Innholdsfortegnelse for May-June 2016 i Australian Flying

Australia’s new Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, the National Party’s Darren Chester MP, has had plenty of exposure to the general aviation community over his political career. Chester, the federal member for Gippsland in Victoria, took up his new role in March, replacing the retiring Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development Warren Truss. The regional development role, which includes airports, was taken over by Fiona Nash MP. Chester started his political career in 2008, when he was elected to the National Party safe seat of Gippsland. Two years later he became Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Regional Transport, and Parliamentary Secretary for Defence in 2013. Last year, the Turnbull government elevated him to Assistant Minister for Defence, before handing him the Infrastructure and Transport portfolio in a cabinet reshuffle. Other…

Jet manufacturers Embraer and Cessna are experiencing greater demand for their larger single-pilot jets than the smaller models, according to the 2015 General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) delivery figures. Embraer’s 10-seat Phenom 300 has swept all before it in the executive jet market, topping the sales list every year for the past three years. In 2015, the Brazilian manufacturer turned out 70 jets, eclipsing all including their own six-seat Phenom 100, only 12 of which found their way into service. Over in Wichita, Kansas, traditional market leader Cessna saw similar results on the delivery sheets: the nine-seat Citation M2 has consistently out-sold the smaller Mustang. Bundled together, deliveries of the larger jets out-numbered the smaller jets at a ratio of 5.5:1. With customer demand for the Phenom 100 averaging only…

Charter pilots are a special breed of commercial pilot. They are resourceful, flexible and adaptable. You could call them professional decision makers. Not for them the cockpit full of coloured screens and illuminated switches. Not for them the army of support personnel to make sure they push-back on time. Instead, the average charter pilot works in an environment where they plan, prepare and execute a flight with as little as 30 minutes notice; where the customer can change the destination in-flight or add another requirement with no regard to the pilot’s workload. A good charter pilot gets it done, and does it safely and professionally. It’s ad-hoc aviation at both its best and its worst, so it takes a special kind of person to be a great charter pilot, one…

Ask two-time New South Wales aerobatics champion and flying instructor Joel Haske about partial power loss and he’ll recall a harrowing few minutes in a Pitts Special out of Bankstown Airport. Taking off on the first flight after an engine overhaul, Haske’s plan was to orbit over the airfield for around 10 minutes to make sure everything was working as advertised before setting off cross country. But he never made it. Lifting off, he was approaching 500 feet and about to begin his crosswind turn when his engine suddenly sounded like it had swallowed something horrible and all acceleration stopped. By then an experienced Pitts pilot and instructor through his Bankstown school Red Baron Pilot Training, Haske was all too aware of that a power-off Pitts glides about half as…

Cobalt Aircraft stunned the general aviation market in March when they announced they had taken US$50 million in orders for their futuristic Co50 Valkyrie since the books opened in November last year. The Valkyrie is a five-seat single-engined piston with a canard wing and a 350-hp turbo engine driving a pusher propeller. The aircraft is projected to have a top speed of 260 knots, making it the fastest piston single on the market. Following the public launch on 12 November 2015, the fully-certified version has seen significant interest from investors, pilots and travel enthusiasts around the globe, including 29 orders in the first 24 hours. Some of the early customers are believed to have been from Australia. “Cobalt’s initial pre-orders have exceeded my expectations,” said Frenchman David Loury, founder and…

More and more people are using flight planning software and apps these days. The problem with that is some gaps are starting to appear in some basic skills. There are a lot of people who would immediately respond to the previous sentence by suggesting going back to paper maps, whiz wheels, pencils, compass, rulers and dividers. I am not of that school and am quite definitely a proponent of Electronic Flight Bags (EFB). I believe these holes have appeared due to a lack of training. A responsible flight school/instructor will add the teaching of EFBs as part of a syllabus, even though it seems to be still not specified by CASA in the Manual of Standards (MOS). The wording in the MOS is still taken to exclude EFBs, but I…

Australia’s great sandy outback is one of the delights of being aviators in this country. From a great height it is inspiring, colourful and so vast you can feel very alone sitting at 10,000 feet above it. But there is probably no more lonely feeling in the outback than sitting at zero feet next to a desolate runway with a flat nosewheel tyre and nothing but the irritating caw of the local crows to keep you company. You’re stranded, and the nearest LAME is 150 nm away in Busted Flat and can’t get here for another week. It’s enough to wreck your great adventure. But believe it or not, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) is on your side with this one. Under the Schedule 8 maintenance rules, with the…

It was inevitable that manufacturers of high-quality headsets would go down the wireless road. For a long time aviators have been nagging them to do something about the entangling coils that tether their headsets to the comm jacks, fouling arms and seatbelts, tugging persistently with every head turn, impeding sometimes the simplest writing task. Lightspeed, makers of some of the industry’s best-quality headsets, has responded with the Tango wireless, adding new freedoms of neck movement without trashing audio quality in the process. Like other wireless headset manufacturers, Lightspeed also found that journeyman wireless connectivity technology like Bluetooth and WiFi simply don’t cut it in an aircraft cockpit for comms, so they developed their own system, which they’ve called Lightspeed Link. Together with active noise reduction (ANR) technology and light, durable…

The Australian helicopter industry and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) must work together to solve the issues of Part 61 training regulations if the industry is to maintain a flow of new pilots, according to industry association secretary Rob Rich. Rich pointed to a dwindling number of pilots achieving the Air Transport Pilot Licence Helicopter, or ATPL(H) and its “almost unachievable” Multi-Crew Coordination Training qualification. “The troubled ATPL changes have been stalled for almost two years with only a handful of helicopter pilots being able to obtain an ATPL(H),” Rich said. The issue of new licences dropped dramatically to only 44. “When the annual loss rate due to retirements is considered a loss rate of 9% per annum must be met by new ATPL(H) graduates. The fiscal year ending…

Airservices Australia’s ambitious plan to unify the military and civilian air traffic control systems is regarded by many as the biggest and most complex project in Australian aviation history. The OneSKY Australia program involves Airservices and the Department of Defence acquiring a new system to replace the defence and civilian ATC automation platforms delivered in the late 1990s. Air traffic management in Australia depends largely on the capability of these complex IT platforms, which provide surveillance data, data link messages, flight plans, voice communication and various tools to the air traffic controllers. While there is some sharing of surveillance data and standardisation of procedures today, Airservices and Defence essentially operate different platforms with different regulatory, training and system support arrangements. Each serves both civil and military airspace users in different…

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) poured salt into an open wound in March this year when they released a report examining engine failures in aircraft with a maximum take-off weight of 800 kg or less. Although it covered failures of all engine makes, the report focused sharply on Jabiru, exacerbating the angst the recreational and general aviation communities already had over limitations the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) placed on Jabiru engines. Those limitations, which came into force in December 2014, have had a damaging effect on Jabiru Aircraft; something the company freely admits. The ATSB report found that 40% of all failures within the scope of the report (132 out of 322) involved Jabiru engines, with the engine through-bolts and valves the main sources of failure. Jabiru has…

In February 1966 Australian light aircraft manufacturer Victa turned out the lights on a factory that had produced 169 aircraft, in a move that even half a century later still prompts passionate discussion on what might have been. The sale was born of frustration. Victa’s Australian designed and manufactured Airtourer, after just five years in production with 169 built, was facing increasing competition from an avalanche of American Beechcraft, Cessnas and Pipers churned out by the hundreds to service a world-wide general aviation boom. The Australian Government declined to provide a subsidy that would have helped Victa survive until it could ramp up production to compete with the interlopers. It also decided against Victa’s offer to provide a basic trainer for the RAAF. So Victa eventually cut its losses, ceased…

One of the most galling things in general aviation is to conduct a flight with the utmost professionalism and attention to detail, then have the smugness wiped off your face by a landing that ranks highly on your list of the worst ever. I have to confess I did this down at Moorabbin Airport in February, and the whole incident was repeated a matter of only minutes later. But there were two factors that redeemed my performance–I hope–in the eyes of the two instructors behind me: it was my first ever landing in a Piper Seminole, and it was in a full-motion flight simulator. Out on the flight line, the real aeroplanes had been spared the agony. But that’s what synthetic training devices and flight simulators are all about: getting…

it was such a thrill to work towards a common goal and to watch our creation come to life. When I ordered the tail kit for my RV12 I wasn’t exactly sure how my wife would react. As a trial a few months earlier, I told her that I had ordered a TIG welder. I hadn’t really ordered a welder but she didn’t know that. Her reaction to both was one of initial skepticism followed by acceptance. I was surprised when I started building how she was keen to participate too. Building the RV12 has now become our project; something that we now do together and both enjoy. She didn’t even get upset when I gave her half the avionics as her birthday present. Mel and I live in an…

Money is the enemy that leads to potentially dangerous situations – like this accident. Date of Accident: 17 September 2002 Time of Accident: 0900Z Aircraft Registration: ZS-FYP Type of Aircraft: Piper PA-32-300 Pilot-in-command Licence type: PPL Licence Valid: yes Age: 29 Total Flying Hours: 63 Hours on Type: Unknown Last point of departure: Middleburg (60 miles E of Pretoria) Next point of intended landing: Middleburg Location of the accident site: 40 miles N of Middleburg Meteorological Information: Fine Number of people on board: 1+3 No. of people injured: 3 No. of people killed: 1 SYNOPSIS The pilot with one passenger departed Ermelo at 0815Z for a flight to Middelburg to pick up another two passengers. The intention of the flight was to carry out a scenic flight over one of…