turboplanner

.......introduced himself as Dave. "These are stud cows worth $15,000 each" he said "so for a start you're up for $30,000 compensation + 10% interest, but that's not all. I fly a Cirrus from that bitumen airstrip through the fence 50 metres away, so I think you must be blind; do you have a medical?"

"We don't have to" replied bull in that sarcastic way of the typical RA pilot, "it's only a driver's licence standard".

"Well since you didn't see the biggest airstrip in this region I figured you had an eyesight problem, so I talked to my mate, Senior Sergeant Doubtfire and she'll be here soon to do a test". bull had heard about Doubtfire in the NES and an involuntary shiver ran up his spine. It ran down again when Dave said "You understand it is illegal to land without permission? I've taken the libery to make CASA FOI Mad Max Bruiser aware of this incident and he's coming over too; he's in our clay target club."

They heard a siren and saw a long plume of dust on No Hope Road and then a dust plume from the opposite direction as Mad Max gunned the 1986 powder blue Camry, knowing that whoever got there first had first go at bull.

The vehicles skidded to a halt a hundred metres each side of bull and both drivers started springing towards bull who particularly noticed the 357 magnum flopping up and down on Doubtfire and the 357 bulge (FOIs were authorised to carry after 9/11) on Mad Max.  They saw each other running and as they got closer a strange thing happened; their strides slowed into slow motion, their eyes locked, their hair gently flopped up and down, ................................

.........part of the see and be seen policy.

Not many people know that one of the reasons Bull uses the lower case bull was from a severe injury received when he was deployed to Afghanistan. one day bull walked up to a stone wall to relieve himself and didn't realise that 40 Isis soldiers were crouched behind it. One of them thre an IED over and took off the top of his head and part of his face. This didn't stop Bull who opened up with his weapon and killed 38 with gunfire and had to choke the other two because he was out of ammo.

He was evacuated and surgeons grafted on a tin skull, and made a new check from one of the cheeks of his bum.

One disconcerting result, when you were talking to bull was when he farted his cheek would vibrate, but we all got used to that.

When he was flying the Thruster and the prop was hitting his head it made a sound like a cowbell when the cow was heading for home.

The disadvantage was that no matter how clear of stock the paddock was, by the time he had rolled to a stop, 50 cowns had bailed him up and ..............

50 minutes ago, jackc said:

Maybe it’s time for RAAus to help justify its existence, now we have an ex CASA CEO……

Again, what does this have to do with CASA?

15 minutes ago, Student Pilot said:

Everything said is spot on. That's the reason why nobody bothers to make submissions, CASA will not listen.

Especially when the subject has nothing to do with CASA.

.........gavel road. I fact the landing roll looks very much like a chook resettling on the nest with the wheels splaying in and out and the wings flapping up and down, and ..................

..........Thruster pilot after spending twenty years trying to wrestle the thing every nautical mile of the flight, and then sustain the typical Thruster landing on that horrible suspension which is like ...........

4 hours ago, walrus said:

Turbo, I have a ppl and did the training. but $800 for a bfr and then a medical on top of that, just so I can “go coastal” once a year is crazy. Have you ever flown into LAX as a passenger in daylight? You would have seen all sorts of aircraft from a C172 upwards, mixing happily in that airspace, but not here.

I have, but only saw heavies. That could just have been the traffic at the time. These days the US is following ICAO standards as we are.

You could make the same argument about the cost of maintaining an IFR rating just in case you might want to get home in IMC, but it's equally invalid

The once a year extra cost of flight planning through a safer area would be a lot less than qualifying to fly through CTA.

As I recall, all you wanted to do originally was fly a STOL off an island in Gippsland?

2 minutes ago, walrus said:

Turbo, I’m sure you are right. What you are saying, it seems, is that RAA pilots have no rights. That said, my point stands. With no rights, then the 60%+ of Australians living under CTA on the East Coast should not be flying RAA. You can fly suitably equipped RAA aircraft in CTA with a ppl, bfr and medical certificate).

 

‘’That begs the question of medical self certification for GA, if that happens then the floodgates are open for the RAA pilots with a PPL as well.

No, I'm not saying RAA pilots have no rights, I'm saying the RA owners and pilots were exempted from some rules, training costs and areas in order to make possible grass roots, simple flying at a fraction of the costs of GA. If you want the rights o do all the things a PPL can do, then you need to throw away your exemption and train/fly in GA, or train and use a qualifying aircraft. There are some schoole who do this in the bigger cities.

2 minutes ago, mkennard said:

You could also debate whether RAAUS is a direction towards recreational GA. 

You could about ten years ago because that seemed to be the way it was headed, but judging by posts on this site that seemed to cool in both camps, and it's interesting to see rag and tube and local flying again being discussed in recent times.

1 hour ago, walrus said:

Why even fly the East Coast? It’s just a series of road blocks.  Jervis Bay, sydney, Newcastle, Coffs, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast. Seven of them - and not one of them makes a provision for RAA pilots or a sensible fuel efficient corridor. How many Light Aircraft pilots and pax  have been killed because they couldn’t plan or get clearance through these toxic zones? 

RA aircraft operate under an EXEMPTION from day to day aircraft rules.

It was never intended for cross-country flying, it was intended for low cost, affordable flying which suits the basic entry level aircraft.

Over and over again on this site for a decade or more, posters have driven this point home.

However some people have never got that message.

Airspace rules start with ICAO for good international understanding, and are there to protect RPT aircraft and IFR flying.

I've posted very detailed analysis of a particular location, and why you may think the space is "unused" but be totally unaware that ATC have just managed congestion at a busy airport by instructing a Qlink to go to your favourite area and do circuits there until called in, and that can be in both VFR and IMC. You might be showing up on ATC radar, but then again if you are creeping between your two favourite hills, then maybe you won't be seen and then its between you and something travelling at three times your speed that get's a last minute warning.

By all means people should look at how many people have been killed because they couldn't get clearance through these zones, but also realise that these are PICs who have a legal obligation not just to avoid them, but not to plan unsafe flights full stop. That will disqualify most of that group.

If you are going to be accurate you will also collect the data on how many people were killed because someone illegally flew into one of those zones.

Then you will look at the incursions listed in the ATSB reports and see how many near misses there were.

Then you could look at, say Coffs Harbour Airport being shifted inland to free up the VFR coastal route.

And so on.

If you're going to make a submission it needs to be credible.

6 hours ago, Clark01 said:

Can you give me any specifics on the compressed approach you took? How long were the two periods, how many hrs/day, and who'd you do it with? I'm unsure if there will be many Australian flight schools open to the idea, or who run such courses with a private focus (as opposed to a CPL-aimed route).

The advantage of a compressed class is if it's at a city airport you will come out red hot on radio procedures, will be able to seamlessly enter and fit into any circuit traffic, and will know a lot of theory (90% of which you've never tried to do in real life yet).

This can lead later to an example like this one. 

Three Indian students celebrated their compressed PPL course success by deciding to fly to Sydney.

A property owner noticed their Cessna 172 in a paddock and drive down to see if any help was needed.

The students said they didn't need any help, they'd become lost (all electronic gear) and had just landed to work out where they were, and were about to depart.

The property owner, who was also a pilot said "You're going nowhere, hop in and I'll take you into town and book you into a Motel"

The Indian dignity kicked in and they asked why.

He said "You hit my fence when you were landing, and there's about a hundred metres of wire wrapped around the landing gear."

The disadvantages are that  your compressed training will be throughout a common weather pattern, usually calm and cool weather.

You may be warned not to take the aircraft up on days over 35 degrees, and you may remember it, but nothing beats a demonstration about how saggy the aircraft handling has become on a hot day, what the thermals do to your self confidence, and as a result how well you comply with that Instructor warning for the rest of your life.

The only way I got to do crosswind practice was to request clearance to use a non-duty runway in heavy traffic (which was most of the lesson value) and handle a strong, but steady crosswind. Since the crosswind was a couple of knots above the aircraft maximum and I handled three circuits of touch and goes, that's all the crosswind landing instruction I received.  A few years later on a narrow coastal strip with gusts buffetting sideways with the strength to throw me out of the seat into the harness I actually learnt about crosswind landing.

With the non-compressed standard training, with luck you will arrive early one morning to find the wings iced up and be given a rag and a lecture on how the aircraft is not going to lift off properly until the ice has gone.

Or days when there is fog around, and you are taught to wait for it to burn off, and not be like the guy who waited until they could see all round the airport then took off, up through the fog layer which extended to the horizon, except for a tiny section of freeway under construction which he used to land on.

And you miss all the different nuances from different Instructor's experience, from finding that the last one which you just did 30 hours with had taught you a lot of bad habits, to that lifetime experience where a good one taught you how to convert a potential emergency into a sigh of relief.

So there are pluses and minuses - compressed will cost you less.

However, you said you were taking your wife with you on cross-country trips, and the extra cost of lessons spread out is not as great as re-learning after starting on RA.

6 hours ago, Clark01 said:

I appreciate I likely have little choice with the type and age of aircraft I'll learn in. But its a bit like my daughter signing up for driving lessons, and an instructor turning up in a 1960s Holden with a three-speed non-synchro manual transmission, choke, and single-speed wipers.  "You gotta learn how to handle a real gearbox and engine, and drive to the conditions".. Well, no. We reduced task loading and made things safer with the tech. If I wanted to learn on a vintage aircraft, and enjoy that experience for what it is, awesome. I like old cars.

But to reduce the risk issues discussed in this thread, I'd prefer to take advantage of technology for most of my time. If it was possible. 

Interesting that this subject continues to roll on and on when the majority of training aircraft in Australia may well be less than five years old.

Certainly that may not be true for country airstrips where there may be an old faithful 172 with another decade still left in it.

However, you make your own decision these days. It's been a few years since I bothered to do a financial analysis, but on the last one I did when a brand new Cessna Skyhawk with electronics cost $330,000.00, the trailing cost per hour vs the income level compared to about 1979 were roughly about the same - out of the reach of wage earners, just nose above water for people on a higher salary.

Having said that - you've gone away from your original goal of taking the wife on cross-country flights with that line of thinking, because your training should be on the cross-country aircraft types you will need to hire for cross country and there won't be any toys in that lot

In terms of risk reduction, cross country flying is a lot different to cruising around your home strip, going for a short haul to a breakfast, going to a fly in in your State.

I'd suggest technology, given two well-maintained aircraft being compared is not the primary rish measure for cross-country flying.

Of far greater importance is P&O because that decides if you're going to have a fuel exhaustion four hours later, and that included W&B which decides whether you're going to dump the aircraft on its tail shortly after take off. It includes the ability of the radios to communicate clearly when you need to do an airborne amendment to flight plan to get between two storm cells neither of which you were aware of in your home State when you took off. This sort of realisation of what flying is all about comes with your training experience.

36 minutes ago, facthunter said:

Is THAT the incidence of it.?  I have no references. Nev

1200 fatalities in 1 billion road missions  =  1 in 833,333 missions

 3500 RA aircraft 200,000 hours per year (Source RAA)

Average 10 fatalities in 200,000 hours/yr = 1 in 20,000 missions

RA:  1 in 20,000 vs 1 in 933,333 = 40 times the risk compared to cars.

.........adoring.

”Lock us up!, Lock us up!, Lock us up! chanted the population hoping that no one would ever have to go to work again or .....

.....a piston is likely to come flying out of the block.   

Round and round they went, sometimes just a pair of shadows as the completed the intricate formation flying to roll around the tramwires at intersections.

Vicpol had seen them of course and knew Turbo's aircraft well so decided just to observe. A lot of money changed hands onwho was going to throw the first rod.

Unfortuately some busybody journalist had phone the Chief Commissioner and he ordered  ViCPol SWAT One to intervene. This was the mobile SWAT Command aircraft, an old 1979 Blackhawk bought from US Afghan forces. Most of the police commands were "GET ME OUT OF THIS POS" but we'll leave that story for another day. Just as Turbo rolled under the tram wires and bull rolled over the same wire .........

50 minutes ago, facthunter said:

With Flying , the risk factor is very much in your hands if you are operating the aircraft.

That really sums it up.

If you want to be part of the high risk profile that both GA and RA have, just approach flying as you do car driving or most other things.

On the other hand there are thousands of pilots who grasp what FH has said have flown all their lives and never damaged an aircraft.

If you prepare for the flight, check the aircraft, fly the aircraft avoiding all the repetitive causes of accidents, flying goes from dangerous to safe.

If you want to go cross country with your wife and a reasonable amount of baggage, go PPL.

Don't get caught up in "technology" vacuum-gyro instruments are accurate and usually you have the added benefit of a Directional Gyroscope which makes it easier to follow a heading than a swinging compass, or follow an ATC Heading construction, and Vertical Speed Indicator which gives an earlier warning of the slightest deviation in altitude, good for crowded circuits.

If you want to go outback it's a smaller step to find an aircraft with HF etc.

If you must have electronics, find a flying school using new aircraft.

We've been through the RA to RPC then PPL route on this site many times, and sometimes, in theory, it shows a lower cost than PPL from day 1.

However, people don't usually factor in the extra hours of training you will need to get up to speed because RA training right from the start has less in it, so in effect you'll have to "double fly" some of the course.

Most importantly, you will spend more flying hours becoming proficient in RA than you would to the equivalent point in PPL. The low inertia/low wing load aircraft are blown around much more that the higher inertia GA aircraft, and while the throwaway line is "if you can fly a XXX, you can fly anything", you don't want to be spending $10,000.00 perfecting landings in an RA aircraft when you are never going to experience the same handling challenges in a GA aircraft; for cross country flying the three  things you really want to be on top of are P&O (Performance and Operations), MET (Meteorology) and NAV (Navigation) and that's the best place to spend that $10,000.00.

Where’s Willy?; where’s the respect?

You are being given the chance to submit your first hand experience and opinions. No point telling us such as in the past where people have commented to each other months after the comment period closed, but didn’t bother to submit a comment.

......cement his chain of $2 dollar shops called Pudgy Panda after bull before his makeover (Astute NESers will have noticed St Bull weaving a photo of himself (plastered on one of his stores in the last photo.) into the story for advertising purposes, and they needed the publicity with Victorians suggesting they should have been called 50 cent stores because ................

Centrifugal pumps do my head in at times; you go right through the system again and again and then finally find a small piece of grass is creating ir pockets.

16 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Thanks Ibob, I finally found  Drela's paper and followed the argument through. While it still seems counter-intuitive, I am forced to accept the logic.

Well I have an electric bike and this can of course be powered by wind energy and go faster than the wind, but this is not counter-intuitive for me.

 

In that case a huge wind farm produces the power to charge a big battery which drives a small motor for a finite time.

That's a huge energy source for a little job that can't continue indefinitely.

So I agree; easy to understand.

An electric bike carrying a battery plus a generation system small enough to be a sub component of the bike is a different story.

From the power output of the wind generation system you have to deduct gearing resistance, rolling resistence of the tyres, surface coefficient (concrete or sand or mud .gravel etc), Startability resistance, Gradability resistence (unless the trial was on level ground), wind resistence (which increases with frontal area including the prop diameter, and the prop resistance calculations, and exponentially increases with speed.

Not so hard to understand that on level concrete is it slowly going to come to a stop, on an upgrade its going to stop then run backwards, and on a downslope, well bugger me its going to get fater and faster.

I agree with you on the mercury balance, but civil engineers would probably understand that.  I have difficulty comprehending force reactions, such as why if you bury a paper thin culvert pipe the reactive forces from the soil allow it to carry an axle group of 30 tonnes, or how a keystone in a flimsy arch will still hold up a huge cathedral.

31 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Getting back to incident reports...  Why would you self-incriminate yourself by making one? I understand why they all say that you will not be victimized, but they have a record of being untrustworthy.

Not that I've seen going way back to the Air Safety Digest days where there was usually a story evry issue, just to make the point, and not according to the formal processes. However there are PLENTY of "I was innocent and the bastsards just picked on me" stories, some including self-incrimination.

2 hours ago, facthunter said:

If you hit a dust devil you'll probably want to  give up flying.. Nev

You've brought up dust devils a lot over the years. How many have you been caught in?

.....    Insinuation that.....

.........,for a fee, concoct spells and Point the Bone (not the Bowen bone) at particular CASA devils who may have charged them with aerobatics, FNQ beach beatups (with the added excitement of seeing how high a sleeping croc can jump), failure to carry navigation equipment, not having any fuel, carrying more than one passenger (seven in one case), and failing to attempt to make an aircraft fly [multi-avrefs]. That RA owners, builders, drivers and supplier Bunnings could go this far caused ....................

Captain Cook Treasures Inc. (by appointment to the Queen) whose invoice stated 12,000 14 carat gold medallions..........

...And so it became popular to place a Saint Turbo medal on your instrument panel for good luck. In developing the medals Turbo had consulted a bookmaker who told him the odds of retiring unscathed from RA flying were about three out of five, and that was good enough for Turbo. The two that didn't make it couldn't ask for their money back anyway and the other three would go forth swearing that Saint Turbo kept them safe, and ...........