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RAA, GFA etc fly in the same airspace as everyone else. They are bound by the same rules as GA. RAA are not free to make their own rules in that area.

You need to assume sighting isn't possible IFR. It also doesn't work for multiple aircraft inbound on the same track to the same destination - particularly when the fastest one is at the rear!

Vertical separation is most reliable, as long as no-one needs to climb or descend and the altitudes are available/usable. Once you need to climb or descend, an accurate understanding of aircraft locations is required. One day I was listening on area as 4 IFR C172s departed Ballarat for Avalon, closely followed by an IFR Seminole. The IFR traffic information from ATC was entertaining. It was clear blue sky so no problem to actually separate VFR, but good luck sorting that out with pilot organized separation if it was IMC with a low icing level.

I have been flying for a few years with Avplan + ADSB receiver. These are my observations: It's very useful IF the other aircraft is travelling in a straight line and/or you know its intentions. For example, if you are both inbound to the same airfield from the same direction you can get a much better idea of your relative positions and whether you need to take any action to ensure separation. Likewise, yesterday I was inbound to an airfield about 20 miles out when another aircraft departed on a reciprocal track. I was able to delay my descent until we passed each other so I wasn't descending into their path. It can also provide a useful picture when you are arriving at an airfield, supplemented by radio e.g. you might "see" 3 aircraft in the circuit, plus another on the radio but without ADSB, and another on ADSB 2 miles ahead inbound. That's a useful aid to situational awareness prior to arriving. When it's not so useful: If the other aircraft is not travelling in a straight line. Once you are close enough that separation is an issue e.g. less than about 1 mile. By that point you need to be looking outside for the aircraft. It's easy to see why controllers working with a screen use a separation standard of several miles. It's also very tempting to try to separate yourself when there is no risk of collision. This is surprisingly difficult because when you are in reality a long way apart any change to your track doesn't make much difference on the screen. I wouldn't read much into that report. IFR aircraft need separation by ATC, that is what it was invented for, but for some reason we don't do it in Australia. The report deliberately ignored that. I don't think that having additional traffic information in the cockpit (other than last resort stuff like TCAS) will make IFR safer. There have been a number of incidents with IFR aircraft trying to do DIY traffic coordination in Australia (including RPT), but the obvious conclusions are ignored. "the same quality of surveillance information received by the controller" Since Mangalore, ATC has been a lot more proactive trying to avoid traffic conflicts in G airspace. It's pretty painful to listen to. Basically the quality of surveillance information isn't the problem - the problem is that separating aircraft using a screen is very difficult unless you know the intentions of all the participants, can make a plan and give people instructions i.e. ATC.

You can bet if someone is shot at a firing range it won't be SSAA investigating it. Likewise, if someone dies in speedway it will be the Coroner investigating. Speedway participants will be witnesses, not investigators. The problem with expecting RAA or GFA to investigate is that you have multiple organizations involved. RAA and GFA obviously, but the rules to avoid collisions are administered by CASA so they are involved too. Do you think RAA can realistically conclude that CASA is responsible for the accident - even if they find that everyone was following CASA rules, and the accident could just as easily involved 2 GA aircraft? In reality, I think ATSB investigate too many accidents. It doesn't generally produce anything useful, other than satisfy a ghoulish fascination with what happened. Can you find an ATSB investigation that produced a meaningful change to prevent future accidents? As they say, it is very unusual to invent a new way to crash. For private operations, there should be an initial assessment, and then only do an investigation if it appears that the causes are not understood, or part of a wider pattern. Aircraft have been colliding for 100 years. We know why, and we know what to do to prevent it. CASA have been watering down the rules around uncontrolled airfields for as long as I have been flying. It might be useful to investigate and decide whether that contributed. If it is established e.g. that the RAA pilot was not following rules, maybe you would want to do an investigation to see whether that was systemic in RAA in GA in general. Otherwise, there is probably not much new to learn.

Can we please try to dial back the racism on this site? The thing I hate most about aviation - so many people are racist at a level I don't see in any other group I spend time with.

I don't know who is telling you that. In fact the security services currently say the largest threat at the moment is right wing white men who hold grudges against people who are non-white, LGBTIQ, "elites", politically left etc. There are regular attacks that would be considered terrorist actions, except that we have been conditioned to believe that white people cannot be terrorists.

Just that Do you have any other explanation for these posts? There's a clear conclusion I would draw.

Physiognomy is the judgement of a persons character from their appearance. So you are saying that people of non-caucasian, non-asian appearance have some character flaw (based purely on their appearance!) that means we should be concerned when they learn to drive trucks? OK... at least we know where you are coming from.

What does "drivers ... not of the Caucasian nor Asiatic physiognomy" mean?

We know the reason, but perhaps you should ask yourself why you assume non-white people are more of a terrorist threat?

Driving vehicles into crowds is definitely something that authorities are worried about. But I'm not sure why you single out "drivers ... not of the Caucasian nor Asiatic physiognomy". This has been enthusiastically adopted by the white supremacist groups in the USA. There were over 100 incidents where people drove vehicles into Black Lives Matter protests. Terrorism is defined as violence or threats of violence for a political cause, so these definitely qualify as terrorism. For some reason though charges are rare.

It might be readily known, but I don't know it. I can't see how you would expect a single person to do it properly. You need multiple people, backed up by counselling etc. if they are expected to attend accident scenes or investigate accidents involving people they knew. A budget to spend on specialist reports if necessary. A budget to do real accident investigations probably starts at several million dollars.

Does RAA pay (market rate) for people to do this? Or are they volunteers? Somehow I doubt RAA has the structure or budget to support this type of activity. Hard to criticise someone who doesn't want that job!

Any counter terror strategy that relies on people submitting their details voluntarily is pretty lame. I'm sure there are more stringent checks being done without our knowledge on student pilot applications etc. If a terrorist did apply for an ASIC they may well let it through to avoid tipping them off that they were being monitored. The problem is no-one wants to be the one to explain that the ASIC wouldn't have made any difference, if they scrapped it and someone did bounce a Jabiru off a building - even though it's probably true. So I think we are stuck with it. Authorities are realizing that the major terror threat now is right wing white supremacists etc. anyway. They seem more interested in direct threats with guns than using aircraft.

I have had occasional weird behaviour, on 2 different ipads: terrain warnings while cruising at 6000+ AGL, on multiple occasions the aircraft icon turns 90 degrees to the actual track the aircraft icon turns around and goes in the opposite direction for a short period. Maybe there is something on my aircraft that interferes with the GPS signal. But that is the point - an aircraft GPS should tell you when the GPS signal is unreliable, not just give you their best guess at position. These are no big deal VFR, but would get your attention if you were IFR. I see people claiming they use the ipad for "situational awareness" when IFR, but I think the real question is do they have enough situation awareness to reject what the ipad is telling them if it stats feeding them crap? Aviation will be interesting when/if Apple decide they are not in the aviation GPS business and they don't want to be in the aviation GPS business. Maybe they delay GPS updates above 80mph or the GPS position is above e.g. 1000' AGL. Or maybe they just remove aviation apps from the app store. All it would take is someone running out of fuel and crashing after getting lost when their ipad failed (heat etc), and deciding to sue Apple.

As long as you have enough awareness to recognize when it's telling you lies... mine does surprisingly often. The GPS in an ipad isn't the same as an aviation GPS - and in some circumstances an ipad will even confidently tell you a position without a GPS installed. Also you need to be able to use your own judgement on things like fuel calculations. On one flight from A to B and back to A Avplan optimistically predicted a tailwind in both directions, so actual fuel usage was significantly higher than predicted. It's hard to duplicate because it requires specific weather patterns, so I never figured out if Ozrunways did the same thing. It's easy to get lazy, but you need to verify what it is telling you.

It might have been better to talk to an electrical engineer? Solutions to these problems already exist: 1) Most of the time, vehicles plugged in won't actually be charging because charging from empty is rare. 2) Chargers can distribute available power depending on how many cars are being charged. e.g. if your charger has 20KW available, 1 car can get 20KW, 2 cars 10KW each, 10 cars 2KW each etc.

One big advantage of electric vehicles is energy security. We generate all our electricity in Australia, but most of our fuel is imported. We spend 50B/year on defence, but really, if someone parked a submarine in the shipping channels and threatened to sink any tanker on it's way to Australia, how long would we last? Diesel trucks might be great, but they rely on the supply of fuel.

I think overall it is a good thing that people who fly for money are held to a higher standard than is required for a private pilot. On one hand you need to make sure that people with no knowledge of aviation are protected when they pay for a flight. On the other hand, I don't want to have to demonstrate the ability to e.g. plan a flight from Moorabbin to Bankstown via Broken Hill with commercial pressures just to keep doing my simple private flying, or to do the level or maintenance that is required for e.g. charter operations.

As far as flying charter without an AOC goes, it's probably as simple as asking the passengers if they paid for the flight, and checking CASA records of who has an AOC. Unless the passengers are prepared to lie on his behalf, it's pretty open and shut. A political party (or any business) probably has detailed records, invoices etc. for the payments. The more detailed investigations probably were around the fraud aspects.

Electric vehicles will be so much cheaper than ICE that no-one will be able to afford to run ICE trucks unless you absolutely can't use electric. There are electric motors all around us - they are so reliable we forget they are there. At least 10 in most cars I would guess. If you prefer bigger motors, check out the reliability of trains. Electronic controllers will prevent you from burning them out. $100,000 for a battery reflects the cost to dig the materials out of the ground. But at the end of it's life, the battery still contains all the materials to make a $100,000 battery. By that time there should be large scale recycling, so the replacement cost will be more like the cost to break it down, separate the chemicals and make them into a new battery. That should be much cheaper than mining raw materials.

That's always possible. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that a dipole is the ideal configuration. With a large enough ground plane ("large enough" depends on the frequency) we can make something that acts like a dipole at radio frequencies, without the bulk of the second element. There are complications, e.g. the shape of the ground plane can affect the radiation pattern from the antenna. Again, my understanding is that the SWR check at aviation frequencies is the easiest way to check the performance of the antenna. I see some people are recommending something else - I would be interested in more information about why. That is at least as likely to have made the difference as the antenna. I don't think its as simple as making a bigger ground plane. You would probably need a new antenna designed to work with a ground plane, which I think has a different connector from your current antenna. That means you probably need to install a BNC connector or run a new antenna cable. I wouldn't do anything unless you know you have a problem. If you do have problems and the setup is the same as other Jabirus, I would look for problems in the current setup before replacing it. I don't think Jabirus have a problem in general with radio performance.

I think it's a dipole so a ground plane is not required. That is what the black bit hanging down is.

I hate the word airmanship.... 99% of the time it can be defined as "the piloting skills a person believes they have that make them superior to the average pilot". We fly a circuit to land because that means we know where to look for traffic, and gives everyone a chance to spot other traffic and adjust spacing etc. If you have a lot of traffic, it makes it critical that people fly a proper circuit, setting up and maintaining a sequence. You can't afford to have people doing their own thing. A tug pilot trying to get down fast just doesn't work if you have a lot of traffic. It doesn't matter how experienced they are, they increase the risk for everyone. Sounds like there are 2 possible solutions at Caboolture. 1) Decrease the amount of traffic 2) Require people to fly proper circuits, without cutting in etc. Telling people to be aware and take all factors into consideration is useless.