turboplanner

1 hour ago, Munger said:

I would love to have your confidence in the process. So far, we have had one noise winger stir up the councilors (green/labor) and they voted to change the landing fee structure to our disadvantage (admitting it was a plot to lower traffic numbers) and pass a motion to review the airport....all without consultation of the stake holder. When the most active flying school on the field then tried to reason with them, he was told that his own figures are wrong, after a closed session workshop.....and we are also getting the 'we are developing an airport master plan'.

 

To me, that is a row of BIG red flags that something is seriously wrong...

 

 

I think the problem is no one has started the process. I gave you the information on how to go about it, but I'm not getting any vibes that the aviation community is getting engaged.

1 minute ago, Munger said:

Very good point. The wording of contentious issue documents has to be carefully considered. I am not sure that this was done by the council officer who published it. I will get in touch with the airport co-coordinator and suggest an amendment.

It needs a complete review and rewrite, but also you have to do that strategically, because people being people, your own people may well have been giving copies out without reading the contents. 

4 minutes ago, Munger said:

Totally agree: Been flying for more than 30 years and even had noise complaints while flying a paraglider (glider, not motor)....there is always ONE! Problem is that with social media, that ONE now has the power to bully the many....

Not if your Planning status is correct; they can kick and squeal and you don't have to do anything but operate because you have the Zoning to do so.

5 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

Noise is ALWAYS and issue for airports and airstrips. Even a private strip with one or two flights a week can attract noise complaints. You have to anticipate this and actively manage to minimise noise.

What are the aircraft noise levels along Rawson Pl and Kyneton-Metcalfe Rd?

2 hours ago, Munger said:

Thanks Turboplanner. I thought you may have some secrete squirrel sites 🙂

 

 I found the meeting of the 8th June , but did not find that reference. How did you find that?

 

While browsing through our councils expansive list of documents, I came across this 'Fly-Neighbourly-Guideline' (see attached PDF).

 

Fly-Neighbourly-Guideline.pdf 200.27 kB · 4 downloads

Where a Guideline like this fits into the Lismore Planning Scheme as as a Condition of Operation.

So if it isn't in the Planning Scheme now and someone wanted to come up with an Amendment to the Zoning and within that to require an Airport Master Plan, they might include the Fly Neigbourly Guideline as a Condition.

Planning always consists of a hierarchy of the vision for the area, then things that are desirable then things that aren't but might get up after some consultation then things that are prohibited.

Just because Kingsford Smith has a Master Plan doesn't mean that Lismore needs one, so that's the first thing to sort out, if it comes up and there are many reasons not to have one at a small airport.

Then to the "Fly Neighbourly Guideline":

1. Why does it say "Noise is an issue for airports?"

    It might be at Kingsford Smith, and it might be where there are heavy RPT eoperations, but it might not be at Lismore.

    Do we know? No we don't because no one yet has got off his bum and bought a noise meter.

    That could be a very expensive mistake.

2. There are other points which are anti-training.

This is not a good Guide at all  for the survival of training facilities long term, and can be brought out and used against you simply because its a Guide which exists and you're standing in the room without a document in your hand.

So, more work to be done now rather than later.

1 hour ago, aro said:

Australia's vaccination rates are amongst the worst in the world. I do not agree that Australia is getting the best results.

 

Our success more broadly has been due to people who stepped up and took action despite the risks, rather than those who would do nothing lest they be held responsible.

Our objective is to minimise mortality, minimise the number of family members lost to the pandemic.

Australia adopted a policy of separation and contact tracing.

UK, USA couldn't get their populations to separate so they adopted vaccination as their primary policy.

The results as of June 30 were:

Australia 44th out of 174 countries

USA 159th

UK 160th

You don't need to be Einstein to work out which method was more successful.

We are now rolling out vaccinations as a secondary, exponential, policy which will make us even safer.

From a rollout start in March compared to USA and UK is not valid but that hasn't stopped people from making the apples vs pears comparison on vaccination rates.

Australia's nett mortality advantage per 100,000 people is still about the same on last night's world mortality figures by countries, so we are still light years ahead in terms of protecting families.

Maybe some people stepped up and took risks, maybe some didn't, maybe some people separated when they were asked to, maybe some didn't. Regardless, we have the overall result in black and white.

59 minutes ago, aro said:

I'm not denying that, my question was whether it produces the best result?

In the short term Australia's current results are giving you the answer which is yes it does.

For the broader terms there are plenty of ABS statistics you can pull up to give you answers in various fields.

9 minutes ago, aro said:

According to GPs, the government announced they would indemnify GPs but have done nothing to put that into effect. There are GPs that will give under 60s AZ because they believe it is the best balance of risks despite the potential liability, and there are GPs that will not.

a) The public is not likely so see any details of the indemnification until the legislaton is passed.

(b) The reference to GPs was mainly to allow vaccination centres public and private to operate with indemnity - it's a non-issue.

9 minutes ago, aro said:

 

But here is a public liability conundrum: You can give people a vaccine and perhaps become liable for the 1 in a million people who dies, or do nothing and (legally) bear no responsibility for the 1 in ~300 people who dies as a result.

 

Does our system produce the best result?

This is also routine, and like the Murray River diving case. The Murray River has flowed for thousands of years and people who want to be free can swim and drown in it, but when a Council developed a section and promoted it for swimming they attracted a duty of care.

If you stick someting in someone's arm you have a duty of care; informed consent is a routine process.

2 minutes ago, aro said:

AZ is the vaccine we have, but the government don't want to be blamed if people get blood clots so they told people to get advice from their GPs. The GPs aren't happy because they don't want to be blamed either, and anyway their ethical obligation is more to the patient in front of them at the time rather than the population as a whole.

 

On this site we have discussed public liability and duty of care many times, including the necessity to issue a warning if there is a risk (data plaques on RA aircraft). What happened with Astrazeneca is that when blood clotting emerged there were zero cases of people over 60 getting clots, so the Health Departments took the precaution of limiting AZ to over-60s (duty of care action). As it emerged that the side effect of clotting was minute by the standards we accept the Departments released it to younger and younger age groups, and the Commonwealth Government opted to accept the Public Liability Risk, and exonerate vaccinators from lawsuits, provided the customer/patient received medical advice (the warning plate of the dash) from a qualified person (GP) before being vaccinated. Just routine risk management.

 

Just did a quick check this morning on the latest:

Victoria’s control rings have been possible due to the software bought last year which is giving us contact tracing on steroids compared to 2020.

The Queensland contact tracers have done brilliant work identifying movements by school children where a family cluster may have a young child attending a common primary school with other families, an older boy going to a boy’s school in another suburb, an older girl going to

a different suburb, which shopping centres they congregate in with friends, which sporting teams they play with and congregate with, which allows them a much faster ability to identify where outbreaks are likely to spread before they do.

The Australian totals include the 820 people who died in aged care facilities, where legal action is currently in progress.

The Australian TGA has just announced that the Moderna Vaccine is likely to be approved soon.

The Leader of the Opposition in Japan says Japan should adopt Australia’s Covid-19 strategies.

Australia has achieved its results primarily by contact tracing and lockdowns, relying on vaccines as a secondary reduction.

The UK and USA have not been able to use contact tracing and lockdowns successfully so are reliant on vaccines.

This gives Australia a further advantage should new mutations of C-19 emerge

......three months by which time $56.23 had been raised and it was decided ...........

.......a long time coming because OT's planning was tainted by OT's need to drink a pint of apple cider for every thought, and only one out of then of those was a workable one. West Australian NES readers will remember his homebuilt aircraft which took 17 years to complete, where he'd fitted a Jabiru engine in pusher configuration. First time it started it cut the fuselage off behind the engine, and the other .......................

16 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I was impressed that AZ was $4 a shot and Pfizer was $40. This was because pfizer was making billions from the stuff but AZ was not.

Personally, I want rewards for people who have had the shots, like exemptions from lockdowns. 

They'll probably leave you till last, and if you survive six burly guards will come along, sit on you and a great big Russian woman will bring her arm back then throw the syringe into your arm up to the hilt, then realise she forgot to put any vaccine in it, so it will all start again, then you'll remember you are allergic to peppers, and they'll try to get the vaccine out of you again.

57 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

Maybe you could. But at that time, I couldn't. Neither could any of my 4 extended families members, due to lack of supply available.

Yet all the while, SFM and premiers are constantly telling public to rush out and get their vaccine. Yes, it's true that availability has improved a lot recently, but there is a lot of urgent reallocating going on, that has caused cancellation of vaccinations that had been arranged last fortnight. That indicates that we still don't have enough available for everyone to simply line up and get a jab.

Problem is now you're competing with about 19 million others who were leaving vaccination centres empty a couple of months ago.

3 hours ago, Munger said:

..that will be interesting!

 

Can I ask how you tracked down that info so quickly?

 

 

Googled Development Applications + Lismore to see if there was anything current; it came up on google.

This also came up, you should be watching the council site weekly for DAs or Amendments open for public comment: https://tracker.lismore.nsw.gov.au/Home/Index

.......deliver?"

"Where do you want it delivered?" asked OT.

"Tasmania" replied Turbo.

A deal was struck in Quokka eggs which can be frozen and are delicious in summer salads and quite expensive, and OT headed back to the airfield. At the airfield was not Turbo, but Epaulette, jumping up and down in that expectant little way when he's about to rip you a new one.

"There was no good morning and welcome to Tasmania, home of the free" just a quick. "Do you think that's airworthy?"

OT thought it was a joke because he was always doing things like that; replacing the Harley seat with the top of a bar stool, installing a toilet window in the rear of his car, and many pieces of farm machinery in the west where the original maker would be turning in his grave,  for example his 350 hp Versatile was fine for broadacre farming but he wanted much widers scarifiers and drills so he turfed the egine out and fitted a marine diesel that used to drive the Grong Grong Power Station in NSW; the old Chamberlain would do 70 mph on the flat at 950 rpm now.

OT had the magic touch, because everything he built, as odd as it looked, worked, and that's where he made his mistake, He came back at Epaulette with "Why do you want to know,......Admiral, and that's when .................................

2 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I just re-read Munger's post and it appears that the figure is more refined since my time...  gosh, 40,000 times the damage... I have seen a big transport truck tearing up a country road near Narromine. It was just after a heavy thunderstorm and the edges of the road were soft and the big tyres were punching through.

or another one. "One Semi trailer pass is equivalent to 10,000 car passes.

Australia doesn't have the short travel distances of Europe or the eastern USA, so for all but a few roads we can't afford a concrete road.

Our engineers cleverly designed roads with flexible pavement, so while there may be some very heavy point loads, they are moving at cruise speed, and the pavement flexes down to take the load  and comes back up again. This same principle was used in WW2 in north Africa with some pavement-over-sand roads requiring the Army trucks to keep going at a minimum 40 mph to avoid wrecking the road.

These rules of thumb don't mean much, because there are many other ways a flexible pavement can deteriorate, the biggest one being the road base becoming waterlogged through cracks or potholes at the side. What we do have in Australis is a very complex "Bridge Formula" where trucks must be built so only one axle group (single, tandem tri etc) can be on one bridge span at a time, and that creates some of the odd appearances of bigger semi trailers.)

However, none of that is really applicable to RA or GA aircraft because in some cases we have concrete runways, and on others, most aircraft would be under the 4.5 tonnes Gross Mass which triggers the need for a truck licence, so minimal damage to a flexible pavement, and not much damage even on a grass strip.

I'm more inclined to think the Landing Fees are to cover rates, power, lights, security, mowing, cleaning etc.

The current method of applying the fees by radio transmissions, CCTV etc seems to work, so I don't see a problem when you are visiting another field that a fee is triggered for that landing and takeoff.

Where it starts to become unfair if for training, where a student might be asked to pay ten fees for touch and go circuits.

Training is the boilerhouse of the airfield;it usually produces the activity which attracts new entrants off the road, and it usually compound the number of students supporting the Flying School because they go out and promote it, talk their friends into flying etc.

The model I would use for circuit training is no fee, to encourage the airfield to grow. It would be interesting for flying schools who have detailed known cost centres to crunch the numbers and see what affect this would have on the Council income, and at the same time look at policy changes which would make the Flyinf School more viable.

..........borrowed and old FC from an Aboriginal tribe and drove to Launceston where..............

36 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

My rant....

Our federal government seems to have failed us. Early on they assured us that they had "secured" millions more doses of vaccines than we needed. We all thought that our government had got us the vaccines.

Now we find that they played us.

So far there hasn't been a politician brave enough to tell us:-

 

 

The Prime Minister told us around April last year that orders had been placed for Pfizer, AstraZeneca and I think a third brand for about three times the size of our population. At that time no vaccines had been developed, so as much as that seemed expensive, it allowed for some development failures, and TGA problems. At that time he estimated from Manufacturers advice, and the advice of the TGA who required a full test programme, that the rollout in Australia would start in March this year.

The rollout started in March:

I had my first AZ vaccination on March 31, waited the 12 weeks and had the second one on June 23, but noticed a lot of people weren't bothering to vaccinate.

So you could have had a vaccination right on the original timeline if you'd booked in like I did.

18 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

My rant....

Our federal government seems to have failed us. Early on they assured us that they had "secured" millions more doses of vaccines than we needed. We all thought that our government had got us the vaccines.

 

Now we find that they played us.

 

"Secured" didn't mean those doses were on their way, didn't mean we had a delivery date, didn't even mean they exist.

 

So far there hasn't been a politician brave enough to tell us:-

 

"This virus is here to stay. Forever. As such we can expect everyone to come in contact with it sometime in your life. Each of us can take the significant chance of serious illness causing permanent damage (or death). Or we can choose to have a vaccine that has been shown to massively reduce the effects of covid-19 when we catch it."

 

So far, the PR has tried to make out that covid is just a passing thing that will go away after a couple of annoying lockdowns. And that's just not true.

 

(Responses on the 'Off Topic" forum please)

....  been telling a goup of backpackers how he walked the Tanami track, eating lizards and blowflies, and .....

......World Championships"

"You shouldn't listen to OT's rumours" said Turbo, "you'll go blind" and he opened the door a bit wider, which removed no doubt that OT was terribly wrong.

Cappy, now embarrassed headed for the bar where OT was ..............

9 hours ago, Munger said:

Really? We had the rescue helicopter move to the airport and have a landing pad up on the hospital roof...

There was a 2020 DA for the Rescue Base in South Lismore, and an Agreement discussed at the Council Meeting June 8, 2021 for operations, which discussed issues of noise, cultural Heritage and Licence Fee. There appears to have been an agreement to operate in the "Noise Abatement Zone"  (below cliff level).

Whatever was going on there could be useful information of what was at stake and how it was handled.

8 minutes ago, Old Koreelah said:

I wouldn’t be surprised if the worst noise is from a minority of aircraft; addressing that might be a good fall-back position to have. Maybe they could be satisfied with a medium-term plan to replace a noisy aircraft 

I suspect the worst offenders are GA aircraft with metal props, and not easily modified. Perhaps they are nearing their replacement date.

I’ve seen footage of a Cessna flying in Europe with an ugly car-type muffler slung under the belly.

The first thing to find out is if there is a noise problem, which is why I recommended measuring it.   A new helicopter pad is just being installed in Lismore closer to the town than the airport.

There is very little coming to light on what happens at Lismore, other than the issue might revolve around training aircraft and GA training aircraft are among the quietest.

18 minutes ago, Munger said:

Well, we have been to a councilor briefing before a closed session on fees and we got this response from one from the councilors 'on our side':

 

"I think you got some sense of the views of a couple of councillors with the questions asked of you and the other speakers. There is much empathy with the residents affected by the noise of the touch and go and circuit training and I believe some want the airport closed as aviation is a significant user of fossil fuels. Staff presented an assessment of the effects of the increased fees on yourself and some other (deidentified) users. While we disagree with you on the extent of the increased cost to your business, we all agree that it is a significant rise."

 

...to break it down: Izaac presented a spreadsheet with the inclusion of the new costs for his business and the councilors told him that he doesn't know what he is talking about....BUT the one out of the blue for us, was the closure of the airport due to aviation being a 'significant fossil fuels' user! That is a new one I have not come across in my 30years of aviation addiction!

 

Anyone else come up against something like this?

My take from what you said is that:

(a) The Councillors who will vote to curtail the airport appear to be in a majority; you can fix this by giving them better information on sound planning grounds (not emotional statements which carry no planning weight and will be dismissed by both Council and NCAT)

(b) You will likely have to fix it at NCAT and need to start now

(c) There are people on aviation sites arguing regularly for the end of fossil fuels, and you can expect the other side to be quoting them. Is "significant user of fossil fuels true in the case of Lismore, or could you do the rounds of the fuel distributors and find that aviation use in Lismore was 1% of motor vehicles. You can't win these arguments sitting on your bum. If you can neutralise that at the Council level, good, but at NCAT that's not a Planning Issue. 

(d) If the term "touch and go" was used by Councillors, you probably have some enemies within working against you, so you need to sort that out now. Wouldn't be the first time a competitor was using the council to squeeze out a rival.  Other than that you should already have demonstrated that the airport requires a certain level of noise to operate, and the level is reasonable. Here's the link to the noise allowed on a road https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/vehicles/design/adr_online.aspx. Get yourslef a cheap noise meter and stand beside the road and measure the noise coming from the passing cars and tracks and the noise comiong from the aircraft and compare both to ADR28. That will tell you whether you have a problem or not.

Noise comes under the heading of Amenity, and usually at an Administrative Tribunal Amenity doesn't carry a lot of weight because people get into the emotional impact and no facts are presented for a Member to use. This way ou can make a sound submission to the wavering Councillors, and in NCAT you can hire a Noise Consultant as an expert witness and blow them out of the water, if the testing shows the noise level doesn't increase above the road level.