turboplanner

".....training for a Pilot Certificate in a Drifter." The room lapsed into a shocked silence. "Are there any Drifters flying today?" asked Salty with a puzzled expression on his face. Now Remnark has three things going against it:

1. The fies in the day and mosquitoes at night.
   
2. It's in South Australia
   
3. It's so far from civilisation that paddle steamers still bring most of the news.
   

"Yes, there are" said Turbo cautiously, expecting a raft of WF posts saying there are none, Drifter is not the correct name for the Lawson Mk II Big Wing, anyone going to the Moonta fly in and anyone know who does lash tinting in Goondiwindi. Somone even suggested phoning up the Dog Patter.

Mavis, who had been a WASP in WWII before being invalided out with dislocated hips, had ferried Hurricanes, Spitfires, Lancasters and all the other aircraft used by the RAF in WWII, dealing with forced landings caused by fuel tank breathers with pain masking top over them, through rod breakages, ring snapping and piston cracking, and now and again, bored with these transport flights would go up into the German bomber flight streams and knock out a few without saying anything to anyone and had clocked up 39 kills, one more than Johnny Johnson before her Commanding Officer ordered her to get her act together, didn't she know the aircraft were required for 5 hour pilots on the front line, men who were putting their lives together and sent her to Scotland.

Turbo had found this out one night when Mavis talked him into the magical taste of Drambuie. She had never spoken of her flying since.

So when poor innocent Salty had, through the poor education his town was famous for, had suggested that Drifters were extinct, Mavis had gone off like a packet of crackers at a Chinese Christening and ......

Photo of Drifter (Drifter is in the back ground, it's a cone in front)

........wary of putting anything down on paper” said Salty from Renmark, giving away his poor understanding of social media,”but I can talk about farming. He’s a cow and whenever......

we had 7points in the rain gauge this morning.

My USA son in law works with a decimal inch tape measure ie 10 divisions to the inch.

I can still pace an accurate yard; it a bastard now we're fencing in metric.

Yeah! but its been about 50 years since we (UK) were transitioning from Imp to M. In that time almost every manufacturing system must have been replaced/changed over multiple times.

In Australia we have a tiny market and tiny manufacturing base. We have to supply forward at that small volume, about 1 million new cars per year but we also have to market backwards to keep 20 million on the road, where expected downtime is zero

The pitch of the M6 is 0.75 mm, while that of the 1/4 UNF is 28 TPI (which works out to be 0.889 - call it 0.9 - mm).

I see you were about to write more, but so far the UNF bolt has an 18% coarser pitch. Could just be a harmonics sweet spot.

........was about to reply when the critical chain of the NES was broken by a hacker, who tipped a bucket on Bull, and dissed HiHo, who was very sensitive these days. Since Cappy would never do that, Copyright fraud is involved too because Cappy's mother had copyrighted the photo of her son at the age of 18. Form his tent at the Nhill RCamp, Turbo sent his best wished to Cappy, who was just about to ............

I stand to be corrected but it seems that most, if not all automotive brake systems are imperial, often with metric equivalent quoted - how come?

Cost to change

Anyone that tries to operate commercially on a ReOC and can remember the days before they existed will understand why it’s a bad idea to let CASA administer something that isn’t necessarily broken.....

I can understand that; it's a pretty daunting task if you just want to take a few photos of factories, but the industry didn't organise and manage itself and it was members of the public and States governments reacting to cowboys that pushed it into the hands of CASA. I'm dealing with a case now where UAVs with around 3 metres length and wingspan are able to do aerobatics up to 1000' in one of Melbourne's busiest D Zones.

The US vehicle manufacturers switched to metrics years ago; I work directly with them, and all the drawings these days are metric only with no imperial measurements other than on some subassemblies like wheel sizes, tyres and brakes where probably only a war will produce the amortisation cost factor which would allow a change.

However the peripherals, like sales people still talk imperial, so all the product literature has to be dual system, and they perpetuate the imperial freeze by talking to the customers about imperial wheelbases and horsepower because they believe that's what the customers want to hear.

In my car there is a switch, which changes all gauges to metric or imperial, whichever the driver wants.

I built my entire shed without a tape measure, just using parts of my body as measuring sticks:

Your shed is based on the biblical Cubit system then.

Many farmers do the same, and eye off the first corner post against a straight tree and the others against the fourth one.

My grandfather built shearing and hay sheds using the 3,4,5 method of achieving 90 degrees, never knowing that the Egyptians used the same method.

The Egyptians related length and width to the compass points, so incorporated the 1 in 60 component, and also proportioned the circles to fit in, but we've lost those skills now.

Alexander Thom wrote a book about the Megalithic Yard which was approximately three feet, and was duplicated in ancient sites from the south of England to the Scottish Islands.

All of these came together to make the imperial system much more elegant and related to the earth and solar system than the metric system.

It is a nightmare, all those stupid fractions. I needed a new brake line fitting & the thread is UNF.

I still use UNF bolts for race car design in critical areas because the thread locks better and stays tight better, even with a shakeprooof washer, whereas every attempt I've made at getting a metric thread to do the same jobs results in the bolts coming loose, but that's the only exception.

Seems to me the building trade & supply have never converted - even when its in M its still mostly in the old Imp dimensions

There are millions of Australians who don't care. Walk into a house with a set square and a level and start checking; they might as well be measuring in the old corn seed system.

I don't own a metric tape...I never converted...I'm dyslexic with numbers Imperial works for me metric doesn't . The bus in my avatar is 36 foot long .

Bernie .

I started forcing myself to think in metrics by holding my thumb and forefinger 50 mm apart measured by a metric only rule. After a while I could visualise 50 mm, then I could visualise 100 mm, then 10 mm then 1 mm, all using similar props to my fingers, then I learnt to visualise a metre. then, when I was aking something new around the farm I built it in metric so I didn't have to do any conversions.

Today I get stuck trying to remember whats a third of 15/16" or doing a conversion of 3'-3 9/64.

I spent a lot of time once converting 40 feet to the inch plans into 1:500. Cost our company a fortune and barely changed the plans at all.

I'm working in that right now, programming a CAD system to read data from an Excel input spreadsheet which has calculated dimensions needed for a truck to be within legal dimension and mass limits. It will be used in the US so has to read US imperial drawings with a different set of legal criteria.

As part of that I found that you can start with an imperial drawing and redraw in metric, just by adding a simple conversion chart into the spreadsheet which supplies the coordinates to the CAD drawing.

It used to take me about a week to draw a semi trailer on a drawing board; now it's possible for a drawing to be produced automatically from the calculations used for dimensions and masses.

....if we don't stick to something we don't have we can'tbe blamed for something we didn't do, and it's confusing enough that we can't be blamed for something we did do, and we can always cancel something we were going do do, or do something we weren't going to do. His admiring supporters marvelled and the skill and dexterity of Dan the Man and promised to vote for him next .......

Hi Turbs

the exciting day. I have no idea when that will be . I can problably not break the plane in smooth angel air. I learned what a baloon was yesterday when it got a bit gusty.

It is interesting how confidence with particular manouvers ebs and flows . I thought my finals were getting pretty good yesterday until the wind came up.

 

One of thing things I realised. if a cascade of things are wrong, rather than geting over focussed, stop and reset, look around, reassess your current flying parameters.

 

An over-focus on one thing will get you ignoring something else to your hazard

The ebbs and flows are normal, just your system adapting to the fact that no two circuits are exactly the same; you're flying in an ever changing air system.

With a very specialised section of aviation such as Our lot, I hope some consultation would be part of that particular field or Dog knows what weird things might happen. Nev

In self administration the people directly involved, who have laid out their money on aircraft or training can come up with benchmarks, so it's a much better way of maintaining affordable safety than prescriptive legislation was because the people making the rules usually know their business better than government employees.

However, when the industry people sit on their bums and don't manage their affairs, it's not unusual for the government to start legislating safety regulations, which was done in the transport industry around 1999.

I previously posted a number of things RAA had been asked to do in 2010 which were never done, so RAA is exposed on those.

There was one batch of regulations CASA was introducing, which was to bring us into line with ICAO, and I would consider that just confirming Industry benchmarks rather than taking over.

And while everyone is looking at lifting the saso veil and taking things back to casa I’ll throw in that casa have required a heap of admin on build and design not within their caos but brought in through the tech manual where - apparently - casa would not approve the manual without change ... lots of back door regulation by remote through the saso

While the principles are very simple, it's dangerous to just pluck a sentence or two and say this is self administration or this is not.

Just talking generally about industry, if there is an industry safety benchmark, such as an Australian Standard and you were operating to that standard, and something goes wrong then that standard may provide you with a defence. On the other hand if you weren't meeting that standard, someone might succeed if they sue you.

The same principle applies for industry benchmarks, where for example there might be accepted safe methods of using a chainsaw obtained over years of operations.

If CASA are providing a set of benchmarks they may not be prescribing what you have to do. If I'm being a bit vague it's because the discussion is also vague.

........insurmountable. There was much sucking of teeth and plenty of scrutible looks as a carpet was covered in broken thru bolts.

They just didn't know what to do until an old Engineer by the name of Ah Send looked down at the array of broken bolts and said " stamp on bolt says Bung Nin, bolts cost 1 Yuan per 1,000, what you expect?" and he fished around until he found a box of bolts, then burst out laughing........................

From a purely physics POV, I would like to have greater ratio of my own airspeed to the wind speed.

What I now realise is importance of correctly chosen over the fence speed, for the aircraft configuration.

and that you cannot , without difficulty, (at least from my POV) fly a slow airplane (say stall=27 kts) fast (say 45 kts) over the fence. It just isnt going to want to land. the thing is still producing plenty of lift and not much drag , (note : My views are inexperienced and simplistic. )

Your early lessons will show you how to get your airctraft to do what you want.

When is the exciting day?

........bunch of pricks.

In the meantime production continued with the new engines which were achieving life cycles of an exciting 4.5 hours, although there were some through bolt .............

CASA is/has done exactly that. CASR 149 requires SAAO's to submit their expositions for approval. These expositions include all their policies. RAA's recent newsletter discloses that CASA has required changes to the discipline policy. IMHO if CASA approves something, then they own it as much as the SAAO. Part 149 is really CASA regulation by proxy.

Yes, correct. I need to look at the wording, but this isn't the first time they've reassumed legal liability. When they do that there's no point in having Self Administering Organisations for whatever they've become responsible for.

..........book us for destroying an endangered species, and the RSPCA, although dog patters, are full of ex FoIs, who can sniff a Recreational Flyer from 30 Nautical Miles, and know what a pack of ......................

I have heard of aileron hinges being replaced and think this is overkill.

Look at it this way; the hinges are long, but very light construction.

When installed the accuracy required for 100% loading along the length probably isn't achievable without a mechanical installation, so the bearing surfaces are likely to be limited to a few high spots. There's nothing woring with metal to metal contact for slow and occasional use, but wear is still taking place and an aileron hinge is is constant use while flying.

If the wear reaches the point where a section of rod snaps there's potential for part of the rod to start sliding and jamming.

You are then left with whatever aileron angle it jammed at, and the secondary effects of what I considered, after my experiences, a tiny rudder.

I would be doing a programmed hinge replacement.

..........HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and ...................