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  1. M

    Article about General Aviation

    All of the airports I used to fly out of are gone now and never coming back. Airports simply don't generate enough money to offset the value of the land near urban areas. The airport I learned at is still a bean field, but the line of houses of the surrounding developments are only a stones...
  2. M

    Traveling with a twin engine 2 stroke airplane?

    One of the things that contributed to Lindberg's decision was that the Wright Whirlwind was the first aero engine with a published TBO. About 500 hours IIRC.
  3. M

    Traveling with a twin engine 2 stroke airplane?

    This was Charles Lindberg's observation. The tri-motors others were trying to fly across the Atlantic required all three engines to fly when fully loaded, hence tripling the likelihood of a fatal engine out. That's why the Spirit of St. Louis was a single. Instead of a featherable prop, what...
  4. M

    R 4360 Wasp Major

    One of my instructors in college worked on B-36s (after flying B-17s and B-29s). He said it was a rare day indeed when one would come back with six still turning. It was hard to get cool air to the back rank when the engines were mounted on the front of an airplane. The pusher configuration...
  5. M

    TV/Movies: Most stupid depiction of Aviation?

    Blue Thunder
  6. M

    Cockpit recorders !! visual and sound !!

    How much investigative resources should be applied when the answer is going to be either a, b or c...just like the last 1,000 times? The purpose of an investigation is to discover the unknown, not to confirm the known. Airline accidents almost always involve some very unusual series of events...
  7. M

    Cockpit recorders !! visual and sound !!

    A union contract between unions and employers would not be binding on the government.
  8. M

    How safe are these ampibian planes we can home build or buy ready made ??

    No. Not necessarilly. "If it saves just one life its been worth while" is the eternal cry of the Prohibitionist. Prohibitionists aren't interested in making life better. They are only interested in controlling other people's lives. Carried to its obvious conclusion, this phrase would...
  9. M

    TV/Movies: Most stupid depiction of Aviation?

    Accurately depicting military flight operations would put the audience to sleep. There's a lot of procedures and checklists to run through.
  10. M

    TV/Movies: Most stupid depiction of Aviation?

    That was Sky King. What's-his-name was her uncle IIRC (It's always uncle-neice. Why is that?). The plane was a Cessna 310. Saturday morning TV. About the same time as Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges. Aaaahhh, the Olden Days. I don't think there's been a good aviation movie (as in good flying...
  11. M

    Single Engine Water Crossings

    Bottom of this page has a table of survival times immersed in water. Even an immersion suit only extends you endurance in cold water.
  12. M

    Single Engine Water Crossings

    Mustang survival immersion suit.
  13. M

    Single Engine Water Crossings

    I was on an airliner going from Michigan to Wisconsin one cold winter day. I looked down on the expanse of broken jagged ice on Lake Michigan and thought, "no place to ditch". Even a flying boat would be crushed attempting to set down. The good part of single engine flying is a failure will...
  14. M

    Interstellar - or planetar aircraft

    Orion used a series of small nuclear bombs released behind the space craft. The blast waves pushed against a giant base plate mounted on shock absorbers. I believe the concept was used in the movie Deep Impact. The ship would have to be huge, the number of bombs would be huge, the radiation...
  15. M

    Horizontal Tail (for a twin boom pusher) - In propwash or Out?

    While pro and con lists are a good start, it might help to try and weight the values. For example, how much weight difference is there between the the H and inv. U? If the structure is essentially continuous up the fins, would there be any difference? That would eliminate that parameter...
  16. M

    Interstellar - or planetar aircraft

    An Earth based rail gun would be hundreds of miles long and the projectile (hard to call it a space ship) would come out of the muzzle at over 17,000 mph (orbital velocity) (OBTW. Mach is a poor way of measuring orbital speeds since the speed of sound is not a constant.) Even if the rail gun...
  17. M

    Interstellar - or planetar aircraft

    It was fiberglass. It was an ablation shield. An instructor of mine at school had worked on the Mercury program. Mercury had an aluminum honeycomb shock absorber behind the seat to absorb the impact of hitting the water at umpteen miles per hour. They needed to test the shock absorbing...
  18. M

    Interstellar - or planetar aircraft

    IIRC (always increasingly suspect) the heat shields of the Mercury and Gemini capsules were basically fiberglass. It doesn't melt. It sublimates, going directly from solid to gas.
  19. M

    Privatizing Space Flight

    Somebody's tossed out the idea of colonizing Venus by building a cloud city that floats in the upper atmosphere. Star Wars as prophecy.
  20. M

    Interstellar - or planetar aircraft

    IIRC...The first Ariane V was lost because Arianespace, the European consortium, used the guidance computer from the Ariane IV assuming it would work without change. The Ariane V had a different trajectory than the smaller Ariane IV. When the Ariane IV guidance computer saw what it thought was...
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