turboplanner

.........a recorded message saying "Fred won't be in for a while", so.........

For those interested in following the ATSB investigation on this accident, here's the link to the Investigation Number: Investigation: AO-2020-012 - Mid-air collision involving Piper PA-44-180 Seminole, VH-JQF, and Beech D95A Travel Air, VH-AEM, near Mangalore, Victoria, on 19 February 2020

Turboplanner has made some inquiry to RAAus and it seems there is no incident reports about any of them.

Just a slight correction there; I haven't made any inquiry to RAAus, I just look at the data published by RAAus and it has been quite reliable since I first started looking at it in 2007.

.....attempted to talk his way out the embarrassing situation. Meanwhile Turbo was not slow to pick up on the potential of the gum from Eucalyptus-A, and through his subsidiary Turbine Environmental, had managed to clone some Eucalyptus-A, using the Thompson Metamorphic Ewe process. He followed the practice of the automotive industry to keep processing costs down and had the product masticated by 2,000 Pakistanis. He'd had no trouble getting labour at 57 cents per hour with 10,000 applying initially. There was an unfortunate misunderstaning in their reading of the ad, but it was all sorted out, and Turbine Environmental had just sent their first 3 tonne batch to Boeing [former avref] who, as we know, are always on the lookout for ways to reduce costs. TE was now in the process of planting 10 million cloned Eucalyptus-A trees in Pakistan, and Turbo had been honored by the President, who was now going to attend the next Paris summit not only with a Zero CO2 target for 2050, but shooting to the top of the world with a minus 30%! To celebrate this future event he called on......

Turbo thats because its all been done without reporting...being hidden from view..its a numbers game so they need to keep the recorded numbers down

 

I doubt that there are many reports on Rotax failures either...so long as a Mayday or PanPan hasnt been called and someone heard it then its pull the covers over to make sure nothing is recorded

There are two types of failures; one where there is no safety issue with the aircraft, and the other which causes a fire or a forced landing.

With a forced landing there's the possibility of it producing injuries or fatalities.

In the first category there isn't any real need for us all to know because the end problem is really a financial one between the customer and the manufacturer.

In the second one, it would be worth the people who don't report trawling through the CASA material to find the penalty for not self reporting the cause of a forced landing.

They think no one knows but reports go in from several sources including ATSB as you mentioned, the manufacturer, members of the public, and RAA.

In the same period that zero Gen 4 showed, there were 13 failures on older units, designated 2200, 2000B, 3300, 3300A, and unless any of those were GEN4, I'd thinkit was doubtful that people would be reporting the older ones but not GEN4. If any GEN4 issues were occurring which fell into the first category I mentioned, I wouldn't see that as an issue.

Do we have any numbers on gen 4 engines? How many are out there and how many have failed and at what hours?

From Nevs statement and my own experience it is clear that running the older Jab engines at higher speeds solved heating problems.

My Corby runs at anything from 50 to 100 plus knots with no overheating problems. That says to me that the jab engine problem must be due to the installation in the aircraft. I am using a modified Jab cowl and the original ducting, so I assume it would be very similar to the Jab installation.

I just checked RAA reports for the last six months and didn’t find any Gen 4 failures.

The older engine failures were intermittent so you can’t say installation is the solution; yours might just be 1 of the many destined for 1,000 hours +.

...fruits, and prone to speaking and chewing gum at the same....

.....sell them for $10,000.00 each. Now NES readers might be a little cynical about that, but in fact these sticks were made from the last gum from the Eucalyptus-A trees which have now become extinct due to Climate Change, and it just isn't possioble to get that exact taste any more. Loxie........

......member of the Firettes who had just bought an Extra to compete in aerobatic championships, and who knew plenty of sequences, but before she......

........Loxie who was dressed in Alpine leather shorts with braces, and had his hair slicked down with sewing machine oil. He knew he was guilty and panicked, bumping into.....

The CASA people involved in the Senate inquiry were the Director and the American legal expert.

This was a Senate Estimates Committee, not an Inquiry and these were the appropriate CASA people required for discussing forward estimates.

For anyone not sure of the difference between Senate Estimates and a Senate Inquiry, here are a couple of links.

They denied any knowledge of the fact the the data relied on by CASA was not right and when questioned stated that the failures attributable to fuel starvation etc had been removed from the figures. They had not.

All this had been published well before the inquiry by "Proaviation" in an article entitled "Indecent Haste" in November 2014. The facts that CASA will now tell you are different from the facts they published before they were found out. Read the article attached.

Paul Phelan story Indecent Haste 28/11/14

This story is based on the press release by Peter Gibson, Corporate Communications, CASA. He based those numbers (40>12) on what RAA provided to CASA in November 2014.

Paul Phelan was reporting what he had been given, but the figures which triggered the Instrument came from years before this.

CASA data

• CASA referred to a batch of data from 2008 onwards.
  

• In December 2013 CASA offered to send staff to RAA to extract data and RAA accepted the offer. Two CASA employees collected this data on site covering January 1, 2012 to December 16, 2013. CASA provided a copy of what they had extracted to RAA.
  

• In August 2014 CASA requested more data, and RAA supplied data to August 3, 2014
  

• On November 3, 2014 RAA supplied further data (the 40>12 batch with errors)
  

• ATSB supplied data
  
• Jabiru Aircraft Pty Ltd supplied data
  
• Aircraft Owners supplied data
  

CASA’s Safety Systems Office (SSO) assessed the data

The assessment included allowances for debatable data.

The assessment was against FAA Policy PS-ANE100-1999-0006

PS-ANE100-1999-00006 Risk Assessment for Reciprocating Engine Airworthiness Directives

I would recommend that anyone interested in the CASA Instrument read this because it takes all the politics out of what happened.

The average in-flight shutdown rate of 5.8/10,000 hours from January 2012 to July 2014 was five times the FAA benchmark.

Note that the data for this period was from the batch extracted by CASA, and the batch supplied by RAA in August 2014, not the contentious last batch on November 3, 2014.

I ran a check on RAA reports for July 2019 to the end of January 2020, and the good news is I didn't find any = ZERO Gen 4 engine incidents listed.

Interesting to see the Australian attitude on display here. Always got to put more/more severe/more training requirements on anything, compared to the country where by far most of private GA is done. No wonder CASA is like it is.

In Australia, and in GA you are authorised to fly NVFR if you have been trained, and with a NVFR endorsement.

The endorsement has been available for decades, and as far as I know, hasn't changed.

It's not something you decide to have a stab at on a balmy night; there's planning involved.

A typical example is leaving before true first light; you may have good references around the airport when you take off, but then it all goes blaclk. There are several reports of early morning crashes flying out of Roma; this one, involving a 6,000 hour pilot is a good example: Investigation: AO-2013-057 - VFR flight into dark night conditions and loss of control involving Cessna T210N, VH-MEQ, 2 km north-west of Roma Airport, Qld on 25 March 2013

I agree, make it a personal choice only. BRS is not a perfect choice, but I believe IF it can increase survival chances in an incident then I personally, will happily pay the price. Besides, my wife won’t let me fly unless the aircraft is equipped with one. And finally, I have approval to buy my own aircraft if it has a BRS fitted! What’s not to like:-)

You should have said that first! Of course you have to buy one!

Reading all these posts just reinforces my decision not to fly without a BRS, or Parachute.......

That wouldn't help you if you started playing around with Night VFR or IMC - smacking into a hill or unlighted tower is a common result.

However, there's no need to get depressed about it, you will not be flying Night VFR or IFR in your RA aircraft, so that takes out what this accident is about (collision in IMC).

Sounds like a lot of brave, but famously wrong predictions.

 

In the late 19th century it was predicted that the US Patent Office would soon have to close down, because all the inventions had already been made.

IBM thought there was a world market for a dozen or so computers.

Bob Menzies couldn't see any future in computers (Australia built the world's fourth mainframe whle he was PM- it's still intact and now the world's oldest). Menzies couldn't see any future in space even through Australia was a pioneer...

I've been saying we need a battery break-through to make EVs feasible and that has been trotted out against me many times. There is even a long list of famous last words which circulates from time to time, so you do take a risk if you kill the chance of a new invention.....but I've been waiting 34 years for a battery that meets my specification.

The thing that happens is that as fast as new inventions come along knowledge is lost to the human race. About 20 years ago I remember how Alan Ramsey, Workshop Manager for Mayne Nickless Ltd diagnosed steering wander in a Prime Mover, requiring an additional chassis crossmember using four buckets of water and two broomsticks.

.........recognition. That little Italian Bernoulli had been handing out matchboxes at the BoB, while he, far more intelligent, but African American was prevented from entering by the Sudanese security guards. Just as he was once again being ejected Constable Doubtfire swung round the corner in the Land Cruiser. “What........”

I am surprised at the lack of hysteria wrt this aircraft. If it was a Jabiru all would be grounded immediately. CASA have a different approach to this problem. They were happy to kick the local product on shadowy statistics.

That's not true and I hope you weren't relying on earlier posts because they weren't true either. I haven't heard of anyone being refused correct figures from CASA. Figures that included flat tyres etc were RAA figures very late in the process, and produced verbatim by the CASA PR person. I would suggest that if you seriously want to know CASA facts you contact CASA direct. The Senate "Inquiry" was not an inquiry either, it was a qestion asked by a single Senator during a Senate Estimates Committee which was discussing financial matters, and the CASA people present were those required for the financial discussion, so not the ones involved in the Jabiru instrument.

I was trying to find google references to this statement so I’m not asking stupid questions I could have solved.....Came across this accident report instead...https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/4462266/ao-2011-100_final.pdf

Makes you want to never night fly again!

You picked a complicated case; this was a day VFR flight which became later and later.

You can train and be endorsed on a PPL for Night VMC, and a lot of pilots used to do that in the 1970s when hire rates were around $25/hour, on the grounds that if they were delayed close to last light they could save themselves, or that they could do the whole flight Night VFR. This requires continual reference to the ground just like day VFR, so you are not flying on instruments, just at a higher level of standard (e.g. flight planning LSALT.)

Its popularity died quickly, I think because it's too marginal in terms of weather, and the black holes to the horizon as paddocks get bigger and homestead lights further apart.

Question if you don’t mind...I’m puzzled over how VFR radio procedures have changed and what was cut back and how it related to costs?

A ot of changes have taken place in radio over the decades making it hard to unlearn the old and learn the new; too much to try and cover (or find) here, but I'll give you one example, Full Reporting.

At one stage you could chose a flight plan with no ATC supervision (e.g. out to the training area, or local), SARTIME, or Full Reporting. Full Reporting triggered ATC to supervsise your whole flight, sector by sector. Let's say you were flying French Island, Wonthaggi, Latrobe Valley to Bairnsdale, you would report departure time, then you had to report Wonthaggi within 2 minutes of your flight plan or ATC would call you to make sure you were still there. If you didn't call in within 15 minutes that automatically triggered an emergency. Full Reporting was dropped to reduce costs.

My ADSB-in (raspberry pi) device also made me look outside keenly in exactly the right direction. Often, in good VFR with my 20/20 vision I still couldn’t see the oncoming “paint” aircraft until the last 15 seconds, (thankfully with good spacing each time). I believe pilots often overestimate their visual capabilities, and oncoming speeds leave little time for evasive action. I’m a big advocate for flarm and ADSB-in traffic awareness systems.

The early anecdotal information is that AEM was on descent in cloud and JQF was on climb out in cloud at approximately 4100' and both were operating to IFR flight plans; I agree about VFR, the radio procedures we used to have, which came out of the blood of the very heavy aircraft traffic associated with WW2, were excellent for pinpointing other aircrtaft, but were cut back by the Government officially on cost grounds, but also likely on liability grounds.

IFR is a different form of flying under a different set of rules. PIC obligations are different and the work load is much higher, and IFR is based on all aircraft following the same procedures.

Not many people know, and this clearly includes the dullard C. Cook, that there are two critical surfaces in an aerofoil, the upper curved surface which prompted Bernoulli to write his theorem about (since disproved by a panel of WF experts, 97% of whom said it didn't work, while providing no proof of their assertions, and the transitional surface on the hyperbole of the leading edge, which Turbo's flatmate Benoulli discovered while hang gliding in the Pyrenees, before he broke his leg in the..........

Lets remember that this is a CTAF airport, not a class C/D with atc from the ground up.

Allowance needs to be made for vfr aircraft operating in the area with the ifr traffic.

Yes, it is, but when flying an IFR flight plan at certain points you will automatically receive traffic at others you have to call for it etc, you will be on different frequencies at different times etc.

This sort of collision could be eliminated if aircraft had glider-type flarms. These cost about $700 and they use a gps plus a low-powered radio to talk to each other and sound an alarm if the little computer decides there is any possibility of a collision. ( They use an array of lights to indicate where the other aircraft is.) They often go off if you fly in company with other gliders and they sure keep your head turning. On one occasion, I was alone and near a 4000 ft cloudbase when the flarm went off and sure enough, another glider was going the other way. The concentrating factor was the line of cloud. ( In fact we would have missed, but I would never have been aware of the potential midair without the flarm)

My guess as to why flarms are not used for GA is that there would not be much profit in it for the "safety" bureaucracy. Gosh, it empowers pilots and not the officials. But also my guess is that a certified version of the flarm would be $50,000 or so. It costs millions to certify something apparently.

At Gawler, all the tugs and gliders have flarms, and hardly any of the planes.

IFR is a whole world on its own; if you think of the failsafe rail system where one train has to leave a sector before another can enter, it's not dissimilar to that with both pilots and Airservices personnel working the plan. This is the system RPT and Charter work to and is safer than your $700.00 gismos when you look at the big picture, but something slipped through the cracks here.

Were either of them flying IFR or even in IFR conditions. It is possible for instrument flying to be practiced with an instructor, without ATC knowing about it.

If they were flying IFR then control should have been aware of them and the collision possibility. I wonder what their transponders were set to. One of them may and probably was set to 1200, which is VFR.

I don't think it will take ATSB long to come up with a pretty good idea of what happened.

Both were flying IFR flight plans Centre could possibly be involved in this and you're right ATSB will pull all the data together and sort it out.

.....[it has taken some time to establish that Darwin Chestnut who was flying the Cortina] "........ reached V1!."

"Tell someone who cares" replied Chestnut and was about to say something else when he heard the unmistakeable sound of thin fabric (avref) ripping; the Benoulli part of his wing skin was failing and he ............

.......that the wheels were rotating as an oblate spheroid which gave the Cortina.........