turboplanner

.......there wasn’t a hand to be seen while they were giving evidence.

Meanwhile a fight had broken out in the Gumly Gumly RSL after Locksie had taken advantage of Mavis’s absence to attend the CWA Bridge night in hs BoB outfit, and....

Just did some searching, and found a lot of RV-6A nose wheel collapses/nose-overs.

If you disregard what each pilot should or should not have done and just look at the engineering of the nose wheel, a few things spring to mind.

The purpose of having a tricycle undercarriage is partly dynamic stability; you get rid of the tail wheelers potential to ground loop, and partly steering, you get one man handling when taxying in cross winds by having steering controlled by the rudder pedals. The RV-6A has a castor nose wheel, so in this aircraft you're back to steering by ruffer and prop. Under those circumstances, I'd choose the tail wheel version.

However in this case we've got what we've got, so I tried to compare the RV-6A trailing link with a Cherokee 140 hydraulic strut.

The hydraulic strut retracts when it hits an obstacle like a small mound or the beck end of a small ditch and the pressure dynamically cushions the blow. The stroke appears to be a lot longer than the trailing geometry of the RV, so you would expect the Cherokee to have a lot less problems woth the nose wheel. Because the strut retraction is near vertical, the forces are acting closer to the mounting, so there's less impact on the aircraft frame.

The RV, for dynamic stability needs to locate the nose wheel a long way foward of its mounting point, so a long, rigid strut is required extending forward from the mounting to the aircraft frame. this looks flimsy, and could result in twisting of the frame, butg is a lot stronger that it looks, and isn't blamed in the William Creek end-over.

A sprung castor is swung off the front end of this strut; to get stable trailing without shimmy a lot of castor angle is needed, and it has this, but to get castor when mounted off the strut at the front, the trailing sprung fork is below the centreline of the wheel, so quite close to the ground, and when weight comes on, gets lower appearing in one photo as low as the bottom of the rim, and if the tyre pressure is down slightly, will be lower again, and if it hits a rut just after it has bumped down, could possibly be scraping the ground.

This is just theory after googling "6A nose gear drawings"

What I was looking for were drawings with bump dimensions to compare the RV with the Cherokee 140, but couldn't find any dimensions.

The drawings I looked at didn't show any shock absorbers on the RV, and if that was the case, then it had the additional disadvantage of no damping to slow the vertical acceleration down.

He hadn’t counted on the evidence Lawyer X presented which revealed the entire underbelly crew were as innocent as lambs and Constable plod had saved himself writing a lot of false briefs by just plugging them and....

Fatalities in RA are roughly 12 per year over the decades. If you look at the causes a surprising amount are just the pilot giving up when the engine stops. The rest are similar to GA - flying in IMC flying over terrain where a forced landing is not possible, trying to stretch a glide to some landable surface. RA trains on incipient spins and I pulled out of my first one at around 750 feet, so an epic fail, but got them up to 150 feet, so reasonable for an alert, current, pilot getting into one on turn to final at 500 feet. If you pull the exact figures and consider how you might improve things without adding, say, 20% cost to an RPC pushing it closer to GA costs, full spin and unusual attitude recovery training might not produce any difference in the fatality rate.

However, if you love flying and if you want to improve your skills, you only needs to find a GA instructor with suitable endorsements and suitable aircraft, and you can go and do both. I've seen a lot of reports from people who have done this, and all the comments have been very positive. Also, even in RA if it's been a few years since you did incipient spins, and forgotten which rudder to go for etc, or if you never did them, and hour with an instructor is a great investment.

....on the nose after a conviction for...

Have a look in the mid background, blow it up to 500% and see if you can see the discontinuation of the wheel tracks which also should not be there.

Maybe that's not on the runway, maybe the runway doesn't have any other ruts etc. Maybe he's tried to strengthen the design because he uses the point and shoot landing method. I've landed on outback dirt runways where the passenger said he couldn't feel us land, and others where the main suspensions have gone to full bump then launched me and the strips can vary a lot of there's been recent rain, but I think Poteroo's advice is good.

.....a twist of his epaulettes (avref), they were headed for the Drifter 9two avrefs) which........

Fly the aircraft, usually the uncomplicated answer. If you look at a lot of threads on aviation forums they start with a simple enough statement. That statement is then dissected and miss quoted, the armchair experts then become involved with some theory on how they would never crash and how things should be done better. It's best if you can make the subject as complicated as possible, bringing aviation law into it, that's always good for another couple of pages. Then there's usually somebody who takes offence at a comment/phrase/statement/opinion, personal insults then swap for the next few pages.

Ultimately interest in the thread wains, nobody agrees because they know their opinion is right (Or a rite).

Fly the aircraft

A bit facile but I have nothing to do this afternoon besides waiting with the Batphone, mebe I should find something useful to do instead of pot stirring

Well you're right of course with all of that; forums are one of the worst mediums for over-analysis and red herrings, but what fascinates me is why both student and qualified pilots keep asking questions that their instructors should have been able to answer in less than three minutes.

It's good we have so many expert fliers on this site that know the answer to everything

You seem to be implying that everyone is wrong so what's the answer then?

That RV-6 front wheel strut design is obviously in need of a major redesign, if an experienced pilot with many hours under his belt can hit the runway with it, in just a fairly normal, if a little bouncy landing.

What the ATSB is saying is the accident was caused by the nose wheel fork contacting the ground, so it could also have been soft runway conditions.

ATSB Report: Investigation: AO-2019-037 - Landing accident involving Van’s RV-6A, VH-ANU, William Creek ALA, South Australia, on 28 July 2019

Was just a by product of changing to a different type piston, piston change wasn't intended for increased power. Piston were

changed to prevent piston break up which seems to have worked, this project has cost us a huge amount of money and time , we are now working on a ring pack to complement this piston and we have had some amazing results so far with one engine 3300 has done over 130 hrs and absolutely no oil in the bottle, bottle is bone dry, we havnt striped this engine to see how cylinders are going ,[ owner wont allow us ] but I hope to bore scope cylinders next week

Very interesting results, the whole project sounds like it's going somewhere!

Sorry did not reply earlier , we went on nbn wireless , nothing but trouble since.

All the pistons , except for one set , were VR pistons. the other 4 were Silverlite brand, we tried these because they had a lot more material in the skirt area where the VR pistons were cracking, they only made 130 hrs before cracking , they cracked from the oil ring slot downwards and inwards, where as the VRs cracked from the bottom of the skirt upwards and inwards. We had 2 sets of VRs only made around 260hrs each with about 8 hrs difference between them. We are experimenting with another piston , and have close to 1000 hrs on one set and 700 on another set, but not without some problems, which I think we have now overcome, how ever there has never been any signs of cracks, and produce more power

What did you change to produce more power?

......a feast but getting a famine, and then....

.......trot (Turbo noticed that Cappy cringed from being the one to have Loxie say what he used to say every night he showed up at the BoB, and which would create a riot among the quiet burghers who frequented this forum)..........

An electric motor can be designed for initial torque and maximum power rpm to suit the optimum prop for the aircraft.

With the operation someone else described, and exchange battery packs, a lot of the negatives of electric "vehicles" fall away.

If you're not looking for range, then range issues fall away.

If you can swap batteries, then the long downtimes while charging fall away

If you're not trying to design in recharging in the glide, the aircraft is less costly, less failure-prone, lighter etc.

If the design is based on the Application, and not on CO2 reduction, you don't have to worry about trying to charge the batteries on solar or nuclear.

Looks very exciting for all short-lead flights, and not just for Beavers.

Warmup too should be shorter ?.

spacesailor

Yes, half a nano second, but think about your experience around the house with electric motors that suddenly stop working, never to spin again - like hair driers, and think about all the electrical issues in the newer cars, and all those molten bitumen patches you see on the freeways these days.............

........run the 100 metres in even time. Ever mindful of Een's reputation for integrity and abhorrence for wet shoes, The Core Group (CG) and Moderators (with the exception of 3 and 5) had made a big effort to create Conditions so complex that no one would ever be able to qualify to mention XXir or XXrem again of WF , and so it was until Loxie tore himself away from playing with his Fire Trucks and said "............

.......temperature buoy floating 77 Nm South East of Oahu and picked up by Turbo, and.....

.....they have a degree in diversity and....

.....he or she has a Medical Certificate and.......

......go and have a pee.”

This shocked Moderator 3 so much that he...

HiHo was mortified at getting a warning for debauchery, and looked again at post #11893. If only he could delete it as he used to in 2011 on a regular basis, but there it was marking him for all time as a debaucher. His greatest fear was that the Gippslander would pick up the story (Country Editors scoured the NES for a whiff of scandal), and he would be exposed to the local townspeople, and they told.......

.....Black Plague breaks out and....

[KNOWING THAT WF MEMBERS ARE SENSITIVE TO BAD LANGUAGE WE HAVE DELETED THE DIALOGUE (WORDS).- MOD 6.

The call came as a surprise to George because he wasn’t. Catholic. He was Treasurer of the CFMAU and was used to deflecting demands for union money. He let the Pope run out of steam then said “Listen you XXXX...........”