"Even if all cooling systems failed, explained Mr Riis-Johansen, the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing due to the permafrost on the mountainside."
Hmm..their backup/failsafe cooling system is permafrost. Cue the global warming inducted failure discussion.
Personally, I get a real kick out of playing Destroy All Humans with the invincibility cheat turned on. I get to whack all the bad guys I want, breeze through missions with amazing weapons, and generally run amok. Yes, I played the game all the way through and enjoyed it, but for me, a lot of the replay value comes from being able to bypass some of the more difficult hoops I had to jump through the first time. If there wasn't a way to breeze through parts of the game, I'd probably have re-sold it a week after I got it. I've had it a year now. I can say the same thing for the Ratchet and Clank series. Sometimes it's more fun to cheat. Just ask Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa!
We're a contract engineering shop, so things never last that long. Each time a new project starts, it gets it's own repoitory. Once a project is closed, it gets archived locally and offsite, so things remain nice and tidy.
That said, we've only been using it for about 18 months, so our experience level with the long term project impact of lots of SVN traffic is low. It's something we'll be looking at soon though, since the server that SVN lives on is an old box, and the drives are getting full with all of the repositories.
I didn't actually configure SVN here, I just use it like it's going out of style. It's set up on a WinTel box using TortiseSVN and svnserv, using ssh+svn, without apache. The TortoiseSVN howto is here, in case you didn't already see it. The rumor was that our guru gave up on apache+svn too.
SSH, no apache or other bells and whistles. Our offiste folks are at an office connected with a VPN backbone, so they see our local server transparently.
After several years of working with SourceSafe and it's truly braindead way of dealing with atomic commits and binary files (not to mention the massive data loss problems we had with it) my office switched to SVN for EVRYTHING. All employees use it for everything, from notes on ideas in Notepad or BBEdit or pico, to massive software projects with hundreds of files and over a million lines of code. Using TortiseSVN to put it into the windows desktop shell, it's nearly transparent, and it allows atomic commits to work intelligently, making the engineers who work with programs that have multiple files (hardware in myb case, a half dozen files for each PCB design, it works even better for revision control for the software guys), which has allowed us to recover a really insane amount of time we'd been handing over to M$SS for maintainance and babysitting. Additionally, the (automagically compressed) repository size for 11 hardware guys and 13 software guys with a year's worth of code and binaries (2M lines and hundreds of MBs, local, respectiively) is a paltry 180MB. That's with upwards of 20 commits on everyone's data every day. I admit, I sound like I drank the SVN kool-aid, and I'm OK with that. The next step is to install it at home and use it to back up/home,/documents and/music on my various and sundry computers (seperate server, weekly media swap, etc).
I think you're right. The install I saw that was the very closest to what was postulated further up the chain was one where the sector antennas were on the corners of a building, and the heliax ran from the center of the rooftop like spokes on a wheel out to the 4 clusters of antennas. The rest had the cabinets either at the base of the tower, whether it was on the dirt or on top of a building, or the sector groupings had their own cabinets, and the heliax runs were measured in single digits of feet (well, ok, there were only 2 like that). Then there were the water tower installations, the tubular tower installations, and the other oddballs where the antenna runs were encased completely in a grounded metal tube, save a few feet on either end to connect to the racks or the antennas.
UCI agrees with us, by the way. Sector antenna sites are very safe, and the antennas used have incredibly good pattern control.
Different carriers and equipment I guess. The ones I serviced, either outside or on buildings, placed the transciever cabinet as close to the base of the tower as possible. I did have a bunch of installations where the swtichgear to the trunk system was elsewhere, but the RF stuff was always at the tower. I don't miss the work though...on rainy days like this, it's nice to have an office job.
Cell site base stations are self contained. The only things that run to them are the mains supply cables, which are indeed beefy, but that's 60Hz, not the UHF that mobile phones run at. The antennas used for cell site base stations also have a decidedly toroidal or sectoral radiation pattern. Every one I've seen in the last 10 years has used a set of sector patch antennas, which have excellent pattern control (energy goes in a set direction with set limits, not anywhere else). It's in the best interests of the cell companies to minimized the radiation that goes straight down in favor of the radiation that goes out, as straight down mostly wastes power that could be used to increase coverage somewhere else.
I don't doubt that there seems to be a link, but whether or not it's causal needs some very carefully done science, not a newspaper story.
It's more than a bad idea, it's a forking NIGHTMARE. Even for non-hams like me, the radiated fields from the lines will cause all kinds of problems. BPL produces a horiffic amount of conducted line noise, in violation of the FCC's own regulations, and further pollute an already overcrowded section of bandwidth (DC to light). BPL may be good for the power companies' profit margins, but it's bad for EVERYONE.
The former USSR tried something like that back in the early 80s. In my dad's copy of Flight of the Old Dog, there's a press clipping that's the only record I've ever found of it. I'll post the text later if anyone's interested. Basically, a high energy (free electron?) laser right out of Real Genius was being built.
I thought as much. My thoughts are in another comment. I especially liked the flying wires from the twistlok sockets to the bus rails in the dimmer racks, and the complete and total lack of any strain relief for the fragile (looks like Extron or Gepco?) RGB cable, which was left hanging from the BNCs.
There wasn't a whole lot to it, except that the broken sprinkler pipe soaked 4 projectors worth a combined $270k US while they were running. The real story was that the guys from Christie turned them off, mopped up, dried them out, and flipped them back on for the rest of the show. Pro gear is cool. It was also interesting when they mistakenly routed the bob scare evac notice to our exhibition hall, instead of the empty one the staff were using for evac drills on the other end of the building. There were some pictures taken as it was happening (the waterfall that is) that were posted, but I can't seem to find them now. If I dig them up I'll post a link for/.to break.
Indeed. Specifically, I see a video switcher (all those BNCs you see are fo rvideo I believe), and what looks like the back of some control equipment from a company I can't remember the name of.
The rack appears to be holding a standard compliment of either 64 or 128 channels of dimming, and also seems to be used as a stand. The soco connectors are all naked, the twist locks are L21-20s or L21-30s (120/208 3 phase 4 pole 5 wire connectors, 20 or 30 amps per phase) and are receptacles, indicating that maybe the distro in the box is being used to provide normal 120V power from a 3 phase patch point, and there just happened to be some dimming in the rack along with it. Not terribly uncommon at large conventions.
That was a cabinet holding, what look to this ex-stagehand, like a rack of dimmers, not servers. My guess is one channel of dimming or perhaps audio (though no one uses socopex for audio do they?) went up in smoke. It happens sometimes. Ask about the waterfall over the Christie Digital booth at NSCA 2005...
My dad used to bring a Compaq Luggable home from work so I could play Rogue with my mom. I have fond memories of sitting at the dining room table, or in the den, debating the various advantages of a particular spell and a particular monster-filled situation. It was the best ever. DOS 1.0a was the order of the day too, before MS was big.
My DT770 Pros have the same effect. I get ~15dB of noise reduction, which lets me enjoy the music at a level compatible with a ringing phone or a speaking coworker. The velvet ear pads are removable and washable, and are extrememly comfortable.
Indeed it is. 15 years of studio work banged that into my brain something fierce. Late nights and sleep dep seem to have clobbered by ability to spell.
Or maybe I've spent too much time reading the/. editor's posts.
You mean omnidirectional, not sinusoid. Cardoid describes the polar pattern of the mic, and will tend to reject sounds that are behind the mic, like the computer fans.
Let's hear it for the infamous fiber-seeking backhoes!
I spent most of last month waiting for SBC to un-b0rk my DSL and phone service when the fiber loop I'm on was cut by the village (while they were installing new street lamps, 30 blocks away).
A number of years back, Tom Danley of Intersonics (and later Servodrive) designed a rotary vane transducer for low frequency reproduction. If you check with USPTO, you'll find the patent. It worked wonderfuly. It was efficient, and it went down to 1-2Hz. Then it was sold to Phoenix Gold. Like they seems ot have a knack for, they took it, re-engineered it until it was so unreliable, and performed so poorly, that the PG Cyclone (Google is your friend) became a footnote in history.
It looks like someone noticed the patent expired. It also looks like they don't quite undertsand the technology. The original worked in about a 6cuft box. This one seems to need to be run as a ducted dipole? No thanks. I'll take Contrabasses any day.
Indeed, I only plan to carry a chute as a last resort option, and only because it's cheaper than a BRS cannister. For now. It's amazing how low the fire risk is with a composite airplane. When the fuselage parts ways with the wings, there's very little metal to spark and ignite the fuel, and the design of the wing tanks on the EZ is such that they tend to seperate intact. It's pretty cool. In mine, I'm planning on doing the widely-accepted center sump mod, which does away with the sight glasses AND the transfer switch, and pipes both wing tanks into a central sump, unifying the fuel system and allowing a much simpler flow and capacitive gauge design. I'm more worried about rollover and stuck rudders than fuel in the cockpit. Avgas is pretty safe compared to auto gasoline. It's got a much lower vapor pressure and is harder to spontaneously ignite. I like that.
N555JD crashed because of mutual stupidity. Burt Rutan commented on how he couldn't believe Denver screwed up, not even a little, until he simulated the same action in an EZ, and it surprised and alarmed him how quickly things got out of shape. The builder did something dumb by requiring that the pilot go thru those contortions (including unstrapping) to change the selector position, and something dumber by not placarding it in any way. Denver was dumb because he didn't refuel before he left, and he wasn't familiar enough to know that the half-full mark on the sight gauges was far less than that in reality. It's a real tragedy, because it could have been prevented so easily by either party. I only harp on it because uninformed people tend to pile-on to the homebuilts-are-dangerous bandwagon. That drives me nuts.
The O-360 is a great motor, but it's a lot heavier than the 235, which messes with an already precarious CG in the EZ. I'm debating a massaged 235, or maybe a 320, with electronic ignition and maybe fuel injection, and downdraft cooling. Yes, it's money, but it does away with weight that can help to offset the engine mass. Couple that with a reasonably efficient three-bladed constant speed prop, and I could go places. Fast. The idea of Infinity retracts is also very tempting, especially for the increase in mileage, but it's all hanger flying until I find templates, since my EZ plans came without them, and they're critical for the rest of the construction process.
I'm glad the TIG thing is working out so well for you. I've heard it's not terribly difficult to start with, and I'm looking into a rig myself. Which one did you end up with out of curiosity?
Casting is an interest of mine, but I prefer the method of assembling machined parts with molten metal. Casting requires a furnace, fuel, and a whole benchload of casting accessories, cope tools, rams, and a ball mill if you want to get cheap casting sand, among other things. Not really my cup of tea.
Oh, I'm posting without a karma bonus because this isn't really thread related any more. The folks who kept it on topic deserve to have the extra +1;-)
There's a reason I only went parachuting twice. The first time was at a podunk jump center, and I wrote it off as such. The second time, I realized why the pilot of a jump plane always wears a chute too. The altimiter and TBI were both placarded, and they still flew it. If I'd seen it before takeoff I'd never have gone up, but I was the 2nd one in, and stuck in the back. Oy. Never mind that I prefer to fly than jump by a large margin.
The issue of flight schools going under is part of the reason I'm paying real money for ground school, as I explained above. The insurance rates killed a few near me (all 3 had accidents on their records, one fatal), underscoring the need for vigilent instructors and uncompromising safety policies. Not to mention the problems with FBOs kicking the private pilots and clubs off the field and charging insane fees to everyone but the b-jet crowd to keep them away, but that's a different rant as well.
I'm interested in building hours for sure, but only advancing in capability once I"m truly comfortable, ie, rec/sport-student, then private and XC. Only then will I fly the EZ, whenever it gets finished. I'm flying ultralights now, since it's been a few years since I did it last with any regularity. I'll hopefully be starting ground school and seat time this winter, for a springtime solo. It should be fun. Also note that due to the fundamental nature of the EZs, I'll need complex (retractable nost strut makes it a rectracable gear aircraft) and high performance certs before I can get insured on it. But like I said, it's at least 8-10 years out.
No John Denver syndrome here. Part of my day job is human interface design. What killed JD was the impossibly poor location of the fuel tank switch and the highly nonlinear and unmarked sight glasses for the EZs fuel tanks. The NTSB investigation [pdf] showed that the only way to switch tanks was to reach over the pilot's left shoulder, requiring the right foot to be braced against something, like the right rudder pedal. The whole thing was terribly tragic and could have been avoided if someone had thought about the user a little bit. Thankfully N555JD was the only EZ on record with the wonky fuel selector position. Mine will have proper fuel sensors and calibrated sight glasses. I'm something of an instrumentation freak. Maintaining situational awareness is impossible without reliable information.
Slats, flaps and big tires will slow you down some, but probably not as much as you think. I can't afford an IO540, so it'll be more like a used and abused 0-235 for mine, all 120HP of it for my > half ton aircraft.
My welding experience started as a youngster, and I can still gas weld steel tube 15 years later and lay a neat stack of dimes every time. I've never done gas-shielded welding, but I think it'd be easier, given the much greater control it affords. I'm looking forward to picking up a little TIG rig some time. I have designs on some aluminium fixtures for my table saw and drill press.
The only flight schools I consider crappy are the ones that turn out pilots that fly lawn darts, but that's just my opinion. NOw podunk, that's a different story, especially to a boy originally from east TN like me.
I'd love to go part 141, but I can't spend the money or the time. My day job as an EE sucks up too manu hours to allow flying to be anything more than a hobby, no matter how manic I am about the training. My USAF buddy is as close as I can get, plus I get the bonus of tales of his time training budding jet jocks and bomber drivers. There are some incredible stories from that part of FI.
You're right, the sport/rec license route is all about me in the left (or front) seat. Hours and hours of practice are the only way I know to hone a craft into a discipline. Rec will lead to Sport will lead directly to Private, or that's my plan. Private can wait until I'm close to taxi-testing the EZ, but I haven a hunch I'll end up getting it long before then so I can do things like cross countries and IFR flight.
I think that Sport (and student sport) classes will indeed change a lot of things. What I've read in the last year is encouraging..it seems that there are more general aviation pilots signing up than in the last 15 years, which will drive the growth desperately needed both in the commerical manufacturing end of the plane world, but also the growth the EAA seems to be starving for. Hopefully my H10-30s will see use soon. I miss the smell of 100LL.
As for your Bearhawk, we'd be pretty evenly matched. I'd win on Vne (195kts vs 150ish IIRC) but cruise would be comparable (120-130), depending on altitude and whether or not I can find a good 3 bladed cruise prop;-)
1. I like the idea of combined education for these things. A good friend of mine is a CFI, and will be imparting his knowledge to me over the next few years. Flight time is bartered for pizza and beer (or car repair, as the case may be), but ground school classroom time, along with sim time, is real money, partly to pay for the instructional equipment there, and partly to cover the very real cost of keeping a small but excellent instructional group running in the midst of so many wannabes and hacks They're staffed by 2 ex USAF and 2 civillian CFIs, and offer everything from recreational training to complex, commercial and high performance certificates. 15 years in business, close to 1000 students, and a perfect safety record.
I'm not going to go into the relative merits of personal instruction vs the accredited home study courses. That's a whole vi-emacs thing I want to avoid;-)
In case you can't tell, I do things carefully and with precision, and I take endeavours like general aviation pretty seriously. After I got my driver's license I did something similar, doing a number of high performace driving schools and a bunch of hours in car control and adverse situation training. I like to be as good as I possibly can at things like this;-)
2. I've got plenty of time in an ultralight, and the recreational/sport license is literally a small step up for me. I want to get 200 hours in before I solo in my EZ. which shouldn't be hard given that I think it'll take 8-10 years to build. Besides that, a recreational (aka sport pilot) license will allow me to accrue solo seat time (albeit under 87kts, under 10000ft, not in class B, C, D, etc airspace, and only on sunny VFR days) while I"m getting my hours for my private, which will be here and there due to my schedule. The 20 required for the recreational will be easier to get due to the logistics of the license, or so I believe.
3. I thought you were referring to the general aviation applications of the jets. Mea culpa. If the racing league is structured anything like the others are, they'll be set away from heavily trafficed areas and well delineated, on the ground and with something like SPANS and beacon warnings. Burt Rutan and the guys around him are amazingly concerned with safety, and it's why he and Mike Mellville are still alive, among others.
4. And to you too. It's definitely a 'someday' thing for me too, but ever since I first laid eyes on a row of gleaming white canards at Oshkosh back in 1986 I've dreamed about it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Even if all cooling systems failed, explained Mr Riis-Johansen, the temperature in the frozen mountain would never rise above freezing due to the permafrost on the mountainside."
/flamesuit on
Hmm..their backup/failsafe cooling system is permafrost. Cue the global warming inducted failure discussion.
Personally, I get a real kick out of playing Destroy All Humans with the invincibility cheat turned on. I get to whack all the bad guys I want, breeze through missions with amazing weapons, and generally run amok. Yes, I played the game all the way through and enjoyed it, but for me, a lot of the replay value comes from being able to bypass some of the more difficult hoops I had to jump through the first time. If there wasn't a way to breeze through parts of the game, I'd probably have re-sold it a week after I got it. I've had it a year now. I can say the same thing for the Ratchet and Clank series. Sometimes it's more fun to cheat. Just ask Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa!
We're a contract engineering shop, so things never last that long. Each time a new project starts, it gets it's own repoitory. Once a project is closed, it gets archived locally and offsite, so things remain nice and tidy.
That said, we've only been using it for about 18 months, so our experience level with the long term project impact of lots of SVN traffic is low. It's something we'll be looking at soon though, since the server that SVN lives on is an old box, and the drives are getting full with all of the repositories.
In order...
No
I didn't actually configure SVN here, I just use it like it's going out of style. It's set up on a WinTel box using TortiseSVN and svnserv, using ssh+svn, without apache. The TortoiseSVN howto is here, in case you didn't already see it. The rumor was that our guru gave up on apache+svn too.
SSH, no apache or other bells and whistles. Our offiste folks are at an office connected with a VPN backbone, so they see our local server transparently.
After several years of working with SourceSafe and it's truly braindead way of dealing with atomic commits and binary files (not to mention the massive data loss problems we had with it) my office switched to SVN for EVRYTHING. All employees use it for everything, from notes on ideas in Notepad or BBEdit or pico, to massive software projects with hundreds of files and over a million lines of code. Using TortiseSVN to put it into the windows desktop shell, it's nearly transparent, and it allows atomic commits to work intelligently, making the engineers who work with programs that have multiple files (hardware in myb case, a half dozen files for each PCB design, it works even better for revision control for the software guys), which has allowed us to recover a really insane amount of time we'd been handing over to M$SS for maintainance and babysitting. Additionally, the (automagically compressed) repository size for 11 hardware guys and 13 software guys with a year's worth of code and binaries (2M lines and hundreds of MBs, local, respectiively) is a paltry 180MB. That's with upwards of 20 commits on everyone's data every day. I admit, I sound like I drank the SVN kool-aid, and I'm OK with that. The next step is to install it at home and use it to back up /home, /documents and /music on my various and sundry computers (seperate server, weekly media swap, etc).
I love it that much, and you can too!
I think you're right. The install I saw that was the very closest to what was postulated further up the chain was one where the sector antennas were on the corners of a building, and the heliax ran from the center of the rooftop like spokes on a wheel out to the 4 clusters of antennas. The rest had the cabinets either at the base of the tower, whether it was on the dirt or on top of a building, or the sector groupings had their own cabinets, and the heliax runs were measured in single digits of feet (well, ok, there were only 2 like that). Then there were the water tower installations, the tubular tower installations, and the other oddballs where the antenna runs were encased completely in a grounded metal tube, save a few feet on either end to connect to the racks or the antennas.
UCI agrees with us, by the way. Sector antenna sites are very safe, and the antennas used have incredibly good pattern control.
Different carriers and equipment I guess. The ones I serviced, either outside or on buildings, placed the transciever cabinet as close to the base of the tower as possible. I did have a bunch of installations where the swtichgear to the trunk system was elsewhere, but the RF stuff was always at the tower. I don't miss the work though...on rainy days like this, it's nice to have an office job.
Cell site base stations are self contained. The only things that run to them are the mains supply cables, which are indeed beefy, but that's 60Hz, not the UHF that mobile phones run at. The antennas used for cell site base stations also have a decidedly toroidal or sectoral radiation pattern. Every one I've seen in the last 10 years has used a set of sector patch antennas, which have excellent pattern control (energy goes in a set direction with set limits, not anywhere else). It's in the best interests of the cell companies to minimized the radiation that goes straight down in favor of the radiation that goes out, as straight down mostly wastes power that could be used to increase coverage somewhere else.
I don't doubt that there seems to be a link, but whether or not it's causal needs some very carefully done science, not a newspaper story.
It's more than a bad idea, it's a forking NIGHTMARE. Even for non-hams like me, the radiated fields from the lines will cause all kinds of problems. BPL produces a horiffic amount of conducted line noise, in violation of the FCC's own regulations, and further pollute an already overcrowded section of bandwidth (DC to light). BPL may be good for the power companies' profit margins, but it's bad for EVERYONE.
And that's my professional opinion.
-dave
EE, currently working on EMC compliance
The former USSR tried something like that back in the early 80s. In my dad's copy of Flight of the Old Dog, there's a press clipping that's the only record I've ever found of it. I'll post the text later if anyone's interested. Basically, a high energy (free electron?) laser right out of Real Genius was being built.
I thought as much. My thoughts are in another comment. I especially liked the flying wires from the twistlok sockets to the bus rails in the dimmer racks, and the complete and total lack of any strain relief for the fragile (looks like Extron or Gepco?) RGB cable, which was left hanging from the BNCs.
There wasn't a whole lot to it, except that the broken sprinkler pipe soaked 4 projectors worth a combined $270k US while they were running. The real story was that the guys from Christie turned them off, mopped up, dried them out, and flipped them back on for the rest of the show. Pro gear is cool. It was also interesting when they mistakenly routed the bob scare evac notice to our exhibition hall, instead of the empty one the staff were using for evac drills on the other end of the building. There were some pictures taken as it was happening (the waterfall that is) that were posted, but I can't seem to find them now. If I dig them up I'll post a link for /.to break.
Indeed. Specifically, I see a video switcher (all those BNCs you see are fo rvideo I believe), and what looks like the back of some control equipment from a company I can't remember the name of.
The rack appears to be holding a standard compliment of either 64 or 128 channels of dimming, and also seems to be used as a stand. The soco connectors are all naked, the twist locks are L21-20s or L21-30s (120/208 3 phase 4 pole 5 wire connectors, 20 or 30 amps per phase) and are receptacles, indicating that maybe the distro in the box is being used to provide normal 120V power from a 3 phase patch point, and there just happened to be some dimming in the rack along with it. Not terribly uncommon at large conventions.
That was a cabinet holding, what look to this ex-stagehand, like a rack of dimmers, not servers. My guess is one channel of dimming or perhaps audio (though no one uses socopex for audio do they?) went up in smoke. It happens sometimes. Ask about the waterfall over the Christie Digital booth at NSCA 2005...
-dave
My dad used to bring a Compaq Luggable home from work so I could play Rogue with my mom. I have fond memories of sitting at the dining room table, or in the den, debating the various advantages of a particular spell and a particular monster-filled situation. It was the best ever. DOS 1.0a was the order of the day too, before MS was big.
Ahh, the memories.
Pathways into Darkness begat Marathon
/no karma bonus
//not a troll
//I miss the old Bungie
Marathon begat Infinity
Infinity begar Halo/Mac
Enter M$
Halo/Mac takes a 3 year long 3rd seat behind Halo/Xbox and Halo/PC
M$ makes a mint with Halo/Xbox and Halo/PC
M$ makes Halo2/PC exclusive to it's own OS, requiring not only Windows upgrades, but hardware upgrades for a lot of users.
Everyone who remembers the old Bungie, back when they cared about their platform and their customers, dies a little bit.
My DT770 Pros have the same effect. I get ~15dB of noise reduction, which lets me enjoy the music at a level compatible with a ringing phone or a speaking coworker. The velvet ear pads are removable and washable, and are extrememly comfortable.
I also make extensive use of my C.H.I.M.P.
-dave
Indeed it is. 15 years of studio work banged that into my brain something fierce. Late nights and sleep dep seem to have clobbered by ability to spell.
/. editor's posts.
Or maybe I've spent too much time reading the
You mean omnidirectional, not sinusoid. Cardoid describes the polar pattern of the mic, and will tend to reject sounds that are behind the mic, like the computer fans.
-dave
Let's hear it for the infamous fiber-seeking backhoes!
I spent most of last month waiting for SBC to un-b0rk my DSL and phone service when the fiber loop I'm on was cut by the village (while they were installing new street lamps, 30 blocks away).
A number of years back, Tom Danley of Intersonics (and later Servodrive) designed a rotary vane transducer for low frequency reproduction. If you check with USPTO, you'll find the patent. It worked wonderfuly. It was efficient, and it went down to 1-2Hz. Then it was sold to Phoenix Gold. Like they seems ot have a knack for, they took it, re-engineered it until it was so unreliable, and performed so poorly, that the PG Cyclone (Google is your friend) became a footnote in history.
It looks like someone noticed the patent expired. It also looks like they don't quite undertsand the technology. The original worked in about a 6cuft box. This one seems to need to be run as a ducted dipole? No thanks. I'll take Contrabasses any day.
-dave
Indeed, I only plan to carry a chute as a last resort option, and only because it's cheaper than a BRS cannister. For now. It's amazing how low the fire risk is with a composite airplane. When the fuselage parts ways with the wings, there's very little metal to spark and ignite the fuel, and the design of the wing tanks on the EZ is such that they tend to seperate intact. It's pretty cool. In mine, I'm planning on doing the widely-accepted center sump mod, which does away with the sight glasses AND the transfer switch, and pipes both wing tanks into a central sump, unifying the fuel system and allowing a much simpler flow and capacitive gauge design. I'm more worried about rollover and stuck rudders than fuel in the cockpit. Avgas is pretty safe compared to auto gasoline. It's got a much lower vapor pressure and is harder to spontaneously ignite. I like that.
;-)
N555JD crashed because of mutual stupidity. Burt Rutan commented on how he couldn't believe Denver screwed up, not even a little, until he simulated the same action in an EZ, and it surprised and alarmed him how quickly things got out of shape. The builder did something dumb by requiring that the pilot go thru those contortions (including unstrapping) to change the selector position, and something dumber by not placarding it in any way. Denver was dumb because he didn't refuel before he left, and he wasn't familiar enough to know that the half-full mark on the sight gauges was far less than that in reality. It's a real tragedy, because it could have been prevented so easily by either party. I only harp on it because uninformed people tend to pile-on to the homebuilts-are-dangerous bandwagon. That drives me nuts.
The O-360 is a great motor, but it's a lot heavier than the 235, which messes with an already precarious CG in the EZ. I'm debating a massaged 235, or maybe a 320, with electronic ignition and maybe fuel injection, and downdraft cooling. Yes, it's money, but it does away with weight that can help to offset the engine mass. Couple that with a reasonably efficient three-bladed constant speed prop, and I could go places. Fast. The idea of Infinity retracts is also very tempting, especially for the increase in mileage, but it's all hanger flying until I find templates, since my EZ plans came without them, and they're critical for the rest of the construction process.
I'm glad the TIG thing is working out so well for you. I've heard it's not terribly difficult to start with, and I'm looking into a rig myself. Which one did you end up with out of curiosity?
Casting is an interest of mine, but I prefer the method of assembling machined parts with molten metal. Casting requires a furnace, fuel, and a whole benchload of casting accessories, cope tools, rams, and a ball mill if you want to get cheap casting sand, among other things. Not really my cup of tea.
Oh, I'm posting without a karma bonus because this isn't really thread related any more. The folks who kept it on topic deserve to have the extra +1
There's a reason I only went parachuting twice. The first time was at a podunk jump center, and I wrote it off as such. The second time, I realized why the pilot of a jump plane always wears a chute too. The altimiter and TBI were both placarded, and they still flew it. If I'd seen it before takeoff I'd never have gone up, but I was the 2nd one in, and stuck in the back. Oy. Never mind that I prefer to fly than jump by a large margin.
The issue of flight schools going under is part of the reason I'm paying real money for ground school, as I explained above. The insurance rates killed a few near me (all 3 had accidents on their records, one fatal), underscoring the need for vigilent instructors and uncompromising safety policies. Not to mention the problems with FBOs kicking the private pilots and clubs off the field and charging insane fees to everyone but the b-jet crowd to keep them away, but that's a different rant as well.
I'm interested in building hours for sure, but only advancing in capability once I"m truly comfortable, ie, rec/sport-student, then private and XC. Only then will I fly the EZ, whenever it gets finished. I'm flying ultralights now, since it's been a few years since I did it last with any regularity. I'll hopefully be starting ground school and seat time this winter, for a springtime solo. It should be fun. Also note that due to the fundamental nature of the EZs, I'll need complex (retractable nost strut makes it a rectracable gear aircraft) and high performance certs before I can get insured on it. But like I said, it's at least 8-10 years out.
No John Denver syndrome here. Part of my day job is human interface design. What killed JD was the impossibly poor location of the fuel tank switch and the highly nonlinear and unmarked sight glasses for the EZs fuel tanks. The NTSB investigation [pdf] showed that the only way to switch tanks was to reach over the pilot's left shoulder, requiring the right foot to be braced against something, like the right rudder pedal. The whole thing was terribly tragic and could have been avoided if someone had thought about the user a little bit. Thankfully N555JD was the only EZ on record with the wonky fuel selector position. Mine will have proper fuel sensors and calibrated sight glasses. I'm something of an instrumentation freak. Maintaining situational awareness is impossible without reliable information.
Slats, flaps and big tires will slow you down some, but probably not as much as you think. I can't afford an IO540, so it'll be more like a used and abused 0-235 for mine, all 120HP of it for my > half ton aircraft.
My welding experience started as a youngster, and I can still gas weld steel tube 15 years later and lay a neat stack of dimes every time. I've never done gas-shielded welding, but I think it'd be easier, given the much greater control it affords. I'm looking forward to picking up a little TIG rig some time. I have designs on some aluminium fixtures for my table saw and drill press.
-dave
The only flight schools I consider crappy are the ones that turn out pilots that fly lawn darts, but that's just my opinion. NOw podunk, that's a different story, especially to a boy originally from east TN like me.
;-)
I'd love to go part 141, but I can't spend the money or the time. My day job as an EE sucks up too manu hours to allow flying to be anything more than a hobby, no matter how manic I am about the training. My USAF buddy is as close as I can get, plus I get the bonus of tales of his time training budding jet jocks and bomber drivers. There are some incredible stories from that part of FI.
You're right, the sport/rec license route is all about me in the left (or front) seat. Hours and hours of practice are the only way I know to hone a craft into a discipline. Rec will lead to Sport will lead directly to Private, or that's my plan. Private can wait until I'm close to taxi-testing the EZ, but I haven a hunch I'll end up getting it long before then so I can do things like cross countries and IFR flight.
I think that Sport (and student sport) classes will indeed change a lot of things. What I've read in the last year is encouraging..it seems that there are more general aviation pilots signing up than in the last 15 years, which will drive the growth desperately needed both in the commerical manufacturing end of the plane world, but also the growth the EAA seems to be starving for. Hopefully my H10-30s will see use soon. I miss the smell of 100LL.
As for your Bearhawk, we'd be pretty evenly matched. I'd win on Vne (195kts vs 150ish IIRC) but cruise would be comparable (120-130), depending on altitude and whether or not I can find a good 3 bladed cruise prop
1. I like the idea of combined education for these things. A good friend of mine is a CFI, and will be imparting his knowledge to me over the next few years. Flight time is bartered for pizza and beer (or car repair, as the case may be), but ground school classroom time, along with sim time, is real money, partly to pay for the instructional equipment there, and partly to cover the very real cost of keeping a small but excellent instructional group running in the midst of so many wannabes and hacks They're staffed by 2 ex USAF and 2 civillian CFIs, and offer everything from recreational training to complex, commercial and high performance certificates. 15 years in business, close to 1000 students, and a perfect safety record.
;-)
;-)
I'm not going to go into the relative merits of personal instruction vs the accredited home study courses. That's a whole vi-emacs thing I want to avoid
In case you can't tell, I do things carefully and with precision, and I take endeavours like general aviation pretty seriously. After I got my driver's license I did something similar, doing a number of high performace driving schools and a bunch of hours in car control and adverse situation training. I like to be as good as I possibly can at things like this
2. I've got plenty of time in an ultralight, and the recreational/sport license is literally a small step up for me. I want to get 200 hours in before I solo in my EZ. which shouldn't be hard given that I think it'll take 8-10 years to build. Besides that, a recreational (aka sport pilot) license will allow me to accrue solo seat time (albeit under 87kts, under 10000ft, not in class B, C, D, etc airspace, and only on sunny VFR days) while I"m getting my hours for my private, which will be here and there due to my schedule. The 20 required for the recreational will be easier to get due to the logistics of the license, or so I believe.
3. I thought you were referring to the general aviation applications of the jets. Mea culpa. If the racing league is structured anything like the others are, they'll be set away from heavily trafficed areas and well delineated, on the ground and with something like SPANS and beacon warnings. Burt Rutan and the guys around him are amazingly concerned with safety, and it's why he and Mike Mellville are still alive, among others.
4. And to you too. It's definitely a 'someday' thing for me too, but ever since I first laid eyes on a row of gleaming white canards at Oshkosh back in 1986 I've dreamed about it.