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nomadpete

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Everything posted by nomadpete

  1. nomadpete
    Yes, it's a common problem for some drivers.
  2. nomadpete
    Flighty, you seem to be the only one repeatedly referring to fear. I don't base my decisions on fear, nor do I see signs of fear from many other forumites. I look at the available data, and make my choices. As far as covid goes, I choose to filter the sometimes contradictory information that comes from many sources, and find a pathway that I am confident will minimise my risk. I do the same process for all my decisions. It works for me, and as a result I don't live in fear. I'm simply managing the risk.
  3. nomadpete
    OK, I'll back off a bit. They claimed that initial "proof of concept" motors have been running. Doesn't that mean that the concept has been proven? They claim to have a number of larger motors "in production" which implies the motor prototypes were made and successfully tested? I should wait until somebody buys one and reports that it actually works as claimed.
  4. nomadpete
    All I can say, is.... WOW! It doesn't appear to be "pie in the sky". They have running examples.
  5. nomadpete
    Nice idea, Nev. But not likely to happen. People don't want to pay for information, these days. So the information streams are provided by less visible financial backers who are expecting a financial return on their "information".
  6. nomadpete
    Doug, as pointed out above, there are quite a lot of us going quiet on the forum. Not from lack of interest, rather from the march of time. My day came a couple of years ago. My saddest day was when my aircraft went. I still can't stop myself from glancing up whenever a plane passes by, and I get a year in my eye when watching 'our' wedgetail cruise past on the rising air. Now we have 'Calypso'. A Columbia 34. So I can still feel the air, although everything happens a lot slower now. As a bonus, a stalled aerofoil is a lot less hazardous on a sailboat.
  7. nomadpete
    I hope you wore your black jacket with gold epaulettes?
  8. nomadpete
    Maybe you could. But at that time, I couldn't. Neither could any of my 4 extended families members, due to lack of supply available. Yet all the while, SFM and premiers are constantly telling public to rush out and get their vaccine. Yes, it's true that availability has improved a lot recently, but there is a lot of urgent reallocating going on, that has caused cancellation of vaccinations that had been arranged last fortnight. That indicates that we still don't have enough available for everyone to simply line up and get a jab.
  9. nomadpete
    My rant.... Our federal government seems to have failed us. Early on they assured us that they had "secured" millions more doses of vaccines than we needed. We all thought that our government had got us the vaccines. Now we find that they played us. "Secured" didn't mean those doses were on their way, didn't mean we had a delivery date, didn't even mean they exist. So far there hasn't been a politician brave enough to tell us:- "This virus is here to stay. Forever. As such we can expect everyone to come in contact with it sometime in your life. Each of us can take the significant chance of serious illness causing permanent damage (or death). Or we can choose to have a vaccine that has been shown to massively reduce the effects of covid-19 when we catch it." So far, the PR has tried to make out that covid is just a passing thing that will go away after a couple of annoying lockdowns. And that's just not true. (Responses on the 'Off Topic" forum please)
  10. nomadpete
    Skippy, what exactly is your question?
  11. nomadpete
    When I were a young(er) man, to be called 'discriminating' was a compliment. It describes a person who chooses wisely. So I believe that discrimination is simply the act of deciding a preference. Discrimination is essential to life. For instance, I discriminate against bad wine.
  12. nomadpete
    Nice one Marty. So, how are you going with your new cowling moulds? The'll be a lot more streamlined now that you don't have to fit them around that obsolete Rotax boat anchor at the front of your plane......
  13. nomadpete
    But I think we'd agree that we don't wish to line ourselves up on the 'exploited' side. Our national weakness is apathy. Which makes us an easy target for any kind of global exploitation.
  14. nomadpete
    I apologize for the thread drift. My experience with the power industry, and even my own profit/loss of my grid feed PV system. My only defence is that I got sucked in by preceding thread drifters. Back to electric ultralights......
  15. nomadpete
    Somewhere above, there was a passing comment regarding the cost of building HV transmission lines to bring power from remotely located alternative generators (wind/solar), into the existing grid. This is indeed a significant influence on economic viability of ANY kind of new generator. As an example, I'm pretty sure that Queensland grid company spent around half a billion dollars on a 275Kv grid expansion out to Roma. The spend was over a period of about 3 years, and was solely done to provide power to the new CSG industry. That's a lot of money that doesn't help citizens, it only helps us wash and pump our gas out of the country. Hopefully the gas industry will be buying power in large enough quantity to pay for it. However, once the gas is all gone, who is going to pay for the continuing maintenance of hundreds of K's of transmission line and the 30 or so substations along the way? My only hope is that some bright spark builds a big solar farm and uses all that infrastructure to bring energy back to the cities.
  16. nomadpete
    Sailors have the same problem. It seems to be a rigid rule of physics. I'd call it 'The perversity of nature'
  17. nomadpete
    RF Chap, What is really missing is the increased safety that would be brought to aviation by changing from antiquated AM, to FM. Can't see why shipping has a more functional VHF system than aviation. Marine radios can instantly add GPS coordinates to a voice transmission.
  18. nomadpete
    He's a politician. Maybe he got a new script writer?
  19. nomadpete
    Marty, I'd be taking off the bonnet every time I prefight the aircraft.
  20. nomadpete
    On my lightwing, cowls overlap the fuselage. It only had two clips on the top section. I'd use dzus wingnuts. They should be easy to visually check, easy to release/refasten without tools, and difficult to drop in long grass. The lower cowl was fastened to fuselage by three csk screws on each side, with csk washers and captive nuts. This setup adequately kept the cowlings in place.
  21. nomadpete
    Hey Marty. Looks like you've got an aeroplane in your shed!
  22. nomadpete
    Absolutely awesome, Phil It shows their great skill, with mounts, tracking mechanisms cameras and post processing. And to think it's the work of so called 'amateurs' in their back yard, with modest sized telescopes. Galileo would be so stoked! Thank you.
  23. nomadpete
    Note that Rotax 91series motors don't windmill when they run out of fuel in flight. (Don't ask me how I know)
  24. nomadpete
    Nev, I think you might be over complicating things. Gliders teach energy management better than powered flying appliances. After all, gliders don't have the luxury of extra energy on tap. And most gliders ideally land in a three point even though their nose doesn't point as skyward as noisy tail draggers. As you point out, proficiency in one machine sure doesn't assure competence in a different machine. I'm no instructor, but I really think that glider experience greatly aids progression to powered flying.
  25. nomadpete
    Risk takers........ My tale is not of an accident. Rather its about an accident looking for somewhere to happen. So maybe it does qualify as 'hooning'. I live on a hill half a kilometer from a river. My front deck is 700' ASML, but our driveway is along a narrow valley which rises to an end behind our house, at about 1000'AMSL. So, when I heard what sounded like a Rotax coming up our little valley, I started scanning to see the aircraft. I spotted it through the tree trunks, still below me, and it was heading up our narrow dead end valley. As it went past the last possible U-turn point, couldn't believe there could be a reason to drive into narrow rising ground. I heard the throttle open up. I lost sight of it and started listening for the sound of breaking trees. The pilot managed slightly more than a 90 degree turn on full climb and just cleared the hundred foot gumtrees behind our house. It had my adrenaline going. It looked like maybe a Foxbat. Human factors? Showing off? Poor training? If I had my camera, I would have identified the aircraft and made a complaint to RAA because, apart from flying at less than 500' over houses, it looked like reckless behaviour of the sort that gives us all a bad name. I hope there wasn't any passenger.
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