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kgwilson

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Everything posted by kgwilson

  1. kgwilson
    The Aero club at Hamilton in NZ had an earlier Cherokee 6. Crashed and burned in a slmilar manner. Luckily that time they all got out.
  2. kgwilson
    The guns had been removed probably to save weight after adding the second seat (later versions had canons) & the prop looks to be composite not metal. Looks very repairable to me but won't be cheap.
  3. kgwilson
    From a design perspective the A320 is far more modern designed as Fly by Wire from the start. The 737 still has all the cables and controls that can be manually managed. The undercarriage is too short also so the engines have had to be steadily move forwards and upwards with a flat bottom cowl to allow the newer larger and quieter engines to be installed resulting in stability issues that had to be addressed such as MCAS which was largely the causes of the crashes in Indonesia & Ethiopia. This led to the grounding of the 737Max & the fallout for Boeing and its management culture has resulted in Airbus leapfrogging Boeing and the worlds biggest commercial aircraft manufacturer. Boeings reputation kept spiralling downward as many other issues appeared. If it wasn't for the US government military contracts Boeing may have gone bankrupt. Like all big US companies that screw up they get deemed as too big to fail & the government bails them out.
  4. kgwilson
    Correct. I use Thunderbird Email client which allows you to to view and download the message source which lists the trail including the email addresses, hosts and servers etc. I provided this to my solicitor who in turn sent details to their website providers. Whether anything could or has been done I don't know. It was the solicitors email that had been infiltrated and that is where they got my email address. They just lifted the logo off the website. The email asked me to deposit money into their fake trust account. About a year ago I got an email demanding money in the form of crypto currency. They had managed to get my email password & got in to my mobile phone account but got stopped there. I changed all my passwords & set up 2 factor identification & had to get a new sim for the phone but other than a lot of effort I lost nothing. About $2.74 billion was lost to scammers in Australia in 2023. Reported scams this year amount to $210 million so far but not all are reported. You can see the stats on the scamwatch web site.
  5. kgwilson
    The verification of bank account information is not done by email or web based information. Often you need to ring a trusted phone number, get info via text, check numbers with the bank etc or obtain a hard copy printout. Scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. When getting info from my solicitor via email, I got an email from a scammer using their logo. It was obvious to me but wouldn't be to many people.
  6. kgwilson
    That is already in place. I sold an investment property and my house and bought another house & everything was done on line with no paper at all using a system called Pexa that solicitors use and Docusign for signing contracts and property transfer documents. Both systems required that I provide IDs and I needed to upload photo scans (PNG or JPG) through another system called Infotrack. Once all the ID stuff is confirmed documents are signed without any witness being required as it had to be before.
  7. kgwilson
    I bought a $US6.95 3/8" snap fitting for my air riveter in 2011 from Aircraft Spruce when building my aircraft as the same item from Hawker Pacific here at the time was $60.00. Freight cost was $US59.00. Once bitten twice shy. After that the the only way to get a reasonable freight cost was to buy a number of things at the same time in a shared order with others.
  8. kgwilson
    The F35 was supposed to be the aircraft of the future that could perform all functions of fighter, bomber, launch pad, stealth, performance etc. It was conceived in the mid 90s and had huge time setbacks & ridiculous cost over runs during development. The first examples cost more than $1 billion each. It has the best technology but in the end is a compromise. Like a jack of all trades it is a master of none.
  9. kgwilson
    Sodium Ion batteries are starting to find their way in to Chinese EVs already. While their energy density is less than Lithium (currently NMC has the best) cost is around 30% of Lithium NMC or LFP. Sodium is plentiful being half of the chemical composition of salt (NaCl). The sea is full of it.
  10. kgwilson
    1955, 10 years after the end on WW2, just after Korea and before Vietnam. The RAAF probably didn't have any live ammo in any of their aircraft or those capable were too far away or in maintenance. There is an Aiglet at South Grafton & it has a Cirrus minor engine. 4 straight exhausts out the bottom. Very noisy.
  11. kgwilson
    I agree, there have been a number of near misses reported lately. Trumps dumb decision to get rid of a lot of ATC personnel is likely to contribute to this as well.
  12. kgwilson
    7 Spotlight is about sensationalisng any issue without evidence or real facts to get ratings as the free to air commercial TV channels lose more and more viewers. Complete rubbish.
  13. kgwilson
    I've used Curtis fuel drains for years and replaced the O-ring seal. If the O-ring wasn't there fuel would just run out. A standard fuel tester with its castellated notched top fits the horizontal rod and a push up allows fuel to flow in to the tester tube. While pushed fully up twist the tester to the right and the valve will lock open & you can drain the fuel in the tank in to a container. A good quality brass reliable fuel drain. I have never had to replace one, just the O-ring.
  14. kgwilson
    The transition from one state to another is reported via programs to the FDR (software). The reported transition is electro mechanical if induced by the pilot. It could also be induced by a short circuit in the wiring or switch itself. While highly unlikely it is still possible.
  15. kgwilson
    I agree. It is a superb aircraft. I flew in one from Sydney to Auckland some years ago. I am sure they are investigating the backgrounds of the pilots extremely thoroughly.
  16. kgwilson
    I don't think it is obvious at all that the cutoff switches were moved in the cockpit. That may just have been an assumption by the pilot when power was lost and the other pilot said he didn't. This assumes the 2nd pilot was not planning a crash. The reports states at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off. In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so. There are likely to be plenty of conspiracy theories going around but a software or system logic failure cannot be ruled out. If it was a system failure then over 1100 787s would be immediately grounded and that could put another nail in the Boeing & US Aviation industries coffin.
  17. kgwilson
    So if neither pilot actually moved the switches how did the fuel then get cut off?
  18. kgwilson
    I still reckon the system shut the fuel off as it got an instruction from some other part of the system that the valves were to be closed, so that's what it did.
  19. kgwilson
    Not very likely does not mean impossible. I spent 30 years in the computer industry & programs thought to be fail safe did things that they were never programmed to do. With multiple systems checking each other with fail over processes and fail safe logic there should be no way that things like this could happen.Very highly unlikely but not impossible.
  20. kgwilson
    The physical action of moving a switch from on to off where computers control everything just means an electronic instruction has been passed to the computer controlling the fuel supply to tell the system to shut off the fuel. The physical process is purposely made difficult to prevent accidental activation. If somewhere in the system amongst the billions of transistors present on thousands of chipsets a software malfunction somehow erroneously thought it was instructed to shut off the fuel to the engines nothing could have been done to prevent it.
  21. kgwilson
    CATL announced the 500Wh/kg a year ago and have been testing the technology since. With the market announcement in April I'd think that those who already have electric aircraft operating or in the pipeline will gain significant performance and range. What it can do straight away is improve the range of the existing Pipistrel quite dramatically as its existing batteries provide about 150kWh/kg. Charging time is falling massively too. Both BYD & CATL have developed Megawatt chargers that can provide 1000km of range in 5 minutes for an EV with a 100kWh battery. These are of course not main stream yet but the technology is here so it will not be far away. There is a lot of investment going in to battery powered short haul and vtol aircraft & autonomous operation. There was a demo one at last years Oshkosh.
  22. kgwilson
    10 out of 15 Boeing Engineers said in an interview they wouldn't fly on a Dreamliner. There are plenty of youtube videos citing Boeings problems and especially the problems with the 787. https://en.as.com/videos/video-of-boeing-engineers-goes-viral-i-wouldnt-fly-on-one-of-these-planes-v/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxV0CqGlgwQ&t=12s
  23. kgwilson
    I always understood that the CVR & FDR were located in the tail section of the aircraft as this is the least likely place to suffer severe damage in a crash. The tail section got torn off & stuck in the first building so unless the units are further forward in a 787, you'd think that they should be in reasonable condition & not fire damaged.
  24. kgwilson
    Report from ABC website. No other details & it would seem no one knew about it till the wreckage was discovered by Police who were looking for a stolen car NSW farmer who died in aircraft crash remembered as community man - ABC News WWW.ABC.NET.AU Father of three Paul Adam died when his recreational aircraft crashed in Central West NSW.
  25. kgwilson
    There will be a fair bit of scrutiny on Boeing as well. During the 737 Max & the door blow out fiasco a number of Boeing Engineers working or had worked on the 787 project were scathing of Boeings build and safety processes, some saying they would never fly on a dreamliner
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