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Showing posts from 2010

Your Street

From the Sunday Herald-Sun newspaper on The Basin, just down the road from us: " Local councils are filled with petty bureaucrats obsessed with over-regulating the lives of suburban residents." Reminds me of the tree saga. We called the council tree expert as we were worried about one tree. He said that was OK but identified two others that should be removed - that was 10 years ago and all are still doing well. At the same time we mentioned a dead tree next to the road just at the front of our place. They weren't interested in removing it. Electricity company sent me a letter demanding removal as it was near the power lines and unsafe - I told them to talk to council. It was indeed unsafe - it came down on the road one night, fortunately no-one was injured. The there was the spa pool fence. I rang the council and was told that I needed a permit for the fence around my portable spa pool. I filled in the form and sent the money. Got a phone call from them a few days la

Too Dumb To Fly

Editorial in the Sept-Oct issue of AOPA's magazine , Australian Pilot. "A group of us was standing around the other day discussing the death of a fellow pilot in a crash. The newspaper story on the accident which took the pilot's life (and that of his passenger), told the usual story about what a great bloke he had been and how he had died "doing what he loved." We all made the appropriate noises about how terrible the whole thing was for the man's family, especially for the family of the passenger who died. Then one member of our group muttered that the crash had not come as a surprise to him and that he would never have flown with the pilot. "He was an accident waiting to happen, that bloke," he said. Others mumbled their agreement, obviously reluctant to speak of the dead. I hadn't knowm the pilot and so pressed them for more information. Gradually, the members of the group who had known the dead pilot, admitted more and more information

Low Level Aerobatic Peer Reviews

Just been reading some articles at Avweb. The first, "Lucky or Good" http://www.avweb.com/news/probablecause/probable_cause_62_lucky_or_good_198053-1.html "There's something about the typical experienced-pilot's personality that is antithetical to safety. I'm not an expert in analyzing personalities -- though I know what I like -- but it seems the very traits that make someone a "good stick" also make that same skilled pilot a safety risk." and the other, "We Worry About the Wrong Things and It's Killing Us" http://www.avweb.com/news/pilotlounge/pilots_lounge_122_we_worry_about_the_wrong_things_196933-1.html "My friend just can't figure out why we Americans so blithely accept the true risks we face while continuing to smoke, over-eat, not wear seatbelts and not raise heck about hospital procedures, yet we get ourselves all in a twitter over the low risk items and take all sorts of expensive and often-redundant preca

Judging Again

I was at an aerobatic club meeting recently and observed some of the discussion about judging. There was criticism of the standard of judging and it seemed to me that criticism was directed at the Unlimited judges of which I was one. We didn't use the Fairplay System where the judges would expect an analysis of the scoring and a ranking of the judges - a pity as us judges have no knowledge of the basis of that criticism. The first that some may know about it may be when the proposed judging committee comprising "senior pilots" decides that they are no longer wanted at the contest. The Fairplay System would tell all where we stood although I wonder how it deals with a majority of the judges not detecting errors worthy of a hard zero. (I admit to missing the odd thing while judging at the nationals - no-one says that judging Unlimited is easy) Those of us who didn't compete and just participated as judges will probably respond in the following manner if this i

Big Tour 1996

All of this is just from memory of events about 15 years ago so if anything is incorrect please just treat it as fiction. We had two Pitts S-2Bs travelling about 1000 nm or so to Oshkosh and we were taking it in turns to lead the other in formation for one leg at a time. I had Cindy with me in the front seat. She hadn't been in a little aeroplane before at all. A little bit of baggage. Full fuel. Cruise at 145 kts TAS gave a safe range in still air of about 220 nm plus ½ hr reserve. We'd normally plan legs of no more than 200 nm. Mark led for the first leg. After departing Afton airfield we immediately turned right through the blind canyon. Sounds dramatic but we were rapidly climbing so always plenty of options in case of an engine failure. We were soon at 12,000 ft to get us over the 10,000 ft ridge. A while later a climb to 14,000 ft to skip over a higher ridge. At the first refuelling stop I took the lead. The tower ignored several calls from me in N727PS (that was th