A64Pilot

I’m not arguing against what your saying, I’m just saying I guess that unfortunately not all Judges are impartial and ones that aren’t can often find in a way that’s not impartial. However I think that a Judge that has an Agenda will find the argument that requiring a major modification be done to burn a fuel harder to overturn, could still happen just I think it’s a more convincing argument. Long way of saying this might just not be the last we hear of it, that more court cases are coming. I know nothing about California’s politics and CARB etc except what I read and hear, but I’m surprised at this ruling, I expected a rubber stamp. I would expect the ones leading the fight to ban lead to have an apoplectic fit and come out strong. I doubt they will stay quiet, but as I don’t live there and have personal experience maybe I’m wrong.

I think the most important part was him or her recognizing that the FAA hasn’t approved the fuel, but allows it if there is a major alteration of the aircraft done. STC by FAA definition is a major and therefore requires an IA and a 337. Things like the opinion of the definition of Commercially available can be undone I think, but I think saying an STC isn’t a major when he FAA say’s it is, is going to be tougher for another Judge to disagree with. There is precedent for fuel STC’s though with the Mogas ones back in the 70’s, but often they did require significant airframe modifications. I keep thinking that surely the G100UL is dead, but the FAA still hasn’t taken action.

My 2c, ask for copies of the logs, very often the guy who wrote the ad didn’t have a clue what they are taking about. It could have all been well done and maybe it wasn’t. Until you get the logs you don’t know. In my opinion don’t worry much about repairs in the logbook, be very wary of those that aren’t. By that I mean have someone who knows what they are doing look for oversized rivets etc that hint at repairs. Since the requirement that you only have to keep logs for one year has been so widely disseminated, and that log book pages aren’t numbered. I know of a couple of pages that were lost when the razor blade cut them out suddenly it’s a “No damage” airplane. They can’t lose a filed 337 though so pay the buck or whatever the CD costs from the FAA.

You can believe what you want, but I can tell you that if the POH stall speed was off by 6 kts, that aircraft would have never been certified. Secondly the part about consistently beating book speeds is more than a little suspect, I guess you believe that too? My older J came from the factory with the upswept tips, they didn’t come out with the MSE

Burn and Learn, seriously? Why are they so hot to “help accelerate a transition to our unleaded future?” Why the hurry? Shouldn’t they instead be all for a slow roll out to ensure safety or extensive third party testing or similar?

It reduces drag by reducing the vortices that are generated by the difference in air pressure from the top and bottom of the wing. AKA induced drag, one way is just from the decreased wing area at the tip, a big ole fat Hersey bar wing has a lot of area at the tip, a sailplane very little. If your producing little lift at the tip, there is little induced drag, at the tip. If I look I can show you pictures of a Thrush crop duster spraying, the spray is similar to smoke in making vortices visible. In level flight there are pretty much no visible vortices, the spray lays down flat in the field, at the end when you pull up if your still spraying you can really see the vortices, this is due of course from increased angle of attack at the whole wing of course but the tips now have pretty significant vortices. The Thrush has a 1.5 degree washout, not a lot but enough so that there is very little lift in a decently high speed cruise, even though it had the big old fat Hersey bar wing. So yes any kind of “fence” that prevents the air under the wing from mixing with the air above the wing will reduce drag, hopefully more than the drag it produces but on an average GA airplane in cruise the drag reduction is pretty much nothing. But an aircraft that flies at high angles of attack in cruise can really benefit from tips reducing drag, reason you see such high tech ones on an airliner but on a GA airplane they are more for marketing (look cool) But you just can’t convince some, look at these things on a Thrush crop duster, my testing showed the did little to nothing, but they do move the center of mass on the wing and the center of pressure so they will change bending moment etc and most likely increase wing fatigue, how much who knows? I’d try to tell people that if the accomplished half of what was claimed I’d fit them on at the factory, they aren’t Patented, nothing stopped me from building them https://www.johnstonaircraft.com/Ag Tip Winglets.htm I have to think if you got a couple of kts out of J model looking tips, EVERY Mooney would have them, these guys remove steps, hide antennas in the airframe and who knows what else for a kt

Even a few months ago traffic circles ate its lunch, now it handles them better than I do and I spent years in Europe so I learned then. If anything it’s not as conservative as I am, it will pull into traffic that I would wait for. Someone on this site explained FSD perfectly as of a year ago, that it reminded them of a nervous teen driver, it was full of bugs, you would be driving down a country road and out if the blue it would brake hard. I think shadows would confuse it, but it could get exciting when someone was right behind you and the car hit the brakes for no reason, I drove then with my foot near the accelerator to hit the “gas” when it did. The steering wheel movements were jerky at parking speeds, you could tell it was making the effort, but it just wasn’t there. I assume after years of trying and failing Elon had enough and spent God knows how much building an AI Supercomputer named dojo that’s teaching the cars to drive, I believe there is more than one now and expect they are doing things other than teaching the cars like maybe the Robots but that’s supposition. Plus Hardware 4 is now in production cars and at least the cameras are much, much better. He’s stated if he can’t make FSD work on hardware 3 cars he will update them for free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Dojo The Cyber Truck has been problematic FSD wise I don’t know why but it’s FSD updates are well behind the cars, I’m sure it will be fixed but as I don’t have a clue what the issue is as honestly I’m not really interested in the truck. Cool vehicle, just I don’t have any need for one. Supposedly the Cybercab is going live this Summer in Austin. I suspicion it will be geo fenced and only allowed in certain areas that have been tested at first, because it won’t have the capability of being driven manually, I don’t think it will have controls in it, but who knows we have only seen prototypes The Waymo model is I think a dead end, it has of course a great many sensors and is restricted to only areas that have been mapped to the centimeter. But in my opinion FSD is tough, I mean hugely way more complex than Garmin self land or anything in an aircraft to include any ground ops. So if you can teach a car to drive in NY City at rush hour then you could teach a jet to taxi anywhere on an airport I believe. The future I think in cars and Commercial Aviation is Automation, not saying there won’t be a Pilot, but I think their job will be to take over if needed and that will be rare, so how would they maintain proficiency? I have no idea, maybe Sims? But successful automation is much safer than a Human that's been proven decades ago, who can hand fly an instrument approach with the precision of a coupled approach? Almost all of my drives now start out in the garage when I tell the car “navigate to La Perla in Eustis” for example, that’s a restaurant in Eustis a town about 30 miles away that the Wife likes. Push a “button” on the screen and tap the brake to acknowledge I want the car to drive. The car backs out of the driveway, drives to the neighborhood gate where it stops and triggers the built in homelink to open the gate and drives to the restaurant and pulls into its parking lot, without me having to intervene at all. I do park it as the lot is dirt/gravel and I think it needs lines to park? Lots of construction in Eustis now with traffic cones etc and the car has no problems and it’s congested. We take the little dog as he enjoys going with us and when we get there I put the HVAC in dog mode where it maintains set temp until we get back and click the home button, tap the brake and the car drives home. It won’t pull into the garage it stops short I don’t know why, but I do have to drive the last 10 ft. The cars are of course all internet connected so you get live traffic updates and it will reroute if it will save a time that you set, you see live Radar on the map like ADSB, get wx etc. Not sure if it’s happened yet but the cars will phone home and report things like flooded streets, construction, temporarily closed roads etc so other cars will reroute around the trouble area. FSD is close, but I’ll never completely trust it, but as I get older I know the day is coming that I’ll get to the point that I shouldn’t drive, especially in night and maybe bad wx etc. Then I’ll really be even more appreciative of a FSD car. Assuming I live that long of course.

Of course. I think most of these runway incursions the offending pilot doesn’t realize they are crossing a runway, think it’s just another taxiway

It keeps changing but it sometimes stops and if you’re close to the light when it turns it accelerates and gets through. I think it bases it’s decision on how close are we when it turns yellow and our current speed. What I don’t know is how does it know a four way stop from a two way? It always has so far but how? Does it recognize the backside of the other sign? It displays all traffic signs and lights on it’s screen so you know it sees them, it even makes a ding noise when not in self driving when the light turns green so you don’t sit there like an idiot. By changing I mean the FSD is updated maybe once a month or two on average and sometimes you really notice the changes and sometimes not. Last update it’s a little more aggressive than I like, but it used to be stupid cautious, for instance it would stop right parallel to a stop sign like the law requires, then it would move forward as most of the time you can’t see cross traffic back there at the sign, if traffic was spotted it would stop a second time. Normal driver stops once a little past where the law requires where they can see. Update before last it now stops past the sign like human drivers. It used to be that it obeyed speed limits pretty closely, but now it drives close to average traffic speed. It’s getting more and more to drive not precisely IAW the law like a high school driving coach, but more and more like a common driver. It doesn’t like intersections, by that I mean it seems that it accelerates pretty briskly to clear them Compared to what it used to be like, it’s brilliant now. Not that I live in NY city, but I figure at dusk especially that it has to be a tough drive, I only watched a few min of this Video, this is the latest revision of Tesla FSD, and remember a Tesla is completely reliant on cameras only, no other sensors just vision just like we humans are. Anyway just if your curious

Forget the self insure for amounts above that. The reason is if the repair bill will exceed about 60% of the insured value they will write you a check for the insured amount at which time it’s their airplane and they will auction it off. I saw someone lose their Maule that way by being underinsured. I don’t know about the 60% number it’s just what I heard maybe it’s 80%, but either way if they total the airplane it’s theirs, not your to repair. I think it may be better to be uninsured than under insured

They DO reduce drag at high angles of attack, Winglets are better of course but even end plates work. But we cruise at low angles of attack unlike Airliners, then add in many aircraft have washout, the tips have even lower angle of attack. So far as reducing stall speed significantly? I doubt that. A friend, a Dr Ralph Kimberlin had an STC for winglets for a Twin Bonanza, I teased him about them not knowing he was the STC holder, he claimed they helped climb. Personally I think they may have but bet money they slowed cruise because of drag, probably not much though and I have zero data to support that belief.

Note I’m not saying anything about Gami or George. We had a saying in the Army ref being “caught” It was Lie, Deny, and make counter accusations, until the hammer falls

Weight is there of course but doubt it’s much, tips on GA aircraft are ineffectual as we don’t cruise at high angles of attack, in theory they could help in climb but I doubt it’s measurable. If you want them for looks I think you will be pleased, if you buy for performance I think you won’t be happy. When the J first came out LoPresti was asked in an interview what the performance gain was and he shifted to how good they looked, said the reminded him of some woman named Stacy’s nose, she has such a pretty nose. I think technically as they do add a small amount of frontal area which is a drag increase that they may actually hurt performance, by an amount that’s calculable but not measurable. Insignificant in other words. Like wheel pants on older Pipers and Cessna’s they improved looks but didn’t do much for drag reduction, modern ones like on RV’s do.

I bought mine at 64, in my neighborhood I’m young, we have people in their 80’s that fly. I’m 66 now. We also the other day had a Commercial Airline pilot age 63 who felt poorly after helping a neighbor pour concrete who went home to lay down and died of a heart attack. One neighbor in his 70’s flies the “Villages” Jets. So age isn’t necessarily the determining factor, some lucky people at 70 are in better shape than some unlucky ones in their 50’s. It depends where you are on that spectrum. As far as Insurance it may go down as you acquire hours, but I think if your not instrument rated, getting that rating may help the most. I pay about $2200 for 125K on my J. It went down 7% this year but don’t think it had anything to do with me, I think insurance has hopefully peaked and beginning to ease a bit, but that’s just hoping and guessing. When I can no longer be insured assuming I still want to fly and feel able to do so I’ll either forego insurance or switch aircraft. In truth my Mooney is a bear to get in and out of for me now, a C-182 is looking more and more attractive, or an LSA amphib maybe, but their insurance is stupid high.

60” MP really isn’t that much boost, it’s only 15 PSI roughly, if I do the Math correctly, still drinking morning Coffee and brain hasn’t engaged fully yet. My Motorhome for example pulls 30 lbs of boost, but automotive boost is PSIG so need to add the 15 PSI atmospheric to get to PSIA that aircraft indicate. So my Motorhome pulls 90” boost, yes it’s a Diesel and therefore not constrained by detonation margins because detonation in a properly operating Diesel isn’t possible. But it’s a Motorhome not any kind of performance motor. Tractor pull motors can run as high as 300 lbs of boost, what’s that, something over 9,000” MP? I wonder what the Reno racers pull? I would assume at least three times what the Military P-51’s saw? No idea really