, the Data Centre company will now lose my business...$3,000 a year

Hi All

The site went down for about 4 hours this morning from what is called a "Kernel Panic Attack".

I am sorry about the inconvenience and note that technicians will be working on ascertaining the reason this happened and fixing to ensure it doesn't happen again throughout the day

Gday Ian, Do you have an ANR version available in the Rec Flying series ?BPN

PJ's with "Remove before flight" would be good......-Linda