onetrack

Whatever happened to the pre-flight, full control-surfaces-deflection test, before takeoff?

Good God, you might as well use a farm stationary engine, as use a HD V-twin. What were they thinking?

Nothing creates problems like vibration does - it will crack frames and mountings, shake accessory mounting fasteners loose, and cause whip in shafts.

Manufacturers spent decades trying to smooth out torsional and longitudinal vibrations in crankshafts, because they created such a host of problems.

Good luck with that DEMAND, Nev. In large organisations, a**e-covering is a perfected art, to hide managerial incompetence, and to ensure the blame travels down to someone way below them.

Do you know what the stains actually are? Bugs? Blood? Mildew? Rust stains? Unknown substance dripped on it? Identifying the stain type is a big help in what product to use, and what technique to use, when getting rid of it.

Simple hand soap, warm water, and a scrubbing brush usually works on most stains. Cold water is necessary to remove bloodstains, as hot water sets (congeals) the blood.

If the stains are difficult to remove or of unknown origin, then the laundry pre-wash stain-remover sprays generally work well. I use Coles Ultra brand pre-wash stain-remover spray, it's only about $2 a bottle.

These pre-wash stain removers are nearly all palm oil, it's a great cleaner and stain remover. Give the stain a spray, leave it for 20 secs to a minute, then scrub it.

You can also try any of the hand cleaners with the scrubbing brush. Ensure you use a hand cleaner that doesn't have grit, or the poly beads in it, these will damage the Dacron.

Another effective stain remover is Citrus oil spray - but use it sparingly, it's quite strong, and using it neat, will possibly strip painted surfaces.

Don't use bleach or strong petroleum-based solvents such as acetone or thinners, these will more than likely damage the surface coating of the Dacron.

Yes, I trust the ABS floggings will continue, until morale improves.

I guess there's one good thing to come out of it - the Defence Signals Directorate staff have had a good workout, checking on the supposed source, of the supposed DOS attack.

You could guess it wouldn't be long, before we had the Hitler rant over the census failure.

They have never been held in high regard; I first thought my great great grandmother was semi literate when she spelled the name of one of her children differently to what was onj the birth certificate. Then I went through the 19th century census results and foun that at each census she changed the birth dates of at least three of the children to have a different eldest child at each census, she changed the spelling and she swapped some of the names; she clearly had a healthy reluctance to give the government anything.

I can remember Dad telling us the family was shocked to find he was actually 78 when he died (from an accident), not the 71 they all thought he was.

I tracked down all his records from the British census, from 1845, when he was born, and found the census report from 1891 where his listed age didn't add up (the British did a census every 10 years, in the years ending in "1").

I'm wagering it was because he went for a job after being in the Army for an extended time, and he was probably concerned he'd be overlooked as too old - so he passed himself off as 7 yrs younger.

They paid some firm $450K to stress test the site, so I wonder what went wrong?

And of course, the head honchos of the ABS obviously deemed keeping another BRB on hand as a spare, as pure wastefulness.

I guess we should be thankful for small mercies - these types of people that we have in the ABS management, could be planning, designing, and installing the NBN instead ..... Oh, hang on ........

Bottom line is, everyone still has until Sept 23rd, 2016, to lodge a census report. All that's required is that you report on the population situation where you were, or as it was, on Aug 9th.

This is where the stupidity and incompetence of the ABS managers has come to the fore.

They wanted a "snapshot" on one day, but made it appear that it had to be produced on Tuesday night, or that was it, you were roasted.

Just as cafes and restaurants go berserk right at meal times, and they need to spread out the rush to make it easier on kitchen and wait staff - so should the ABS have spread out the census-form-filling over several days.

It wasn't necessary for everyone to pile onto the ABS site on Tuesday night, within the space of a couple of hours, to fill out their form - everyone should have been advised that they could fill out the form anytime this week, from Tuesday morning onwards - just as long as the form represented the population situation, as of last Tuesday.

Like many others, I've lost confidence in the ABS website and their ability to manage the on-line content.

I've gone back to the dark ages, requested they send me a paper form - and it will be filled in with one of those old-fashioned pen thingys.

Wow! Those blokes must have been videoed, right about knock-off time! Never seen so many blokes move so fast!

Great video, thanks for the link!

The ATSB is slamming Byron Bailey - claiming one experienced B777 pilots opinion isn't worth a lot more, than the combined experience, calculations and opinions of many hundreds of highly-qualified people in the areas of crash investigation, communications, IT skills, and various other important fields, that the ATSB has utilised in their MH370 search work.

Unfortunately, the ATSB's confidence that they are on the right track, and they will find the wreckage of MH370 is not re-inforced by the simple fact that Fugro and the ATSB have found precisely nothing - in nearly 2.5 years of searching - while amateur sleuths have actually found parts of the aircraft.

Correcting the record

There can only be two reasons why the ATSB search has been unsuccessful - their calculations contain overlooked errors that means they are looking in the wrong place - or the wreckage sank in relatively large pieces into very soft mud, which ensures it is perfectly hidden. The seabed surveys do indicate numerous areas of extremely soft deep silt in the search region, in the range of 50-70 metres deep - let alone the numbers of ravines and canyons that the wreckage could have fallen into.

I'm not sure how good the Fugro sonar is at finding items lodged in canyons and ravines, but I did note that the ATSB said they intended to go over some of this type of seabed again, to see if they had missed anything - which indicates to me that the sonar has its limitations when confronted with underwater canyons and ravines.

More than one wrecked aircraft has never been found, because it lodged in a canyon or ravine on land - let alone on the seabed, 4 kms down.

The ATSB has initiated an investigation, but it will be several months before it's completed. The landing was apparently a precautionary landing after the pilot noticed a low fuel reading - the aircraft didn't actually run out of fuel.

My hunch money is on someone milking the tank overnight, after the pilot filled it the previous afternoon - and didn't re-check it during pre-flight checks.

Investigation: AO-2016-087 - Low fuel and precautionary landing involving Cessna 172, VH-WKB, 30 km N of Broome Airport, WA, on 1 August 2016

I can recall the crash of an Aero Commander that ran out of fuel in the hills near Perth in February 1986. The aircraft was set up for surveying with a magnetometer, and had been refuelled by the pilot in preparation for some flying in a day or two.

However, unbeknowns to the pilot, the aircraft had been run up and taxied around, doing ground testing of on-board equipment, the next day.

Because the aircraft never left the ground, no entry was made in the logbook as regards the engine hours run, nor the fuel used.

The fuel gauges were inoperative, and this was not noted in the maintenance records - however, the pilot was known to be aware of the inoperative fuel gauges.

The pilot arrived the next day and apparently took off without doing a physical fuel level check, as part of the pre-flight checks. He obviously assumed that, because he'd refuelled two days before, the tanks would still be full.

He was wrong, and the aircraft ran out of fuel over the heavily timbered Hills area, N of the Canning Dam, and the result was two fatalities and the total destruction of the aircraft.

Investigation: 198600131 - Aero Commander 500S, 2km North of Canning Dam WA, 27 February 1986

Old K - Yep, been there, done that (lost power steering). It sure got my attention pretty rapidly. Suffered a brake boost failure, too, on a Holden ute (inside of manifold vacuum hose peeled off and blocked the vacuum line).

That got my attention, pretty quickly, too! - particularly as I'd just roared up over a dam bank in a paddock, to check the water level!

I can't see where a moderately competent driver would be fazed by either a power-steering boost failure, or even a brake-boost failure.

However, just looking at the salvage yards tells me there there's an awful lot of car drivers out there, who can't even keep a fully-operational vehicle upright, and steering straight, on perfectly good roads.

This is why all the current vehicles are being fitted with so much automation - anti-swerve controls, hill-descent controls, anti-lock braking, collision-avoidance controls, even lane-drifting controls.

It's all heading towards full automation of driving, because there's so many idiots who just can't drive, or respond appropriately to any out-of-the-ordinary event.

Slow reflexes, inadequate training, just plain carelessness or lack of attention behind the wheel - the reasons are multitudinous - but the designers say their sensors and control systems have a higher level of reliability than humans.

They are very likely to be right. Personally, I'm pretty much old school, like most on here, I'd guess - I learnt to drive in the early '60's by broadsiding Holden utes around sharp bends on gravel roads, just to find the limits of Holden ute handling, and my own skill levels. After a few excursions into the bush, you learn what your limits are.

I still much prefer my vehicle control skills to those of the manufacturers - but I don't think I'm going to be able to, for much longer - the drive is on to take all our hard-won driving skills from us, because we obviously can't be trusted with them!

Nev, you rely on a myriad of sensors to keep working when you drive your car down the highway in heavy traffic. The stats say the most dangerous part of piloting is the drive to the airport.

Soon, you'll be relying on sensors to drive you down that highway, when automated cars are lobbed on us, and you're just along for the ride.

Electric-power-assist steering, common on most vehicles today, relies on sensors. The vehicle designers have designed the system to have redundancy.

Go to a minesite and watch the multiple 300-400 tonne dump trucks and 800 tonne excavators all operating around the minesite in massive synchronicity - without an operator to be seen. All done by ECU's and sensors.

You'd better believe the sensors are coming, to rule our lives on a daily basis.

It'll never work, I tell ya! Look at what happened to all them Zeppelin thingys!

By the way - whatever happened to Bondy's airship?? I can remember when I was living on my gold mine about 60kms N of Norseman in the mid-1980's, and they drove it from Sydney to Perth.

They passed right over my minesite (which is right alongside the Coolgardie-Norseman Rd) in the middle of the day, at a pretty modest height - I would estimate at maybe only 1000 feet.

It was quite an impressive sight. It appeared to me their navigation merely involved following the highway.

EDIT - Big website (link below) on the airships (with a general slant towards British ones) - but interesting, the site is called "The Airship Heritage Trust" - sort of like they're talking about hugely historic items that need saving.

Yet they claim that "many are still operating today". Not sure where they're operating, because they sure don't make the news any more.

Airshipsonline : Airships : SkyShip 600

Why do they still stuff around with carbs in this day and age? They're essentially just crude jugs pouring fuel down the neck of the engine.

Car engines have nearly all been EFI for over 30 years. It's proven technology, it's reliable, it delivers fuel virtually right to the combustion chamber at the right time, and with great precision.

I don't understand why a little more complexity is shied away from. Aeroplanes are already complex machines, big jets reflect that to the nth degree - yet, today, it's a newsworthy event, when something goes even slightly wrong with a big jet.

Increased complexity doesn't necessarily translate to unreliability - particularly when you can add redundancy, and even multiple redundancy. Nothing to stop EFI from having a backup ECU, it's not like electronics are a huge weight penalty.

Large factory for free for a few years courtesy of the Local government.

O.K. Just let us know, what the compensation agreements are, that are part of getting this deal??

(parts of post removed - Mod)

I mean to say ... a FEW YEARS ... for FREE??

I think I can now begin to understand why you're operating out of China. I've heard of the number of Chinese "ghost cities" - but I had no idea that also included ghost factories.

The local boat builders tried to score an Austral Fisheries boat-building contract. They wanted rent relief from the State Govt, for the area of industrial land they intended to expand onto - a miserable AU$4.9M in rent forgone over 5 years.

The State Govt refused. The contract went to Madagascar instead. No wonder we don't make anything here any more.

I trust the new shed resembles this, in dimensions? ....

You don't want to run yourself short on working area - and you just know, that every shed you end up in, is always just a whisker too small ....

Now it looks like there wasn't any DOS attack at all - it's just a BS story to cover up the fact that 5M Aussies all got up from the couch at the same time - right when the ABC News ended - and they all tried to log on to the Census site at the same time, and it just simply crashed and burnt.

So much for the "1 million people logging on at the same time", test. Don't these clowns understand that there's 24,000,000 people in Australia, and you can virtually clock what most are doing at any one time by the TV programs playing?

I'll wager all the power station meters show a power spike, as well - right as all the kettles get switched on at once, too, straight after major TV programmes end.

There's no sign of the MLG being extended in any previous photos I've seen - those taken right about evac time. If "gear up" had been selected, wouldn't the gear have cycled right through, until the uplocks engaged?

It looks to me like the gear fell down when the hull was lifted - leading one to presume the gear was partially cycled up, but the uplocks hadn't engaged.

What I find interesting, is the relatively little signs of hull and engine pod scarring on the underside - which I thought would have been pretty substantial, when you have 250 tonnes skating on its belly (well, on engine pods initially, then belly), starting at somewhere around 150 kts, and continuing for perhaps 1200-1500 feet? I would have expected some pretty major scars.

It certainly looks like Boeing build 'em tough alright - I reckon a few other Brand X's would have broken the fuselage in at least a couple of places.

The Gumbyment paid a half million dollars to a company to analyse and run a dummy load test to make certain it wouldn't crash.

And those project managers wouldn't even remotely consider, that a website and project like this - containing a vast amount of prized personal information - would be like a golden egg prize for hackers.

Tried to access it at 9:30PM AWST last night, only got the message that the "site was extremely busy, and I should try again in 15 mins time".

Tried again about 11:30PM and it was still the same message. Today, the message is ....

"The Census website is unavailable

We apologise for the inconvenience. There will be no fines for completing the Census after August 9. We will keep you updated."

I hate to think what will happen when we really need some serious IT efforts, such as in a war footing. It looks like we'll be back to chalk and slate, and rolling out field wiring to communicate.

Gee, those crane operators are pretty careless! Don't they understand you can seriously damage an aircraft by slinging chains around it??

So .. does this mean, the design should now be renamed, "The Midnight Design Special"? Let's hope the components are not being sourced from "Midnight Spares".

Haven't seen anyone mention the lag in spool-up time for the engines, either, once the throttles are shoved forward.

I've seen 6-7 seconds mentioned as the time before full thrust is available, after the throttle movement.

I'm guessing even 3 seconds lag would mean a lot, when you've either touched the runway, or you're only 15-20 feet off it.

Stickshaker, have you seen the size of many people today! The official figures are, 63% of the nation is seriously overweight, and probably 20% is clinically obese - meaning that their obesity is seriously impinging on their health and movement ability.

When I said "stuck", I wasn't actually referring to the exits themselves, more along the lines of getting stuck trying to get out of their seats and into the aisles.

Has there ever been a verifiable instance of pax grabbing their cabin luggage in an actual crash, that has actually created and resulted in fatalities? Haven't seen this in any report I've read.

I seem to recall the greatest problem is trying to get 200-300 pax out of the exits in an orderly and rapid manner. Isn't the evac timing supposed to be 90 secs max? Not easy with panicky pax who often behave irrationally.

Bodies actually jamming the exit as they try to get through, 4 at a time, would be my main concern - and I note that the large Manchester crash death toll was caused by this.

Then there's the problem of obese or unfit people - of whom, I see many, on the commercial flights I take.

These people would pose a huge problem in trying to organise rapid evacuation, with fat people getting stuck, and the unfit causing blockages.

Personally, I think locking the overhead lockers is a waste of time and $$'s. It would only make those desperate to access their cabin baggage, spend more valuable time trying to break the locking mechanisms.

I reckon there's a need for experienced pax with an authoritative manner and abilities, to be selected as additional evacuation controllers, when they board.

In a panic situation, you need a few additional competent and authoritative people taking control of panicked pax, and guiding them.

The cabin crew are certainly the main force there - but they need helpers scattered through the cabin, who can help prevent the problems of cabin-baggage grabbers, and who can insist authoratively that people just GO! Sort of like a big rough NCO yelling at you!

Then there's the problem of footwear. Young women wearing high heels must pose a threat to slides - yet they need decent footwear that protects their feet and which enables them to run from the wreck. 49ºC air temp is 75-80ºC tarmac temp.

IMO, suitable covered footwear has to be worn - and this needs to be stated before boarding. Thongs should be a no-no.

Then, there's the cultural thing. As a relatively wealthy Westerner, I'm not going to waste time grabbing cabin baggage that I know can be easily replaced.

But for someone from a 3rd world country, and of a lower wealth level, it must be very difficult to stop them from grabbing cabin baggage, that represents real loss to them, if burnt.