turboplanner

Someone decided to fly over Port Phillip Bay and spread a person’s ashes.

The Ashes fell on a Wedding Party on a boat out in the Bay and ruined the day.

I think they caught the pilot.

Yes, we have said that, but not in equal proportions. 

Why not go the whole hog and hire a properly large aeroplane, the Antonov?

 

The Govmint could build up a huge fleet of water bombers to replace all the common sense approaches that worked for the last few thousand years...

 

Starting with floggers and feet - still the most appropriate for some fires.

The farm attack units I was brought up on were two tonne trucks with 1000 litres on the back, about a 6 hp motor going flat out and driving along the flank flat out with poor visibility and U turn when something started to burn, hanging on eyes blilnd from smke and just waving the hose in a pattern past the drivers door; he became the aimer with the truck, and followed by a tractor pulling a scarifier in road gear. Amazing combination on 1,000 acre paddocks of grass.

Where the helicopters and aircraft are vital is when a fire heads for an urban area.

You would not have to be very bright to work out the low flying I was talking about was not take off and landing.

 

No, but I think some were trying to obfuscate to find excuses to do it.

That 747 is impressive, and the only way to hit fires.

 

It can lay 3 km in 15 seconds, so a good tool for quite long fronts, but there are still days where everyone might as well just park. In the 1939 fires it got so hot that the eucalyptus was extracted from the trees as a gas, and sparks flying ahead of the fires were igniting whole valleys one after the other so the only defence was in Dugout shelters to get away from the radiated heat.

......and Turbo remembered a time by a camp fire when he and the Captain were talking about their boundary riding history. “One day beside the Fence I needed a crap and as I squatted down I heard”SNAP!” - a dingo trap snapped around my Nuts - second worst pain I’ve ever felt.”

” That must have REALLY hurt” said Turbo, his eyes watering, “but what could possibly be worse than that”

”When I ran out of chain!” replied the Captain. 

They decided to...

For those that don't know, this site has been going for nearly 19 years now. For nearly 19 years I have dedicated myself to helping recreational aviators to stay safe, learn from each other's experiences and help with their aircraft maintenance. I went to a software platform that induced user involvement to help each other. I then changed to a complete web site solution that provided so much more as a service to recreational aviators but the site was impacted...

 

Well, after moving to that new software platform I was told to give it time and my site would recover, "it will take 6-9 months" and other comforting statements that my site will get back to what it was. In its prime it was getting between 2,500 and 3,000 unique visitors per day but then came a competitor using Facebook for the quick and easy posting so I went full on site to offer more than just the interactive forum of facebook. To do this I needed a full blown web site software solution which IPS is compared to the previous platform of Xenforo. I then swapped back and forth panicking due to the drop of user numbers but eventually stuck with IPS as a full site solution.

 

Give it time they said, well here it is after 6 months and still completely flat, no gradual increase, now sudden lift in numbers, the site has so much more now with the IPS database feature and many addons like Classifieds etc. How much more time does one have to give? If there was a slow and gradual increase I would be happy and go along with "Give it time" but I no longer have faith in either IPS OR Xenforo compared to the all mighty, all conquering Facebook. The stupid thing is this site offers so much more, so much that Facebook could never provide but here we are, the software license now needs renewing, hosting costs $250 a month and I am working on the site every single day trying to improve it. What am I missing? What have I done wrong? Is there a solution that I can do to help recreational aviators more in giving them a way that they can learn and help each other, keep each other safe and have fun?...tell me, please, be brutal if you need to be

 

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It's not a question of a few people who might have left, or even a few hundred, because before May you can see the graph is slowly climbing as against bleeding away.   Something happened with the software change and people haven't come back. One possibility is casual Iphone visitors, because the current site is not good to use on an Iphone, so that would be an easy fix.

The level graph is a marketing issue, with an immediate potential audience in the 12,000 claimed RAA members, which like any other market will respond to promotion.    Each typical market campaign, if effective, will bring in about 3% of  a market, and that would get the level pattern pointing upward in 360 visitor steps.

No flying below 500 feet except for take offs and landings covers it.

My low flying takes place each take off and landing - probably a bit cryptic but that's how my head works....

 

Well in that case you and FH are grounded according to CAR 157, Low Flying.

Which is interesting, but they may have covered themselves by having a definition for take off and landing, which should both be on an ALA or ALA standard airfield.

An ALA standard airfield not only has a length which allows for a pilot mistake rather than the POH landing and take off distances, but has the correct splay and object clearance angles.

So the environment is much safer below 500 feet than the surrounding countryside which these days is filling with power lines.

........strategic attack on Australia's food bowl.

The Captain's nasty comments about Turbo were a good indication of his mental state. Schizophrenia had clealy set in some days ago and  he had turned into his alter-ego, a giant Rat.  (Some people would say he was a Rat all the time. but Turbo know it was just his affliction). The only way he could be stopped was by spraying him with Roundup (it went back to the roots). The trick was to catch.............

What are you trying to say? 

That a plague of rats had hit Bone, fruit and vegetable capital of the world, and these were ass-biting Plague rats similar to those which caused the Plague of London. Turbo took the Bombadier Challenger, flew (avref) to Bone, put on his oxygen mask, and bravely did a low pass over the town. There was no movement. He did several more low passes, flattening some of the more basioc houses in the process, but it looked like all were lost in what was a flourishing food-producing town. Just as he was about to head back to Melbourne, he saw movement; an emaciated figure with a rat trap on its bum crawling out into the open and squinting up at Turbo.

"I'd recognise that person anywhere he thought and his heart lifted. Bone would have to be quarantined, but first, bull would have to be saved, but how...........

Did anyone make a submission to the Consultation phase of the Regional Airports programme?

Yep, I do it at least twice every flight......  ?

 

That would be into an ALA. Some people don’t bother complying with ALA specifications.

......he was indeed curious because bull had been missing for a few days and this could be a case of arson or.......

.......Turbo was heartbroken. To be publicly called a dope, when he had been working for years to remove the stigma was mortifying given his lowly beginnings, being forced to do a rabbit trap round after travelling for an hour in a school bus full of tainting older girls, just so he could have an evening meal of roast rabbit, which he did every evening for 12 years, and being forced to quit Primary School at the age of 26 to help out on the farm.

Then being invited to a ball, and being the only one to bring his cricket bat, and going to a beach party and sleeping on the beach like all the others, only to wake up and find they'd all gone back to town, which four hours walk away.

It was different now, when he came back to town. He circled the town three times in the  Citation or the Bombadier Challenger; they all wanted to know him then.

Wun Tak could stick his tunnel up his stope, and ......

OK, two suggestions

1. May 2019 drop in visitors.

    Survey the reasons people turned away from the site, then fix them to get back up to pre May 2019 levels.

    The pre May 2019 levels showed a stable retention of visitors.

2. Out of the claimed 12,000 RAA members, how many know that Recflying exists? probably not very many.

    I notice a number of ads creeping into the Recflying forum section, and I don't have any problem with them, so perhaps some of the repetitive things that people are nopt responding to could be cut back and a few more paid ads can be added to pay for some paid ads in areas frequented by RAA members.

What changed in May 2019? Was that when this latest version took over?

For what it’s worth, I left that FB competitor, something I rarely ever do, and the reason I left it was the high numbers of visitors and their low relevance to recreational flying who infest it today, so the first takeaway is that quality needs to be added to numbers.

If you want me to be brutal, it’s probably fiddling with what was the more successful alternative, and the difficulty of resetting computers and I phones to make the site work again that’s slowing the recovery. A dedicated How To thread would help enormously.

.......that numbers are just their way of indicating good or bad, lucky or unlucky; they use intonation (the Ying Tong of the Goons era) for their secret codes.

So “^good afternoon •Captain Cook, so •good to hear your •opinion, we •must meet again sometime” actually means

”S!t meeting, scumbag, hope we don’t see you again!”, and Turbo knew this would trip up both Monorail and.....

Looks like it's useless for aircraft, cars and boats, but could be useful for the garden hose.

 

That's what I thought, makes beautiful looking clamps with tie wire, but gal wire snaps before you can get the tension tight enough to stop the hose leaking, so there's nothing for it except buying several rolls of stainless steel wire, which does work well, once you've praticed how many screws to get that exact tension needed.   Costs less to keep a tin of stainless steel worm drive clamps.

.........the secret call to actiion: "It be ready in 15 minutes now", but.......

........grab an old boat and drift up to China to teach them some diplomacy. "All you have to do is, make sure it starts sinking when you're close to shore and they'll come out with a naval patrol boat, lift you out of the leaing tub and give you a nice dinner of dim sims stale bean curd. Then you'll be allocated a Legal Aid lawyer who pick up a cool mil per year for the five years it takes for him to commit the act of treason, and you'll be a Chinese citizen who can apply for the dole while stocking up with money you left on long term deposit here, and you can apply for a position in the imperial government where you can go down and flog the sh!t out of the Hong Kong English, then infiltrate the Australian government by dressing up like Pauline Han Song.

"Wouldn't it be quicker just to dress up like Pauline now?", asked Singletrack, "and........"

[NES readers may have noticed that Turbo skirted round the Vietnamese section. When the Vitenamese war was on and the Captaion and Mot track were doing their thing in Hanoi, Turbo was only two, and just writing his first book.

Turbo notes that the Captain did a put down on One Track in  #11085  by using the High English "sandwaich", and OT being a slug from Subiaco didn't notice the difference.]