turboplanner

3 minutes ago, jackc said:

Only if people do not take responsibility, by wearing masks, carrying sanitiser, observe social distancing and avoid places where people gather and crowds.

We have no contact groceries delivery, we don’t go to parties, restaurants. 

The Govt can’t fix it all……a lot of it is up to us as individuals.

The people who are vaccinated will no longer have to worry about wearning masks, sanitiser, social distancing, and Australians being Australians will be filling the coffee shops and pubs and partying, giving an even spread throughout the community.Pick up a petrol pump handle, chances are it will be Covid coated, pick up some parts and somone will sneeze.

Just now, SGM said:

The observation is that multiple Victorian training aircraft are in inflight in Victoria, right now, including the one from a major university (an organsiation that you would expect would take a conservative view).  Is there a "recreational flying" guidance / exemption / "understanding" that anyone has come across.

No, Moorabbin Airport Training Area driven by around 280,000 movements in a normal year has been deserted in the Melbourne lockdowns and comes to life when they end. The area buzzes with R22s the recreational Rotax and Jab powered units are busy training and GA aircraft as well. When the lockdown starts the traffic stops and the only ones flying are Commercial flights to Gippsland and Tasmania.

6 minutes ago, Flightrite said:

Found this on another forum, so true!:-)

Didn't take long; the whistling past the graveyard has started as we head for the pandemic of the unvaccinated.

........a beast [Col Blimp ref] because his behaviour when ...............

8 hours ago, skippydiesel said:

 What I dont get is that the manual variants are not available here but then that skill is slowly being lost anyhow.

It's a Millenial thing Skippy. 

I took a lot of Jackaroos off road and into the outback and found the auto had a few advantages; you can creep forward and scrape the transmission over a rock, and you don't get caught as often in a gear where you are losing torque, and with Torque converter lock up you've got 24 to 32 ratios for soft tracks.

8 hours ago, skippydiesel said:

Well Turbs me old mate... Yes there is the "look at me crowd" who want a  a big flashy US derived tug and then there are the majority of recreational people who only tow  2  - 3 tonne. For nearly 30 years or so, I pulled a double horse float, with 2  x 16hh lumps of geegee on board (say 2 + tonne all up ), with a Daihatsu Rocky 2.8 turbo diesel, 5 speed. Good for 110 kph (maxed out) on the freeway, bit slow on the longer, steeper hills but got there. Never a problem - great little truck.

Well the Australian market leader of all cars is the Toyota Hilux, and that class will tow up to about 2.5 tonnes legally the way Australia tows.

Above that is where the problems are.

Your Rock had the gearbox for startability and gradability with the horse float but you must have had Jesus with you in terms of braking and suspension capacity.

However, there are other markets not being served; the bigger, luxury car market is one, albeit a much smaller segment.

8 hours ago, skippydiesel said:

The tradies & a few recreators, who want bigger pay load , mainly go for the small Japanese trucks and many of them can easily sit on 110 kph . If they have a US ute, its for driving round (without a load) to "big note" themselves.

Some tradies do that, but others tow 2.5 metre wide tandem and tri trailers with materials,equipmment, machines etc so they are looking for more GCM without going to trucks either becaise they use them as family cars, or they need low floor level.

This is the tear jerker market sector because the ones that don't buy trucks don't usually get what they want.

For example, The Ram 1500 Laramie GCM of 7,713 kg in theory allows a 4,871 kg trailer/load, but that's only if the trailer is a 4 wheeler with turntable and A frame.

When you load the Laramie with driver and fuel you can impose a load of just 608 kg, add 1 adult passenger in front and three in the back and you have 248 kg for cargo but nothing available to tow with an Australian caravan, trailer which requires 10% of its gross on the tow bar for stability.

If you keep the passengers and put your cargo in the trailer you'll be legal with a trailer/load of around 2.5 tonnes, hence the tears from the people who just looked at the bigger vehicle and thought it would tow a bigger trailer.

8 hours ago, skippydiesel said:

 

Another point  Rams, in RHD, were/are made that way in Mexico - not conversions, as erlier imports were. The 6.7 turbo diesel with up to 9 tonne towing capacity (overseas) was the pick. Not sure if this is still coming into Au.

Chrysler sold The RAM which is no longer branded Dodge. It's imported as LHD by Ram Trucks Australia and "manufactured to RHD" here.

Interestingly, they've sold 10,000 here, so grabbed a decent market slice.

8 hours ago, skippydiesel said:

 

 

 

 

 What I dont get is that the manual variants are not available here but then that skill is slowly being lost anyhow.

 

..........aimed at the two Flight Plans of Two Tracks, and ...........SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS......of the more elusive members of the flying fraternity, No Tracks who was a half brother of OT conceived under a wing at the Birdsville Races. No tracks had a particular habit of phoneing one track to tell him Two tracks was picking on Half track who was .....................

........on the two Flight Plans [double avref] expanded all round CASA [1100 avrefs] as a shing example of CYA, which they were expert in.  His reason had two paths [avref], one [radioavref]...................

1 minute ago, red750 said:

https://au.yahoo.com/news/dad-of-four-30-who-organised-anti-covid-rally-dies-from-virus-054746631.html

There was another one of those in the US.

Daniel Andrews went into a lot of detail today about the pathway to get back to a more normal life without lockdownsand after the press had asked many questions about the plan for the States to come out of lockdowns at 80% vaccination or whatever is decided.

He put it this way:

"At the present time we're locking down to prevent our hospitals being overrun by Covid cases.When we reach about 80%, the hospitals will no longer be in a position where they are overrun, because there will only be a small pool of unvaccinated people left.

We will then move to a much smaller Pandemic of the unvaccinated  where no matter what happens we will have enough hospital capacity to treat the people who get sick."

54 minutes ago, jackc said:

IF my PPL or RPC was suspended, I would just fly under the radar and I bet a whole lot of others would, too.  A CPL is a different deal.

When you post ridiculous stuff like that you bring RA into disrepute.  There was a case a few years ago of someone doing just that. It resulted in an audit of every RA aircraft in Australia and as a result of that audit there were aircraft that never flew again. You've said this several times, and none of us want to go there.

54 minutes ago, jackc said:

Does CASA alert every airfield in the country of your suspension? 

Check the historical data and see who got caught and see what it cost them.

54 minutes ago, jackc said:

A breach of a Covid health directive has no bearing on your ability to fly, medically or otherwise.   And, would the RAA want to weigh in on this, too?

You're trying to link a Police fine to a CASA sanction to a possible RAA sanction. That wasn't done in the jockey incident, and not likely to happen so why try to invent something?

14 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Turbs, I really object to the term " CASA's airspace " . As a citizen of Australia, it is MY airspace.

Your airspace is under 300 feet, although some of that is now controlled too.

The rest is designated by regulation and CASA is required to ensure safety, so in that context it's CASA airspace.

You fly your Jabiru only by exemption from some safety rules because of where RA operate, light weight and low stall speed etc.

4 minutes ago, Old Koreelah said:

You’ve just confirmed my fears about our leaders’ lack of vision.

They do what they can. I participated in some Vicroads forecasting of the use of our road reservations which look 50 years ahead.

This week I posted Victoria's plans out to 2050 on this site

In 1979 we were rudely interrupted by the Fuel crisis. Some manufacturers made decisions that all but put them out of business; others went into profits of hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the case numbers in NSW, a Sydney nurse commented that every day now was like New Year's Eve. The hospitals are close to capacity.

1 minute ago, jackc said:

Well, it IS a scheme against people AFTER they have been fined, they have paid  the penalty for breaking a health directive.  What right has the VRC to apply further penalty that has not involved any breach of rules in horse racing?

How would you feel if your PPL/CPL was suspended by CASA, because you got busted for going to an illegal fly in, in the bush and someone dobbed in all the attendees?

 

What the VRC does with its set of rules is the VRC business. You would have to ask them why they applied a suspension.

If you do something illegal in CASA's airpsace and CASA find out about it whether directly or though a complaint or though a revelation, there are provisions to suspend your licence, so nothing new there.

1 minute ago, Old Koreelah said:

Obvious trends are sometimes interrupted by something from left field.

We assume that in a decades or two humans will still be driving road vehicles.

Very true.

I did a drawing once for our legislators showing how the Australian Design Rules would lock design into the state of design for that year.

The drawing was of a horse drawn Carriage.

There was an ADR which specified the thickness and transparency of Isinglass.

The brakes, when applied with a four foot lever had to slow the carriage against a four horsepower pull by bolting horses.

The wheels had to be a minimum 2 inches wide and half an inch thick made from mild steel.

The turntable had to have steel faces to avoid a lock up.

I think I finished it with:

The dashboard must be big enough to ensure that no Horse Sh!t flies into the eyes of the driver.

33 minutes ago, jackc said:

The Jockeys breached the health directive, and were fined.  Additionally the were suspended for 3 months each?  I feel that the suspension is weak as pi$$, take away their ability to earn money:-(

 A truck driver gets done, they don’t suspend his licence? Many other instances.

The whole scheme is discriminatory and unfair….

There's no scheme in Victoria:

Police will apply an on the spot fine for breaking the law as is their power. The fine for breaching a Covid restriction is a little over $5,000.00.

In the case of the jockeys, the VRC suspended at least one for three months for a VRC offence.

Her cost of not being able to take part in the Spring Racing Carnival is several hundred thousand dollars.

That's the VRC's action and message.

The AFL have been doing the same.

11 minutes ago, SGM said:

OK so I am in Melbourne, in lockdown 6.0, and using Flightradar24 app I have observed various private aircraft flights around the state, typically without any regional landings.  I have also observed [xxx] Aviation Academy flights.  There are probably many more without ADS-B.

So I am aksing if you have any "friends" (no names) who may be keeping their skills current, and what approach they may be taking.

 

In my situation, it's my own aircraft, so zero other human contact would be required to fly it. 
 

I spoke to the nice lady on the Victorian COVID hotline, and she has approved with my travelling for more than 5km to undertake 'essential maintenance' on it.

Clearly the Government can't make rules for every situation but has done in some situations.. eg  Recreational fishing and boating this is permitted for up to two hours per day, within 5km of home and with only one other person (plus dependants if they cannot be left unattended). Face masks must be worn at all times unless a lawful exemption applies.

 

 

We went through this last year with the standards Civid and States started making lists up which proved endless and were stopped as tighter lockdowns occurred. We now know from the Contact Tracing for Delta strains that allowing people to move through the community like you suggest is resulting in spread so those things have not been resumed. Even Essential workers have to bring their lunch to work and eat it in the car.

........kept notes on the scandals of Two Tracks until one day..

56 minutes ago, KRviator said:

 "92 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19"

About 60 with sources already tracked and isolated, so no further spread

About 30 new untracked cases being worked on by the Contact Tracing Units.

The new cases have ben discovered off the back of increased testing of over 50,000 people a day for several days.

Increased testing = increased numbers - increased intel.

 

1 hour ago, waraton said:

My kids go to a regional underfunded, under staffed high school in NSW, they are currently remote online learning and have one face to face video lesson each day as part of that. The system is delivering learning here albeit (understandably) at a reduced capacity unless you ask for more which is forthcoming when requested. As I touched on in a previous post, parental involvement is very important however I am aware not possible for many for various reasons. The lessons for my kids follow the same timetable, including recess and lunch, as a normal "at school" day. 

Pleased to hear that, because all the news down here only mentioned schools closed.

I agree about the parental/carer support; it's a taxing job with Grade 3 and 4, a lot hard for High school age, because you are having to explain things you'd long since forgotten and you have to explain it fast or the kid is off onto Roblox or chatting up the girls, but very rewarding as you see the knowledge being absorbed.

This year Vic is doing the same as you are getting. One formal session per day going through the lessons. The teacher stays on the line for anyone who needs help, and has informal chat sessions at 11 am and 1 pm for the groups who don't have help in the assignments.

Last year we just had a normal curriculum with nultiple teachers and some couldn't get their systems to work, others hadn't adapted their examples to allow typing on the question papers, electronic hand ins etc.  This year it flows better.

Vic coming out on top with Naplan testing is a good indicator that the students are actually learning more, or putting nre time into the assignments, because they don't have to sit around as the teacher explains to the slower ones. Victoria doesn't usually win Naplan.

There is a lot of Behavioural Psychology built into the Victorian curriculum with a couple of days a week doing fun things which fires them all up.

.....brother known as Gascoyne Mick, quick as a flick around the town.

There was floating [avref] rumour that .........................................

32 minutes ago, Flightrite said:

Poor old Glady will get attacked over that by the indoctrinated for sure:-) The resident lunatic in Vict will go the opposite way now that the daily BS No's have exceeded 90, extending the imprisonment time & probably increase the oppression as he gets off on it!

I'm surprised you would say that because the NSW model is based on the the unvaccinated taking themselves out and freeing up the government PR budget which can then be used to get everyone back working with any new dissidents extinguished at their own cost.

Getting back to AMPERe Inc., Canada

This is the website link https://www.ampereinc.ca/

Still only renderings, but more information, some of them  right in the power to weight category for ultralights.

.......flying the rainbow coloured flag (NTTIAWWT).

OT grew up in Kalgoorlie, and it wasn't easy growing up there. His mother had a little house, but men used to walk past making lewd suggestions, and OT grew up with a chip on his shoulder and went to the thespian side, but he still did normal things. He built a Scout, borrowing a plastic chair from the local CWA rooms.It was a white one, but when he returned it may years later is showed the results of mant narrow escapes.

Not many people know that OT was the first person to fly an Ultralite from Australia to Fiji. He'd set out in a screaming westerly for New Zealand but accidentally punched in the code for Nadi. When the Fijiian natives greeted him with Bula Bula! his thespian side came out and he said "It's not Bull!" and that's when ..........

For a time Turbo, who was Aristotelian thought of wading in and helping his twop thespian friends sort it out, but the thought of more entertaining stories from these two made him .......................

3 hours ago, onetrack said:

It's not ever going to happen, not while Japan and all the former British Empire countries such as India are RHD, and not while the Australian total car market is a piddly 1M car sales annually. Even if we went LHD, our total market for vehicles sales is not even a blip on the North America-Canada-South America total market numbers.

I can recall some local farmers who bought always big in farm machinery, taking a trip to Godzone Land to view a major John Deere factory, and to impress the Yanks with the money they could splurge annually on big farm equipment.

They came back just a little bit stunned, after JD executives advised them that the whole of Australias annual JD farm tractor consumption, was less than 3 days production levels from that one JD factory.

 

The cost of Australia going LHD in the future is not something our small nation can bear, and is simply not economically justifiable or viable. We now have too many major freeways that cannot be converted to LHD operation without incurring trillions in major redesign and reconstruction.

 

https://www.drive.com.au/caradvice/what-would-change-if-australia-made-the-move-to-lhd/

 

The annual Australian purchase of Perkins 6/354 engines represented 3 hours production in one factory per year, so our orders are very small, but JIT production allows factories to produce a different specification for every vehicle on the line. However the different specification is THEIR different specification from their variants, not an Australian specification which we bought for Australia.

We've now had several decades of overseas product as base platform, such as the Opel Capitaine and the European Falcon both of which ended our preference for low window lines to reduce the sun's impact. People got used to them. As the Button plan bit and the tariffs disappeared, more and more overseas product was bought and Australian Engineering did less, but the cars have been accepted to a degree. Many people rejected the smaller cars and went to full 4x4 light commercials to tow their boats, horse floats, and caravans which often exceeded what a Statesman or LTD could tow anyway, but that segment rapidly expanded to become the top selling segment, so they rejected small bodied low power cars.

As OK mentioned, we can still get a full car range from the Japanese, but there are gaps in the market. Tradies, and people towing the recreational equipment want to two 3 to 4 tonnes and still maintain as close to 100 km/hr as they can. Some have bought imported Dodge Rams or F150s but these are really too light for the applications and there are hours of sub stories about vehicles which failed. These all have to be converted to RHD here in Australia for around $75,000.00 so only the rich can afford them. Trucks are a lower cost alternative but you have to go up to big five tonners to get an engine powerful enough to tow the weight at cruise speed. So there is a gap which could be filled by something like F350 built in the US for peanuts if we changed to LHD. That's just one example of where we are cornered with LHD. The second area is the full range of Mustangs and Camaros and Corvettes easily affordable in LHD, if we had LHD, and so it goes on, where we can't tak full advantage of what the Button plan killed our manufacturing for.

The Drive link is an outsiders look at everything.  60 RHD out of around 250 countries is a good indicator of how our supply of vehicles is limited and may be more so as more maufacturers go out of RHD production and that is the current pressure where. Navistar trucks which previously supplied bith LHD have recently ceased to make RHD for economic reasons (market too small).

I haven't studied the amount of engineering and cost to modify our road system, and you could be right in the shorter term, but I did say the next 50 years so that's 2070, and we could do it very quickly if the country needed a financial boost, where sure the road costs would be a big sum, but the incomes would take off and flow back a lot of that investment prducing more income tax etc. 

Today there are 60 countries left; if more go and more manufacturers reach the tipping point, we may have to face it anyway.

Back around 1990 I figured we could handle RHD by building SKD in Australia with plug and play packs, so the cars would be designed with mounting reiforcements and holes punched both sides, the components would all be the same and you'd just bolt the steering and pedals in the side you wanted, turn the harness upside down and you'd have RHD, but first there were the mirror angles to contend with then the headlights, then stiffening the RH platform to take the steering added more than the few cents allowed before lowering sales in the US market due to price, then the LH steering hole had to be filled in, then the RH under dash area built only strong enough to hold up a plenum chamber needed reinforcing for the upper steering bracket but ddn have the mounts for 2 plane steering wheel, then fast forward to 2021 and turning the harness upside down altered the reach of 26 different elecvtrical connectors which all had to reach their engine block destinations from the opposite side of the car, and they are the issues I can remember, so that idea is on the backburner. Maybe we could bluetooth the lot.