turboplanner

5 hours ago, Ian said:

On the fuel note, does anyone know if an experimental diesel powered airplane has flown in Australia? I think that someone in Tasmania was looking to put a Subaru diesel in a plane and I'd be interested to know how far they've got or did it all become too hard.

I think that the biodiesel route is probably simpler and cheaper than the other fuel pathways in the longer term.

Diamond built a production line diesel around 2005, as far as I know it was successful with no issues, however, diesel became popular in Australia because it required less refining to be a commercial fuel (than  petrol), so it was much cheaper. In 1986 I towed a camper trailer from Melbourne to Fraser Island, spent a wee on the island and back to Melbourne for a total cost of $238.26. Fuel wasn't an issue in holiday costs then.

Farming was even cheaper because bulk diesel was not subject to excise.

That sparked the shift to diesel utes, then 4 passenger diesel utes, diesel 4WD wagons antil we reached the point we are at today where Australia's car market leaders are all light commercials.

However things have changed; the fuel companies simply jacked up diesel prices to make up for lost sales of petrol and excise increased, so diesel has finished up in the middle of the fuel mix, and the Nissan Patrol V8 with scheduled maintenance was the first petrol engined car in recent times to offer a lower cost of life than the diesel version.

Diesel, with its lower level of refining has been much more difficult to engineer to meet our stringent emission standards on NOx and particulates to the point where Caterpillar closed down its truck engine operations, and diesel vehicles clean the exhausts either with Urea injection or Diesel Particulate Filter. DPF brings you a surprise as your car gets older because it needs to be replaced. I was quoted over $2000.00 for one by a Subaru dealer and did it myself for about $1500.00

On the other hand petrol has responded well to emissions engineering and the development of things like compression ignition and multi-injection now gves expectations of moving 4 people on a 100 km/hr highway for around 4 litres/100 km. These engines are also producing much longer life cycle, further reducing total cost of life.

So it is likely that we will see a drift out of diesels and back to these low emission, low fuel burning petrol engines.  While there are plenty of commentators comparing CO2 emissions of ICE vs EV, it would be interesting to see where those CO2 figures come from becaise Australia doesn't measure CO2 and there are no regulations for CO2. One of the main reasons is that CO2 output is dependant on the condition of the fuel.

Biodiesel was one of the exciting new developments about 20 years ago, and at one stage a farmer near Melbourne had a contract to take waste cooking oil from restaurants and was running a tractor on it, starting it with a blow torch, much like the old Lanz Bulldog tractors, but I suspect Biodiesel today would not be able to meet our current emission levels where we've taken 97% of particulates and 98% of NOx out of exhaust emissons since 1992.

We also need to take a close look at global warming itself to see if all this pain is necessary. In 2018, in a communication to decision makers, the IPCC moved the start date for the magic 1.5 degree increase in temperature from the mid 2000s to 1760, the beginning of the industrial revolution. One possible reason for this is than when people start to ask about the rate of change you can avoid these near vertical front ends of bell curves and show a more gradual upcurve pushing out the inevitable date when people start saying, we're here but it's not hot?

One of the most surprising things in the discussion on global warming is that the focus has been almost totally on cars with European decrees that ICE engines will be banned by x date, but cars only represent about 10% of CO2 emissions. Why wouldn't we be focusing on the 90% of activities which also emit CO2?

......however it was all for nothing, the Director said "I don't need an Indian statue" and Cappy was out of a job unless he could drift [avref]..............

.......led by the most fearsome warriors of them all, Lidless Thor and Soure Handme Lunch. These two warriors had singl-handedly ............

11 minutes ago, Ian said:

While I see people mention hydrogen it's a difficult fuel compared anything liquid, I've even see people speak glowing about converting hydrogen to ammonia and suspect that they haven't read the history of ammonia safety in refrigeration. Hydrogen is high in volume and interacts with most structural metals to cause hydrogen embrittlement.

In comparison ethanol is simple, there are already planes flying however it does impact your range. There's a large body of knowledge relating to making combustion engines run using it. Butanol has a similar energy content and octane rating compared to avgas and can be produced in a carbon neutral manner.

Biodiesel and related process can produce jetfuel analogues which have already been demonstrated to work in turbine engines. Yes there are issues associated with things like low temperature stability but they're pretty simple to solve.

As policies change to force transport to be carbon neutral things will change however there are some pretty simple solutions out there. The solution will have a significant  agricultural component so I can see this benefiting countries like Australia enormously.

There is a huge issue will intermittency associated with solar and wind which remains an unsolved problem. A huge amount of power intensive industry is only economic when it runs 24x7, these industries won't function with intermittent power. Storage is expensive and countries like Australia which are flat and dry have very limited hydro options. Long distance power option such as high voltage DC are expensive, about a billion dollars to supply the UK from France.

Frankly I don't see anything but nuclear as being able to fill the gap in the near term.

 

 

Good summation, and the key problem is that even if the government committed to a nuclear solution, perhaps in the ACT or NT to avoid delays getting State approvals, the lead time for a nuclear plant is way longer that the hopeful pull back of fossil power.

Aside from intermittancy, the renewables sector has been boasting they can achieve Baseload power. Baseload is the minimum a coal-fired power station can operate at, without the boiler cracking from temperature changes, so is the overnight idle of a coal power station, yet hundreds of thousands of Australians took that to mean renewables were matching coal. Then came the blackouts in Melbourne where Peak Power couldn't keep up with demand, and after 40 years of subsidy renewables were only able to produce the base power they claimed - 1% of that power demand. Since then, renewables have been boasting of records of 40% and even 50% of the power suppy........in the colder months where the distributors have bought the cheapest rates. The States are still encouraging renewables and it is possible that there would be a balance bewteen a much bigger wind/solar component and a small coal-fired plant to crank up on hot days, but the financial model is likely to topple if the cost is added to people's power bills.

The hydrogen comments floating around are interesting in that many of the industry people promoting them think there's going to be a supply of hydrogen gas at every service station and you'll fill up like LPG, but when you ask them for the specifications their product is fuel cell which works perfectly well, as shown in an extended trial by MTT Perth buses around 2005, the only issue being the cost - three times the commercial price, so it's no surprise when household budgets won't stand more than about a 10% increase in car cost, that the fuel cell industry failed on cost. Any direct hydrogen gas vehicles would have to jump the chemical hurdles you quote as well as find and cost an infrasructure.

What I've found over the years is that you can pretty much assess the viability of the next exciting fuel by putting it on the chart with the other existing fuels for volume, efficiency, emission etc. Some people keep pushing on looking for that breakthrough, there's even a guy still convinced he can build a viable steam car, but unless everything lines up on that chart, the initial promise slowly dies.

In this case the sources were Victoria Police and Jetstar; you can check the press conferences where the press got their information if you want.

.....Sly will be in it then we can have a scenario of sly being captured by a tribe of giant African Americans fron a hidden valley south east of Alice.........

.....you ate a double burger. It would most likely be the pickle that got you. Not many people know that the pickles are actually the product of the Stumpy Tail Lizard Farm located  near Thargomindah. We can't tell you how the pickles fit in, but just that the Stumpy Tail Lizards sold by them as children's pets didn't always have stumpy tails and ..........................

16 minutes ago, turboplanner said:

Who are you talking about?

How childish; there's I big difference between the buyer and seller on this case and you've made a derogatory reference, not that anyone would believe it.

8 minutes ago, Flightrite said:

Most know the guy was an idiot, he’s lucky to be alive!

Who are you talking about?

8 minutes ago, walrus said:

How would an SAA be liable for an aircraft whose registration has expired or was never registered in the first place? I fail to understand the legal theory. We know and it is well established that ignorance of the law is no excuse. The law states that unless the aircraft is registered with an SAA it is not allowed to fly and the SAA has stated that without payment of a fee, registration expires.

 

‘’The law appears quite clear on this in regard to road going motor vehicles, why not aircraft?

SAA?

........Turbine Devil Hamburgers, which we shouldn't mention because ............................

....open up a new offshoot, eBayChopsticks, which then caused the Chinese government to ..................

2 hours ago, kgwilson said:

There were no RA rego numbers either before or after the restoration. There are unregistered aircraft all over Australia, some that have never been registered, those that get put in the back of a shed and forgotten about and those including GA that live on farms and have not been inspected or maintained correctly for years. Plenty of these are still flown illegally but never get close to populated areas or aerodromes. The only time we hear of them is if one crashes and the pilot &/or passengers are killed or severely injured.

 

I don't see how that can be a RA issue or even a CASA issue unless it is made illegal to own an unregistered aircraft or one that hasn't had a CoA for X years. People will always do as they please especially if no one else is around to find out or to get the aircraft certified as airworthy means hundreds or thousands of KM travel. 

Under Self Regulation for a class of Aircraft, management is the responsibiity of the SAO along with much of the legal liability. Poor Behaviour is always a headache because the fallout is always negative for the SAO. In this case the aircraft is easily identifiable as one that needs to be registered by RAA to fly. It's unlikely that governments would make it illegal to own an unregistered aircraft; they don't with motor vehicles; there's no elevated risk when something is not operating.

There's no interest by government if there are unregistered RA aircraft all over Australia because they are self administered, and it's up to the owner not to operate them whether next to a city or hidden in the outback.   (To issue a prescriptive fine on a GA aircraft, CASA has to go out there and find them)

The judgement comes when you injure or kill someone or damage their property;  you get sued in a civil court for negligence and the payout is infinitely greater than the prescriptive fine you would cop from CASA for similar behaviour, albeit you would possibly have that payout on top of a negligence payout.

However a self administering organisation can't just sit back and do nothing because when the injury or death occurs the plaintiff will often name the SAO as a co defendant.

5 minutes ago, kgwilson said:

How do you know the original owner was approved? 

If he wasn't that would just magnify the issue RAA has.

27 minutes ago, Blueadventures said:

Turbo my take is that he may not have known about the cable tie or that it held some tube in place, perhaps if this was a case of a missed opportunity to identify an issue that he will make better checks of airframes in future.

I think Tim had good reason not to notice it because it was hidden. I was more concerned about the person approved to maintain his own aircraft replacing a weld with a cable tie.

23 hours ago, facthunter said:

Even Boeing (when they were good) have made errors in the estimated flight loads of structural elements of an airframe. As an example flight tests of the B 727 with strain gauges fitted showed the actual loads in the vertical fin (T tail  ) were many times what was anticipated in wind tunnel tests of  models.

  Early designers loaded things with sand bags. Sample testing welds, Glued Joints etc is also good policy.. I can analyse a truss frame in steel/Al tubes as I've done that in a tertiary Engineering course. You need the actual performance specs of all the materials in the condition they are used in.. I've obtained all of Bill Whitneys published material also and read lots of EAA material..(Tony Bingellis)sp?   Wood is difficult as there's a lot of variation of the material itself.. I don't know how to really address this subject as there's so many facets to it but load testing sub sections would be part of it..  A good approach is for the MAKER to provide the truss parts already welded and design analysed. for a start.  Nev

This wasn't a Boeing type issue it was someone trying to tie a fuselage together with a cable tie after a weld broke.

......spoon (As convicts they rejected everything British down there) and started to eat his breakfast......

.........tyre lever. "Why, what's wrong with this?" asked Cappy brandishing a ......................

......days. "You couldn't fly sh!t!" said one particular XXXX and Cappy took off his shirt to reveal blue singlet and tattoos, one of thedm a Tyro which looked like it had a flat tyre. Cappy.........

RAA which had had some diversity scares and mild bullying. Cappy once had been accused of...........

40 minutes ago, cscotthendry said:

If I was rebuilding a crashed airplane, I wouldn't leave anything uninspected. A little thought would have told him how important bracing structures are in an airframe, and that is exactly what those things are. If he missed those, did he miss inspecting other welds on the frame?

And the original owner should be hung drawn and quartered for using zip ties to attach structural members.

Problem is virtually none of the owners are engineers, so the question is who in RAA has the job of auditing each aircraft to ensure they are safe?

49 minutes ago, Thruster88 said:

CASA schedule 5, mirror, torch and pen. Works on all aircraft. 

 

CASA Schedule 5 came into being many years ago to address a specific identified unsafe condition, when light aeroplanes imported into Australia either had no manufacturer's maintenance schedule, or had an inadequate maintenance schedule.

Eyeball use would be very good, for an Engineer.

Given that RAA considers under Self Administration that a shop assistant can not only build an aircraft, but maintain it, so has no understanding of structural engineering, and what is being described here is the equivalent of (the previous owner or "someone") taking a chainsaw, sitting on a limb and cutting it on the truck side, there needs to be some training in what to use the above instruments for. A cable tie is perfectly OK for a non structural application such as attaching electrical cable to a tube, but not to replace a weld which completes triangulation of a fuselage.

On 25/11/2021 at 9:18 PM, onetrack said:

Red, Google has the most comprehensive and all-encompassing search engine that has the best algorithms for finding things. If you use any other search engine, you will only find about two-thirds of what is on the internet.

 

Google has now added an image search feature called "lens". I'm pretty sure it utilises AI to scan images.

 

https://lens.google/

 

That having been said, Google was the most astute organisation at finding a way of turning searches into money and these days gives priority for producing results paid for by the companies buying advertising. A bit like a newspaper populating its editorial section with ads to the point where ads outnumbers editorial. So when you search google, where 20 years ago if you wanted to find out something very difficult to find in reference books, you'd have it in seconds in a global search, today you might be scrolling through the commercial interests for 20 minutes, or not even find the same thing.

Looks like a Basic structures module with basic engineering pinciples needs to be added to RA maintenance training.