turboplanner

I think the original problem was: Can we have a solution such that during flight, and with some accuracy determine how much fuel is remaining in the tank of a Jabiru SK. The level is hard to see when it's low and swiveling around to view it isn't that easy. The Jabiru SK tank is not long and flat, it's a box shape. I think my idea would work. I also built a prototype level indicator on the bench using ultrasonic sensors and an Arduino micro purchased from Jaycar. That worked quite well, just more work getting it setup properly.

 

In that case you should be able to get an accurate measurement of fuel prior to take off.

The normal procedure taught in the Performance and Operations segment is to calculate your remining endurance during flight from your fuel burn calculation.

So, calculate startup, taxi/hold fuel burn, climb fuel burn, then track fuel burn, descent fuel burn, taxy fuel burn and ensure you have your legal reserve after that.

If you enter your flight data every 10 minutes, you will be able to call back ATC with your endurance at any time should you have an incident en route.

Fuel burn rates for GA aircraft are accurate.

To cover an en route fuel leak/hose failure/tank crack etc. you check your gauges against your calculated fuel burn.

There's no problem in having an extra indicator for when the tank is low (still bearing in mind what Facthunter said)

If you take the cap off a Cherokee and look in you will see a steel tab gauge protruding up from the bottom of the tank.  It gives you a very good method of judging approximately how many litres you have in the tank. If you take a look inside the tank, you'll see that the wing is a deep section, so the length and width of the tank is relatively small.

If you then go to a J170, get some steps and take a look in the top:

1. There's no tab, so you can only look at the fuel level in relation to the top of bottom.

2. Notice the much thinner wing section and much shallower tank.

This means that for long distance cruising the tank has to be much longer and wider compared to its depth.

We have a very shallow but very long and wide tank for our visual checks, stick check, and our fuel height gauge sender, whatever meothod is used.

The 170 fuel gauge is rather vague, not because it is of low quality, but because to the difficult job measuring fuel level while the aircraft is in flaight and the fuel is moving backwards and forwards to the extremities.

I also managed to drain a fair amount of fuel from the aircraft when it was standing, by not noticing that one wheel was sitting higher than the other.

For the same reason my stick levels were erratic.

There's nothing with your sliding tube concept, but for the same reasons it would be inaccurate.

And for the same reason a warning light isn't going to be any help.

What you can do, is before a long trip, fill with a known amount of fuel and then, if the Jab fuel burn rate is accurate, calculate your endurance on the known quantity by calculating the fuel burn. 

Jabiru are getting plent of lift now out of the J170 wing profile, and the slim profile has other advantages, so I thing the long term solution is to design three digital senders with a digital gauge/computer to dynamically calculate average fuel level.

That way you can manually check with a level stick and cross check that with the gauge which will show the same.

Using jet fuel also interests me, Jetboy. I learned to drive on a grey Furgie, which started on standard petrol; after it warmed up we switched over to kero. Why can't our aero engines do that?

 

I buy mine from Bunnings in a plastic bottle now at probably ten times the cost of petrol; in the days you are talkiong about it was cheap enough to take a 20 litre drum out into the paddock and spend a morning burining scotch thistles.

We had a petrol/kero International W6 tractor and a petrol/diesel AWD9 and it was a longer starting process, and I always managed to get way down the paddock to the tractor (so way out the road to the hangar), and find the little petrol tank dry.

.....said “How would you like to go halves in a beached tanker near the Spratly Islands full of oil?”......

95 is fine but the aromatics evaporate and you can have a problem starting the engine after a couple of weeks without use, however adding just a couple of liters charges the fuel enough to get an instant start.

Non- premium usually has ethanol in it and if left idle gums up the air galleries in the carb including the ones which have been drilled and plugged so you can’t clean them out with a wire.

..... "I speciarised in working on Japanese tlucks, Hinos & Isuzus are the duck's guts" exprained Turbopranner san as he stood and faced the lising sun and I therefore speak fruant Japanese, prus, I bought the Nob a 1st crass ticket home on Arr Japan Airrines just because he has been a gleat servant of the NEStoly. Because that's the kind of guy I am". And apprause were heard in the distance (crap, crap, crap they went), because ....

 

.......when he left the Philippines, Nob had said “I shall return” and when they broke out of Cowra Nob said “I shall return” and the minute he landed at Narita and saw the price of a can of coke he would be saying “I shall return”, but they all knew they would get so many free flights in the Zero while he was away that he would have to spend the rest of his life .......

........but as he turned to make another run, through the static on his radio he heard: "Airmen of Japan. This is your Emperor Hiro Hito. The War is now over. We rost, but good news is we about to sell millions of cameras, camrys and of course superbikes. Return to your homeland. Trains now running on time. Fight no more."

This caught Nob totally by surprise: "I never have to fly home before" he thought " How I going to get enough fuel?", but with immediate obedience he turned the zero to the north.

"How did you pull that off Turbo?" asked Onetrick incredulously, I didn't think you could speak Japanese let alone mimic Hiro Hito.

"At one time I took acting lessons and the old CB's a bit scratchy" replied Turbo wondering whether he should put a call through and warn The Captain who would probably be walking down tha main street of Wagga Wagga complaining about any sweet wrappers or single use bags lying discarded in the street. "Stuff him"  he thought, and picked up the mic. "On your way back to Japan, Hiro's voice said, could you drop in to Wagga Wagga and.........."

.......Mayor!!!!!!!!

The Mayor, Cr Axehead responded immediately with a long speech, and there was so much hot air that the Zero was deflected.......

To stop some of that creep, I'm in favour of a policy that for every new ACT introduced by a Parliament, there should be two dropped.

The regulation in Victoria that permitted a man to urinate in the gutter in the Melbourne CBD provided his horse was drinking from a public trough, was only terminated a few decades ago.

TTIS has a relationship with airframe flexing and cracking and from that perspective doesn't need to include the unstressed time on the ground.

Engine time needs to be by hour meter because engine components wear and fail usually at quite predictable run times, but since there will be several engine rebuilds/replacements per airframe, engone time needs to be kept separate.

On that logic FAA is correct, CASA is wrong in their concept, and wrong not to define TTIS.

I was wondering why an over 80 year old would want their plane to go faster.

 

At the time, the Savannah with the slats had a very slow cruise speed; I seem to remember 67 kts, but that may not be correct.

When you get slow speeds like that and a 30 kt wind on the nose, you are down to a TAS of 37 kts so you sit there burning nearly double your fuel per nautical mile. On cross country flights this takes the shine off the reason you bought the STOL for. The VGs made a huge difference for cross country flying.

.....a joint task force had been formed a couple of months back consisting of the Wagga Wagga constabulary and six big Vicpol under cover operators who looked like basketballers on steroids.

Drug dealing had spread from the Murray to the Murrumbidgee, thought to be due to fruitgrowers using over-size tinnies with twin 200 hp outboards to quickly avoid the divvy vans of the NSW police.

The plan was to have the undercover operatives standing on the river bank pretending to fish, while observing the number of boats and taking photos of the people in them.

Many of us have holidayed along those rivers and have a vision of the typical fisherman, and you can imagine that by the time a boat has passed the third basketballer on steroids wearing a grey suit and  carrying a Snapper road and reel, that they would be just a tiny bit nervous.

Unfortunately it was our old friend Constable Doubtfire who pointed this out to the Vicpol members in just two words. The brawl lasted.......

Not sure about the guy, I thought he was quite old, which was a theme in the Uluru story.

 

Could have been a 701 - I remember it had a 4 blade prop.

 

Taking the slats off was all the go about then, to get a faster cruising speed. VGs came in over that period too.

 

Did some more research, found the guy (over 80 at the time, but that played no part).

It was a Savannah, and the first flight after the slats had been removed and VGs fitted, and it was taking off heavily loaded on an uphill strip.

However, the main factory was a wind downdraft, so you can disregard this one when talkoing about routine stalls.

....tends towards narcissism and is often heard muttering "Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all" then waiting around for the next ten minutes waiting for the answer which never came.

Turbo once hid a voice activated recording which said "Captain Captain standing there, you might as well get a chair".     And he did.........

Not in my experience. In every field of endeavour today, there are more rules and regulations, more red tape, and more fearful behaviour of "being held responsible", if anything goes wrong, than there was 50 years ago, when we just "got 'er done", without reference to panels, public consultations, committees, and unnecessarily convoluted and often conflicting regulations. It's a wonder anything gets done at all in todays world.

 

I'll give you a couple of examples where we have less government rules and regulations and red tape.

Motor Vehicles

Registration: We had to take a car to a police station to be registered, so find a set of trade plates, make sure there was extra fuel in it, often find the battery cart to start it (new vehicles were delivered to a dealership with a minimum of fuel, and may have been sitting in the factory compound for several months).

In addition to the above, If it was a truck, it had to go through the police process, and that would frequently involve "discussions" over interpretation of light type and location, or air brake component fitted etc. and it was necessary to book a semi trailer in. In Victoria it was necessary to find out from the customer where the truck would be operating during its life because truck registrations were confined to a district, to reduce other operators coming in and cutting prices. The name and addess of the owner had to be painted on the RH door of every truck.

All buses, and larger trucks then had to proceed to a different government body, the Transport Regulation Board, so after you were finished with the cop, you got a would-be cop, and the truck/bus had to be measured and inspected. A bus registration took a morning or an afternoon; I registered three log trucks in NSW over two full working days once.

The Transport Regulation Board was closed down.

The registration process was de-regulated, and freed from police and transport authorities.

Today we register cars trucks and buses in the dealerships during predelivery - a massive saving in cost, but yes, we take responsibility for what we register for the road.

Safety - Factories, Sporting events

Victoria's Department of Labour and Industry was a large one with several hundred employees who used to travel around inspecting cranes, chains, hooks,and other factory equipment, tagging them as approved. They developed specifications for motor racing tracks; safety fence construction and height, catch fence construction and height, distance of spectators from fences and a host of other items, and the Inspector would come around every season, inspect the track, issue a list of remedial items, then sign an approval to use when everything had been fixed. The general public never saw this side, but the Promotor certainly pulled his hair out.

In the mid 1980's the Department of Labour and Industry was closed down one day, and all those records sent to storage.

From then on, we checked our own factories and race tracks. We saw it as freedom.

"fearful behaviour of "being responsible" if anything goes wrong.

A certain percentage of the population ignores safety, works on the "couldn't happen to me principle", believes rules are for fools etc. and they certainly have something to fear, and at the time governments decided the taxpayers were not going to pay for the screw ups, we knew we were going to have to come up with our own safety benchmarks. All of a sudden the Australian Standards which had been sitting there in the background, could be used to deonstrate duty of care, and we could come up with our own, practical, rules to apply in daily activities, we could develop our own safety policies free of government interference.  Today, if I put one of those vehicles on the road I know it is dynamically stable and fully compliant with accepted safety benchmarks because I've used digital checks which take a fraction of the time I used to take - minutes vs hours, and all my calculations for every vehicle are on file should there be an accident, so I don't have to worry about whether I covered all the bases.

Panels, Public Consultations, Committees

In the Government sector, these instruments are set up to try to ensure that someone doesn't bulldoze some type of inappropriate action.

Sometimes a developer decides to do a dodgy development which will disadvantage others, and locals can expose this during the public consultation period, or evidence can be given at a panel or committee, which may sink the dodgy project, or allow one with some merit to be changed slightly, and become a better development/project etc. This replaces the old days were decisions were made by senior management/entrepreneurs behind closed doors and prisons were sited in the middle of cities, roads were built to Councillors homes, etc.  I agree it's a slower process these days, but is has eliminated a lot of inappropriate activity.

Conflicting Regulations

Shouldn't happen but it inevitably does. At times the fix can be as quick as bring it to someone's attention, and that would apply to the bulk of conflicts. Sometimes you have to be the one to come up with the solution.

Was that the bloke who's a presenter on Channel 7 fishing show... "Hook Line and Sinker" or something.

 

I heard from another 701 builder near Launceston who bought the wreck of that aircraft (701 not Sav) - he said that this bloke had taken off the slats, then crashed it after takeoff from one of the islands - could be Flinders.

 

This was about 10 years ago.  There may have been other father/son 701/Savannah crashes since.

 

Not sure about the guy, I thought he was quite old, which was a theme in the Uluru story.

Could have been a 701 - I remember it had a 4 blade prop.

Taking the slats off was all the go about then, to get a faster cruising speed. VGs came in over that period too.

So Turbs, do you read this quote from the article differently?:

 

Shooting from the hip was always inaccurate

 

This journalist's story isn't relevant to our day to day flying, but you can play with it any way you like, I'm not interested.

....for the exit, with Mavis' walker, while Mavis was still scooping up her Depends. A cry of outrage rang out through the dance hall, and......

 

....the Captain wondered if “Tested by Captain Cook had been a good idea. The Shire President was walking towards Captain with.....

If you cant see the connection between class action PL destroying the economy and life in general and plain old PL claims, which do exactly the same thing on a smaller scale, then there's not much point going on.

 

Neither destroy the economy, and often the byproduct is to boot a thoroughly disreputable company out of the market.

If you're really interested, you can research what happened to the Water Parks in the mid 1980's, what action they took and why you see them flourishing today.

Or you can research what happened around 2000, when the end of the world was forecast because people couldn't get PL Insurance; that was to be the end of many things like sports and sausage sizzles, but they all survived and thrived.

In any case they both make businesses risk averse to the point of giving up or relocating and more often than not, they set new precedents  and legislation is made that removes a bit of someone's freedom and make life miserable.

 

Companies are held responsible for the safety of their employees so of course they are removing unsafe processes. 

You may be happy with your highly regulated paradise, but for many others it's toxic.

 

Governments have de-regulated, not regulated.

Self administration means people can decide how to make their operations safe; some may go overboard, but talking to the organisation can produce a safe compromise. Whatever, that's between you and the organisation you live with. We as taxpayers no longer have to pay the bill.

The hand will soon become sub-conscious.

It always pays to remember the old saying about lawyers - "They're the people who referee the fight, and keep the purse."

 

The returns to class-action plaintiffs are generally, disappointing, and very low - but the returns to global corporate lawyers, who like to advance class actions, are very high.

 

https://www.moneymag.com.au/class-action-crime

 

That story probably explains where Class Actions sit, which will usually be a long way from a Recreational Aviator. 

If someone is contacted to join a class action and is given a target amount of money, say $250,000.00 vs the zero they have now, people can be quite happy to get that. It's only after the newspapers splash a story about a multi-million dollar win, that they start deciding they've been ripped off and could have done better hiring a lawyer themselves.

There was a pilot featured on, I think, 60 minutes who flew his Sav from Tasmania to Uluru and back. Some time later he and his son were badly injured when the Sav fell down sideways 300 ft to the ground. it may be covered on this site somewhere.

Nothing to do with scamming.. Scamming is unlawful. These people are using our laws to make money, to the detriment of the country. 

 

Yes, it was written by a journalist, what’s your point? 

 

OK then, you can use the direct quote “misleading” and deceptive if you want, but it has nothing to do with lawmakers or drug pushers, and the only time this would be applicable to Recreational pilots would be if they caused the crash of something like a Dash 8 full of passengers or a Jumbo and had taken out enough PL insurance around $100, million plus.

My point about the journalist is that he is only repeating what others have told him, it is non specific, and usually on this forum journalists are disregarded out of hand.

The story has nothing to do with law makers, just allegations of people scamming the system.

......as Een flung her into the air and stepped forward to take the weight he pushed too hard and not only did the wheelie walker fly up and hit him in the balls but the extra push sent Mavis canoeing between the Shire President and his wife who had been doing the Foxtrot.....