turboplanner

reached up and grabbed the strut of Hohosland who not only had an aircraft with slow takeoff and landing characteristics, but slow flight as well, and a 17 minute build time according to the kit supplier.

Hohosland had become suspicious when he first opened the Weeties packet and found what appeared to be the contents of a Dick Smith stores dumpmaster, but persevered over the years to finally produce an aircraft which wasn't lovely to look at but..(When they say that you just KNOW its ugly) could land on a ten dollar bill.

"Never trust a man who flies a Sportscar" said Hohosland eying off the gentle curves of Riverland Lass who was wondering where this was all leading.

Just then there came the unmistakeable roar of a Jabiru engine overhead. It was DivebombingPete from down the street...

The method Ross is describing is used to quickly lift race cars off the ground. If you imagine something with the dimensions of a bag trolley, but at a smaller angle than 90 degrees. The lifting tip can be made to suit a particular part of the aircraft, and the crosspiece (axle in the bag troller) can be heavy duty folded sheet metal to provide a wide footprint for soft ground.

Tuberplane rolled over heavy with Christmas turkey and english pudding and thought of BigvoltsPete. Isn't it funny how, if you buy a piece of workshop equipment it's classed as a major present for the next three years, but if you buy them a lawnmower or shovel - something to make life easier it doesn't count!

Part of Tuberplane's Christmas was spent getting his boat out of the dam. He'd launched it to de-rust and repaint the trailer, which had taken longer than expected, just as the warm weather arrived, so the dam was much smaller getting the boat out than it was getting the boat in. The wheels sank to about knee level, but after puttin in half a wood yard, wearing out a set of 4WD tyres and finally using the tractor as a winching point the combination rose out of the water with the trailer now yellow and festooned with lilies, weeds and a half tonne of mud. He thought that all things being equal he wouldn't do that again.

Nevertheless, he was told that getting the boat out of the dam was part of his Christmas present.

Hadrian Lever had just asked for volunteers to join a Recreational Flyer FSX group, but after getting tangled in the Microsoft Jungle (nerds have a wicked sense of humour don't they) and rebooting 17 times he fell asleep.

He dreamed of flying an F16 on a mission, the 20 minute preflight, the radar setup, the precision destruction and the low level return to base with the girl's voice on the warning system telling him to "pull Up, pull Up, pull Up. It reminded him of his youth.

As he approached base he even remembered not to let the speed build up above 280 knots on the descent and rip the gear off.

Suddenly there was an enormous tin can noise, and with a shock, he rose up off the Lilo, thinking it was the Sportscar of Oarlocks.

He'd read about them - crosswired instruments so when the oil pressure was low the temperature was hot, and when the temperature was hot the altitude was low and when the rpm built up the speed washed off, all designed to keep the pilot's attention focussed on flying the aircraft rather than listening to CD's.

As the fog in his brain lifted he realised the noise was just the dog tipping over it's food bowl, but up above him, staring down with a vicious leer stood the Riverland lass...

Some people might say flying, calm, weather and Wagga Wagga Wagga in the same sentence is very cool!

PM Bigglesworth when he gets back on line in a week or so. From his description he's done it, good with electronics.

You're kidding Adrian aren't you? I mix it with the young bloods on Realflight's Multiplayer and you're nobody unless you're hovering a Yak 54 or barrel rolling helicopters.

RF has the advantage over FSX of an instant restart button so my typical helicopter flight is: Start/crash/restart/crash/restart/crash and so on - they are wild machines!

Or a web site with a password linked to current membership status.

What are you having for dinner......

palexxxx, I never carried out any formal tests, but raced against about 200 guys over 12 years and needed to know their habits for self presevation and deciding where on the track to pass them. Some could respond instantly, others gave up, still others were mobile grenades and totally unpredictable.

I was also President of an Association with 1300 drivers - all A type personalities in about 20 car classes got to investigate a lot of incidents and trends including fatalities along with an inside seat at the subsequent corrective actions which ranged from penalties on drivers to changes in regulations or track specifications. Our work was so detailed that an Australiuan carried out US track inspections.

One key observation which came out of this work was the importance of behaviour, or attitude in safety. Fatalities had begun to occcur in one particular car class, and although track surfaces and car specifications were blamed by that class, a detailed analysis indicated that the Chief Stewards were allowing the drivers to get their blood up to an emotional level and generally behave like a bunch of road ragers. I picked up the serious trend when, while stepping a video of a fatal incident I noticed that the driver's car was out accelerating the field while pointed sideways; he was being pushed to his death by another driver, while in the background of the incident two other drivers were bashing into each other uniterested in what they were about to crash into.

A couple of months later the evening news featured another incident where a driver was seriously injured and I recall levitating out of the lounge chair, phoning the mentor of that class and turning the air blue with what I was going to do if the class didn't forget the tracks and the specifications and get some new Chief Stewards. The bad behaviour ended immediately and there hasn't been a fatality since.

I was also able to study driver safety as chairman of an Appeals Tribunal where evidence was given which would leave Hans Christian Anderson, the Brothers Grymme and Walt Disney in the dust.

It's interesting in the light of the trend to speed cameras on our roads that we never asked anyone to slow down, and the top classes were achieving lap times of around 11 seconds for four corners and two straights where the terminal velocities were up to 180 km/hr with around 20 cars side by side in a bunch but obtained our safety record by zero alchohol, rollcages and driver restraint, behaviour control, removal of all condensed objects (poles, stationary objects) from the immediate area, and adding a deflective barrier (solid concrete fence).

The other key element was to prevent vehicles of different sizes and speeds racing against each other, resulting in each class becoming experienced in what each car was likely to do next to them - a facet of safety we've recently been discussing in these forums.

While it isn't possible to maintain a perfect standard all of the time, and nor is it possible to guarantee a new trend won't happen tomorrow, in Victoria we haven't had a single driver fatality in over 40 years - zero, and the last bike rider died in the 1980's.

The key was identifying that safety was complex;there was no single action where you could say, for example "slow down" and the accidents could end.

Incidentally, getting back to reaction times TQ racecars (Three Quarter Midgets) the predecessors of Formula 500, because of their low costs drew big crowded fields and there were several fatalities which occurred when someone at the front got crossed up, drivers behind braked sharply and the tail enders couldn't react in time and piled up on them.

In some brilliant lateral thinking it was realised that it would be safer to use the reaction time to get around the incident, since almost always the braking distance was too short anyway.

The rules were change to ourlaw foot brakes and fit hand operated brakes to the rear wheels only, and from that time on if you saw trouble ahead you flicked the steering wheel which sent you off in a different trajectory, sometimes into the deflective fence, sometimes into the infield, but mostly around the incident, and that's ben one of the major factors in ending fatalities for about 45 years.

If you haven't been matching these supersonic times, don't get discouraged - this is only a small part of taking corrective action.

Derby, Tomo and champ to date Keefe have reaction times which would see them qualify as a Formula 1 drivers (if they had the other 99 qualifications like knowing how to optimise a corner), so they are oustanding.

Anyone faster than 50/100 of a second (0.5) is in the top half of the population, but importantly, anyone who is not may perform better than the above people by being smarter and faster at making decisions. For example you don't need fast reflexes if you don't get into a scrape in the first place.

From my study of race drivers I found some leading drivers who were not particularly fast to react, but just never got into trouble, including one of the best who just spun into the infield at the first sign of a pile up. He was always lined up at the restarts.

On the other hand other drivers who earned about the same points at the end of the season were gung ho, fearless and stupid, escaping from harm many times because of lightning fast reflexes, but featuring regularly in the bingles.

quickly followed by tubbopairer who is treading very carefully after showing his resentment at being dragged into housework, and peeling potatoes by putting one of his daughter's bras on the christmas turkey.

2$.......

Relfy, wait two or three seconds in speedway and it's Come to Jesus time.

But "biorythmitis"??? Geez Tubb. Youze must have been well edakated"

Mostly with a cane, Captain.

Donkey, may have been biorhythmitis. Have another go at a different time.

I got 0.191 when sharp and 1 minute plus after a main mealdue to jump penalties and one sheep getting away, 0.288 early morning session

Think there may be something on this situation in Stick and Rudder

Tuberplane sat there looking at his Jabero with the tractor tyre and thought "This is all happening too fast for me" So he took one thing at a time and reassured Le Crappe that what was in his baggage was fairy floss. He loved Corbet Startles, a great example of what you can do with shrink wrap, he went to school in Geelong, the only time he went up in a Blanik the winch cable broke and the pilot managed to force land on the strip, and Le Crappe must have missed the John Deere paint scheme and fox lights on his aircraft.

"Now Camlocks", he said, knowing that you fly out of YSWG (or is that YSWG YSWG) and set a high standard of repartee, we'll do the best we can, but Big2$ was the material Cecil B. deMill would kill for and we'll have to find some other poor unfortunate to pick on".

He looked again at the Jabiru and realised the John Deere tyre on the nose wheel was the cause of his problem. The angle of attack was so steep that the wings couldn't get any Benoulli and since drag was more than lift this was probably the main reason the Jab had travelled most of the Newell Highway without lift off.

As he was changing the tyre he looked up, and heading straight for him was..

Power kerosene used to be good too. No one mucked around then!

I'm staggered at the variations in performance. After a heavy meal was missing targets, an hour later..top gun.

So where are we with this?

Should we ask RAA to put out clearer guidelines?

Should we introduce similar recommendations to Marine rules, we it is ackowledged that poking the nose of a 4.5 m half cab into the path of a tanker which can't possibly stop or swerve to give way is not on?

It's interesting reading all the contributions above, then imagine we are hareing all over a 500 acre paddock at 185 km/hr in all directions with a vertical component added in and appendages that reduce vision.

I must admit I have some difficulty because when I started flying it was pre-deregulation and a lot simpler and black and white.

We're not quite sure. One minute he was giving flying tips, making suggestions for Christmas presents, contributing to this story in code then.......up in a puff of fairy dust!

It was becoming cold so SuperJabPete settled down into the luxurious, shaped seat of the Jabiru 198 (won't go into it), when scorching in from above with an urgent message came Le Crapper...

Bigglesworth is on holidays

Meanwhile back at Geelongger Hadrian Fewer has been trying to raise the $13 trillion hangarage for the release of Ivan Bakery's Grizzle.

He had taken off from Godforsaken in the Grizzle sure that he could outrun the 17 knot storm, but the Grizzle even with full throttle and Hadrain blowing backwards was not up to the task.

After turning back from Barking Heads due to a vision of the caravan parked across the runway seven years before, he had been welcomed to Geelongerr, but didn't see the gold teeth

The sad thing was he had saved up $13 trillion as a down payment on the latest Drifting, but the banks said no, so he handed over the loot and picked up the Drizzle, deciding the safest course home was to follow the roads.

The trouble was he would just latch on to the back of a caravan or cattle truck which had a I:heart:Godforsaken (how's that!) sticker on it and it would pull away out of sight.

Hadrian dreamed of a Jabiru, which was a silly thing to do because up behind him flaps down and a:laugh: out the window for extra drag came SuperJab Pete...

I recently read an accident report of a tiger moth which had stalled when the pilot attempted to turn back to the airfield after an engine failure. His reaction time was calculated to be several seconds - longer than the time taken to develop the stall, so mathematically he didn't stand a change.

Some fliers and racers develop scenarios in their mind so when an emergency happens the reaction is subconscious.

Try this link to check your reaction time to a known task, the average car driver's brake reaction to a known red light is .500 seconds

Try it when you are fit, after a sleepless night, after 1 drink, 2 drinks etc. For me an just evening meal slowed me right down!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/sheep/reaction_version5.swf