On 19 Feb 2004 00:54:40 -0800, (pacplyer) wrote:

But dang that thing looked neat. Too bad the power to weight was so
lousy. And the hardware quality control was so lacking. And the
design was so questionable (my opinions only.) If I was surfing the
net in my rice paddy, I'd order up one too on the internet just from
the color shots alone. Not sure I'd go with the Russian truck engine
though! But *hay*, who wants to live forever right? ;^D

Besides, after you send the check, Allah or Buddha will watch over
your ball bearings.

pac "true believer" plyer

(thank god for free speech at RAH, who knows, I might have bought one
of those things!)


Yeah Pac. "Hay" man still lives on while the people who sent in
deposits on the 2-seater wonder what happened to them. I guess Buddha
and Allah and Ferris Wheel will watch over them too. In fact they
have. Just the fact that they never got their machines delivered
means they got to live....maybe not forever *hay*, but longer anyway.


After re-reading this, I wonder how many people understand what I just
said? Ha Ha. I can see that you were here in them thar days Pac or
you wouldn't remember the illiterate conversations.

I got your phone number. I've just been flying all this week. If you
get to Vegas next weekend, call me. Just got back from Provo
yesterday. Damn IFR wx is getting me down. Our boss is buying us a
C-414 now. I get to spend today in it reading manuals on how to
operate that new Garmin 530 with the TCAS and the METAR links. That
think is so cool you can request the radar images from from
ground-based radar facilities through the satellites and get it in
real time from the ground stations. So, now we don't need expensive
on-board radar to see our way around imbedded thunderstorms, or TCAS.
They call the new traffic avoidance system, TIS (Traffic Information
System). It shows the targets that ATC is seeing and transmitting you
us on our moving map display. We get an audio alert when a new target
poses a problem to us. The computer calculates their position at the
next pass of the ground based radar antenna and projects that on my
screen. It also gives a vector showing which way the Target is
moving, his altitude and whether he is climbing of descending. Pretty
cool. Just takes hours and hours to read about and learn which
buttons to push. Hopefully I can do it about 20 times and get it down
to a reflex. This thing is also a VOR-LOC receiver with a glideslope
and a COM radio transmitter/receiver. There's a little button in the
bottom left corner that you push and it becomes a VOR, an ILS receiver
or a GPS that slaves an external HSI or even CDI's (for NAV or
Glideslope and Localizer). We have a flight director in it so the
fly-bars give me commands for fly-up/fly-down plus right and left
along with the HSI. It makes flying the thing so easy, a child could
do it.

I don't know how many of you have ever flown with a flight director
but it's years ahead of just watching a CDI on an approach. For
instance, the CDI on a localizer only shows your relative position to
the localizer. You could be drifting off with a wind change and never
know it until you get an actual change in posisiton of the CDI that
shows you are now off the beam. So, when you get that, you correct
and get back on. With a flight director, it looks at the rates that
things are changing. If you are dead on the beam but drifting, it
knows that and commands you to make a turn into the wind so you can
stay dead on. The damn localizer CDI never moves all the way down the
approach, but the fly-bars are twitching all over the place to make
you correct for what is going to happen to you if you don't. For
those of you guys who have had calculus, what it is doing is taking
the time derivative of your right/left and up/down position. If these
are changing in time (even though you are dead on the beam) the
fly-bars command you to do something about it before you ever get an
indication of being off course...because you never get off course.

In the olden days we didn't have that as I said above. You had to get
off the beam to get an indication in your CDI that you needed to
correct for. So, you drifted back and forth and back and forth across
the localizer all the way down. Made you nausious even.

Anyway, I gotta go sit in the airplane cockpit for a few hours and
read this stuff. I can't think of a better way to spend my day.

BWB