sfGnome

John Taru (who was (is?) an instructor at the Oaks) said on the ABC that one aircraft turned with the second plane turning alongside it, but a wind gust pushed one into the other. ☹️☹️

Orange AND purple! Very 70s. All I need then is to bolt a surfboard on top. 😁

Yep, totally intentional. It was the only colour I could think of that couldn’t be mistaken for sky, cloud (grey or white) or trees & grass. Doesn’t work for the outback though. Maybe we should invent a skin surface like an anti-chameleon; it changes its colour to the opposite of its surroundings! 🙄

And 2 months later, my shed is now a blaze of colour. 😁

Private aviation? The land of wait-a-while… 🫤

Not a waste, MB. We’ve all been through the “nothing seems to be working” phase, and time on the controls is the only way out of it. Take as long as it takes, and don’t pressure yourself to get there quickly (I know that your circumstances makes it difficult, but difficult is better than dead 🫣). As for the flap switch, reaching across and starting the change at the right time will become second nature; it’s just that at the moment everything seems to be coming at you so fast…

Assuming you are only using LEDs (ie low current, low voltage), then you don’t need shielded. Of course, the other option is to just run a string through lightweight corrugated conduit, and then you can pull through whatever wires you actually need when the time comes.

Look on the bright side. If your engine quits at 35,000ft, you have plenty of glide time to find a good landing spot…

Of course, this being a record attempt that was likely to generate vast amounts of positive publicity, it’s possible that the engine was intended to be discarded afterwards. It only had to work once, not forever.

You mentioned in the original post that it was noise that bothered him. What type of aids does he use? Are they the type that hang over the ear with the control/battery part behind the ear? If so, they might be reducing the seal so that he has noise leakage and reduced noise cancellation, and in that case, no amount of mucking around with other electronics will solve it. Another (expensive) option is to get a new headset with built in hearing correction so he removes the aids when wearing the headset. My headset ran a brief hearing test and now boosts the higher frequencies where my hearing loss is.

Sounds good. Be sure to keep us up to date with progress and testing. I imagine that there’s lots of functional testing that you can do long before you actually put it in an aircraft.

I’l have to trust you and NASA on the peripheral awareness bit (not saying it’s wrong, just that I have no idea). However (there’s always an ‘however’ 🙂), gyro chips drift pretty quickly, so you also need a magnetometer (and possibly other stuff) to constantly correct it. Have a dig around the web for people who have tried to make homebuilt artificial horizon displays. I haven’t found one that’s been successful, but you might find something. The key thing is that the display and driving it is easy enough; it’s sourcing the reliable attitude information that’s the problem. If you can do that, then you’re away.

Hi Marty. I haven't had a great experience attempting to paint - hopefully things will turn out better for you. I bought rolls of clear builder's plastic and lengths of conduit and constructed removable walls that hung from the roof of the shed. I put an extractor fan down on the ground at a door with the rest of the door blocked off so the air was drawn over the tops of the plastic walls and down to the floor level at the fan. That aspect seemed to work well. (I can add photos if you'd like, but at the moment I'm on a PC which doesn't play nicely with the format that the iPhone produces. Yes, I know how to deal with it, but I'm being lazy...). I painted the cabin interior, but decided that the results, though ok, weren't really good enough for the outside. Maybe I just got frightened and it would have been alright? I don't know. I did show some examples of my work to my paint supplier (an ex-spray painter) and his response was "Not bad, but doing the outside would be a bridge too far", so I gave up and have sent it to a commercial shop recommended by some other blokes in my SAAA group. Sadly, it's been there for a couple of months, and it's still not finished. There's always some "big commercial job" that he's had to do and it's always mine that gets bumped. 😞 Whinge over. If I was trying again, I think I'd leave the interior until I'd built up some skills. Trying to work inside the box that is the baggage area was difficult as I kept bumping the gun against other recently painted surfaces. I'd suggest doing lots of practice sweeps without pulling the trigger until you're confident that you'll get the coverage without the contact. Oh, and I had a couple of worksite lights hung at different angles, but like iBob said, too much light is never enough.

From an electrical & fire safety point of view, absolutely yes, you should have a BMS on lithium batteries. However... The Ducatti regulator that is standard on Rotax engines (I'm assuming that yours is a Rotax) does not play nicely with a non-existent battery. As far as I could tell, most of the alternative regulators had similar issues (though the CARMO regulator given its design type might not be troubled - you'd have to ask them). The only one that I found that expressly stated that it was designed to continue working in the absence of a battery was the B&C PMR1D. It's a bit more expensive, and, as always, shipping from the US is a bomb. However, for that and other reasons, I figured that in my specific configuration, it was worth the money.

I recall a story of an airforce pilot who put in a maintenance request which was returned NFF (no fault found). His reply? NFF means Not F***ing Flying until you’ve found it…

One of my ex-syndicate partners bought a sling2 and absolutely loved it, so much so that when he decided that he was getting too old and sold it, he went out shortly afterwards and bought another. As for the bling issue, you could say that a Lada will get you there just like a BMW, but oddly, people prefer to buy the beemers… I’d love to have a full glass cockpit with autopilot and the works. It’s only the rapidly diminishing pool of the readies that stops me. 😛

B&C are in Newton, Kansas. Sadly, although AircraftSpruce carries some B&C equipment, B&C have confirmed that they don’t carry that particular part (yet).

Sadly, they shut it down a few years ago. Pity, because it used to get reasonable reviews. Then again, all the current companies seemed to get really good reviews up until about 5 years ago, but no longer.

Hi Skip. Yes, I've been examining all the available options, and had some extensive (and very informative) engineer to engineer conversations with the folk at B&C. One of their regulators (actually, the cheaper of the two permanent magnet alternator regulators) is exactly what I want in my plane. Yes, it is more expensive than the European ones, but it has some specific features that the Europeans don't. I'm happy(ish) to pay AUD400 for the regulator, but I draw the line at another AUD250 just to ship it. 😞

Does anyone have any experiences (good or bad) with re-shipping firms? I went to purchase something from B&C in the US, and for a USD250 part (which weighs about 250g/0.5 lbs), they quoted USD150 via UPS for shipping. That's just nuts! I looked at re-shipping firms (like Reship, Planet Express, MyUS, etc), and while they apparently bring the shipping price down to about USD75 (including B&C's USD25 charge for the US part of the delivery), I can't find one that doesn't get a zillion scathing reviews of lost packages and difficult customer service).

The MGL Avionics forum was being wiped by spammers and DOS attacks, so it now has a Cloudflare front end that you have to get through before you get to the site. It’s a (tiny little) bit of a pain to wait for access (generally about 15sec), but it means that the site is now available whereas previously it often wasn’t.

So when the rubber hits the road, it's not all plain sailing... As part of the application for the ADSB grant, you have to supply "a signed declaration by an approved installer using the template provided on business.gov.au". As an amateur-built aircraft, I'm the installer (I can't test it to the required level, but I can install it), but nowhere on business.gov.au's list of templates do I find anything that remotely looks like a suitable document. So, for those of you who have done your own install (ie amateur built aircraft only) AND have successfully applied for the grant, where did you find that magic template?

I have to admit that I think the feeling would be incredible, and if I was still a teenager and bulletproof, I’d love to have a go. However, as both those requirements are unfulfilled, I’ll leave it to braver (crazier?) folk. Wouldn’t it be a rush though…

A possibly easier alternative (ground ops only) is to disconnect the wires at the two wing sensors and sling two temporary wires across the cabin to the opposite wings so that, electrically, the sensors are now connected as if you had swapped them. If the problem appears to move to the other side on your display, then it’s the sensor. If it doesn’t, then it’s somewhere in the rest of the system. You wouldn’t want to purchase all new sensors and then find the problem was elsewhere (unless you really really want new sensors 😛).

…or when buying a new van, filling it up with ‘standard’ (ok, this was a lot of years ago) because my old van took standard, and then wondering why the engine was rattling so much… 🙄