kgwilson

Had my first flight as a septuagenarian PIC on Friday. It took 2 days from attaining the title to recover enough (as well as for the ground to dry enough to taxy on).

Why is it that the Gen 4 engine has problems that no-one is prepared to verify and none have been reported to Ra-Aus?

In WW2 the accident and non combat crash rate was extremely high but my guess is that it was acceptable collateral damage as a result of the desire to gain the upper hand and win the war. Over 15,000 Americans were killed in training accidents alone and that was in the US before they even got to the war zone. More planes were lost due to pilot error or mechanical failure than were shot down by the enemy & more than 1000 were lost on their delivery flights. This is only American data sourced from "Army Air Forces Statistical Digest of WW2"

There were 27,000 people killed every day from 1/9/39 to 14/8/45 to put it all into perspective.

Photo of my Sierra from behind. Note horizontal stabiliser well above the wing and rudder extending well below the stabiliser. The stabiliser is a full flying stabilator like a PA28. The stall characteristics are quite benign. It just mushes and loses height. I can only get it to drop a wing by putting on power and kicking in full rudder. It will then go straight into an incipient spin which is recovered instantly by centreing controls, stick forward & power. i.e normal procedure.[ATTACH type=full]50768[/ATTACH]

, I have approval to buy my own aircraft if it has a BRS fitted! What’s not to like:-)

Absolutely nothing! Buy it now before she changes her mind.

Wheelers do seem to be the norm now but there is nothing nicer to watch that a well executed 3 pointer. I think that a lot of newer T/W pilots aren't very good at it so stick with wheeling.

Personally I think a BRS is only really useful if you have an in flight structural failure. You will still crash at a high descent rate under the canopy and you have little control over where you will end up. When it's windy that's another curve ball to consider. I'd sooner trim for best glide & pick a landing site. Even in Tiger country you may be able to find a river flat or gully. There have been plenty of successful tree landings too, though most are not. I've landed in a tree though I have to say that it was in my Hang Glider & I just flared into it, grabbed it & hung on.

I have heard comments (unverified) of European LSAs with stress ripples appearing on wing skins. If true I would steer well clear of such an aircraft.

I have a Gen3 3300A and have never experienced cooling issues. Why? Well I spent a lot of time discussing cooling with others & Garry Morgan who supplied the materials for my build. I also downloaded & read a paper produced by NASA back in 1982 entitled "An experimental investigation into the aerodynamics and cooling of a Horizontally Opposed Air-cooled aircraft engine installation". It is 150 pages in length and discusses just about everything you didn't think you needed to know. I spent a great deal of time planning my cooling and created a 1 metre wide suction lip at the bottom of the cowl, installed a large 7 row Positech oil cooler with its own NACA duct sealed from the rest of the engine & used the old style low profile plenums with the plug leads on the exterior, deflector vanes of varying sizes glassed in between cylinders and well sealed intake nacelles. I never reach maximums of CHT, EGT & oil temperature even on 40 deg days & in the winter I cover the bottom half of the oil cooler and the air intake for the sump which normally blows cool air onto the finned front sump area.

The early Jabirus were awful and a lip kit was eventually designed to be retrofitted to suck more air through. The later models were improved significantly.

I take it by your not answering my question you do have an affiliation with Jab in some way?

I own a 3300A so if that's what you call affiliation there are 10,000 others who are affiliated along with 50,000 Rotax owners being affiliated to Rotax.

Then why dont the Rotax engines fail ? There are thousands more in service than Jabiru in Australia, run by the same dumb pilot people and you just dont see anywhere near the failure rates.

Rotax engines do fail. That is a completely irresponsible statement. All engines fail. There is no perfect engine. In 2014 when this ridiculous fiasco was at its peak Rotax failures were increasing and had reached 2.7 per 10,000 hours flown while Jabiru's were decreasing from a peak of 3.9 per 10,000 hours flown in 2012 to 3.3 in 3013. This is from published ATSB figures.

The Senate "Inquiry" was not an inquiry either, it was a qestion asked by a single Senator during a Senate Estimates Committee which was discussing financial matters, and the CASA people present were those required for the financial discussion, so not the ones involved in the Jabiru instrument.

The CASA people involved in the Senate inquiry were the Director and the American legal expert. They denied any knowledge of the fact the the data relied on by CASA was not right and when questioned stated that the failures attributable to fuel starvation etc had been removed from the figures. They had not. All this had been published well before the inquiry by "Proaviation" in an article entitled "Indecent Haste" in November 2014. The facts that CASA will now tell you are different from the facts they published before they were found out. Read the article attached.

Talk to an engineer who has been working on Jabs.

I do most days. He maintains flying school J170s. The current one has had 3 engines. One replaced at TBO (2000 hours), 1 replaced at 1000 hours as it was cheaper than the top end overhaul & the other at 700 hours after a gudgeon pin circlip failed.

I built my own aircraft and run a 3300A which I maintain myself. Dyno tested at 128HP & I can run it all day flat out & it is simple with direct drive. Try that with a 912ULS. 5 minutes is the maximum as stated by Rotax. The 914 has a reputation for unreliability. In saying that the 912 is an exceptionally good engine but it still sounds like a bunch of gnomes trying to escape from a tin can & I don't like all the plumbing & gearbox. Personal opinion but that's it.

Article from proaviation.pdf

Ask anybody who has worked on Jabs for any length of time, they will tell you the problem is usually not the people who are operating the engine. The likes of fitting pistons in from the factory with the piston pin offset around the wrong way. Anybody know why that was done?

Correct, it is mostly those maintaining them to their own requirements rather that the manufacturers specifications

Before the excrement hit the fan and scattered far and wide such discoveries would have been covered up and details not recorded. Now there are too many eyes looking and too many arses that need covering.

The attitude is similar to brokers going in to Detroit slums before the GFC & giving sub prime mortgages to unemployed African and Hispanic Americans sitting on apple boxes watching TV. There was no conscience and the only driver was greed. They knew the new owners of their previously rented slum would default but they got their commission & the lender would get their money from the mortgagee sale. It worked until the inevitable crash. The Yanks never learn from history. GM filed for bankruptcy, got bailed by the government & got rid of all the unprofitable brands when the subsidies they were getting from foreign governments dried up. Anyone remember Holden?

According to the report after investigations into several fatal crashes Bristel has been unable to produce evidence of compliance. After the Jabiru fiasco when CASA used raw data & claimed 40 failures that ended up being 12 I would hope the lesson would have been learned.

I note the collision was at around 4000 feet and cloudbase was about 4000 feet so it wasn't a case of poor communication/ procedures near the circuit.

Marty, if you are passing through Grafton give me a call. PM me for details

The notice is HERE but you must have an RAA login to access it.

Consider taking some gliding instruction. Stall and spin training is conducted routinely. Its an annual requirement.

Gliders are always looking for thermals and circle in them to gain height. Turns can be very tight and awareness of stalling in the turn (which can rapidly evolve into a spin) is vital for a successful height gain as often the core of a strong thermal is very small and the tighter you can turn the greater the height gain. This is the main reason that stall and spin training is part of the gliding syllabus.

When I started conversion from GA it was in a Skyfox Gazelle & I sideslipped most of the time on final as I like a high glide approach. With no flaps it was a good way to get the aircraft right on to the aiming point almost every time.

My brother just sent me a T shirt for my birthday. It says "Welcome to Aviation, You are now broke"

I tend to fly pretty tight circuits in my Sierra when there is no other traffic to force a big circuit which is most of the time so my turn on to final is sometimes a widish 180 from down wind which is quite steep and will be descending at 1000 fpm at 70 knots, then straighten up & slow to 55 by the time I cross the fence. I've been told that I was sideslipping but I'm not. I keep the ball centred. It is just a steep descending turn.

The horizontal stabiliser moves around a lot too. The 45 degree snap turn on the touchdown bounce must have really tested the undercarriage & tyres as well as passengers necks. Depending on how full it was there would probably be at least 400 tonnes being thrown around like a big leaf.

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A mate has an RV6 taildragger which he built himself in the 90s. He once said to me landing is a bit like Forrest Gump. That went straight over my head & I didn't ask what he meant till later when I thought Ah the box of chocolates "you never know what your'e gonna get". He is a master of the soft shoe shuffle & has never ground looped except on purpose to avoid hitting the hangar door at his very short farm strip. RVs are incredible fast aircraft but glide rather brick like. With only a 24 foot wingspan when approaching a landing area slowing has to begin quite a bit earlier that many other types.