Officially Approved Nonsense

Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules

MIflyer said:
Okay, I'll buy that. But the Kiwis did have some, somewhere, as the attached confirms. Too bad they cut the wings off.
Click to expand...

Regular pastime here, take the kids and the P-51 on a cross country jaunt...

This was a common site in and around the area where I used to live as P-51s, Mosquitoes, Airspeed Oxfords and so forth got carted off to farms and orchards for their various bits and pieces, after languising at the local air force base at Woodbourne. Many of the aircraft in museums around the country today came from an agricultural background.

Here's a P-40E that was stuffed in a guy's shed for forty years. Note the missing wings...

NZ3043 ii

As for Mustangs, yup, the RNZAF certainly used the type, but they were home based units with the Terris. The units were based on their local affiliation and the colours of the bars either side represented the local rugby team colours - the red and black was Canterbury. That particular aircraft flew in civil colours in NZ for some years, but it's in the USA now. I believe Kermit Weeks has it.

This P-51 has been active in NZ since the early 1980s and wears Canterbury Territorial Air Force markings.

DSC_5382
 
Even authors with impeccable backgrounds err. Ernest Gann had passengers inflating their life jackets inside the aircraft, his Taj Mahal story has the airport on the wrong side of the river, Saint Exupery has the red nav light on the right wing tip.
 
MIflyer said:
Let's see:

3. Locally manufactured drop tanks were paper, not cardboard.
Click to expand...

Cardboard IS paper... it has just gone through more production steps after the pulp was created.
 
MIflyer said:
(Insert Heavy Theatrical Sigh Here) Where does this crap come from?
Click to expand...

Waaaaaay back I worked with Freddy Sheppard who was the first person in Australia to be granted a licence to maintain turbine engines before Ansett bought their F-27s and Viscounts.

Freddy always loved to talk about the process that was needed to get that licence and told everyone challenge any exam failures - direct to the minister. An attitude fully supported by a number of DMN staff I dealt with.

DMN = Department of Many Names - DCA, CAA [Cease All Aviation], DOT [Detriment to Transport], OCA, CASA and others over a short period.

When Freddy sat the Basic Gas Turbine exams he failed both. He and his boss (who had lots of political clout) challenged the result and demanded and got a meeting with the examiner who wrote the exam and the Minister.

The examiner explained he had based all his questions on the Royal Air Force BGT manual written by the top RAF expert, one Frederick E Sheppard, to which Freddy replied I am Frederick E Sheppard you !@#$% moron and dumped his RAF records in front of the Minister. He instantly passed.

I passed several exams on appeal and always insisted staff (and others I knew) wrote any sus questions on their palms during exams so that they could research and challenge them. It was not unusual to find that multiguess questions had 2 or 3 correct answers in the three options provided. Sending those to the minister always worked yet it was not impossible to find the same question a few exams later.
 
emu27 said:
Even authors with impeccable backgrounds err.
Click to expand...

Yes indeed, we are all human. It's not the mistake but acceptance of said error. But to stand one's ground and refuse to acknowledge the mistake or to fabricate untruths is what is really unacceptable.

MiTasol said:
CAA [Cease All Aviation]
Click to expand...

Campaign Against Aviation.

Overheard in a CAA flight exam room;

"Q. What are the four forces acting on an aircraft in flight?
A. Lift, weight, thrust and the CAA..."
 
And in the case of the RAAF, not accurate, even as late as June 44 when all the panic was over according to a RAAF unit history written by the unit CO who was an RAAF career officer who joined in 1934 and remained until his retirement in 1979. Earlier in the book he was complaining that RAAF HQ Melbourne were budgeting 600 flying hours per month for the combined squadrons 11 RSU were supporting in the provision of spares, supplies and manpower but those squadrons were actually flying 1500 hours per month. When the USAAF gave him some engines, so his squadrons could keep flying, Melbourne told him to return the engines and wait for the RAAF to overhaul some. Needless to say he ignored that.

I can understand early errors in both USAAF and RAAF records because until PH happened both countries military's were sitting back fat dumb and happy knowing they were safe as the war was half a world away. The instant induction of massive numbers of people would have resulted in many untrained people doing much of the record keeping so you must expect errors during the learning curve. The fact that over 2 1/2 years later they still not have their act together is not comforting.



If anyone knows of a copy of the above two books for sale I am interested.




 
nuuumannn said:
Campaign Against Aviation.
Click to expand...

One very senior DMN administrator is on record in a tv interview in the 80s saying the only safe aeroplane is one sitting on the ground with its engine stopped.

Need I say more

PS
At least the NZ Rules are stable and do not contradict each other or contain statements like the DMN bogus parts reg when it first came out. A second hand part ....... must be accompanied by a certificate ..... stating that it is new.

This was just after rewrite teams were first mandated and I was on that particular team. We recommended a simple four paragraphs using most of the wording from the FAA reg and some words from the very similar JAA version of the same.

The Office of Legal Drafting wrote two pages of utter crap that was later tabled in parliament and passed. It was at this stage (after publication) that we discovered tabled in parliament means put on a particular table in parliament. If no politician objects to it in the following 14 days it then becomes law. After that writing debacle aviation law was devolved to the Office of Legal Council (OLD).

The OLD has been rewriting the Aust Regulations since 1995. The instructions from the government of the day was to use the FARs as the pattern except where unique Australian circumstances exist. 27 years later the rewrite is still not complete and a typical example of the unique Australian circumstances is that Part 1 was first called Interpretations and later Glossary. The FAA/EASA/UKCAA/NZCAA and virtually every other alphabet soup you can think of call Part 1 Definitions and Abbreviations.

The ICAO/IATA/FAA/EASA etc have one definition of Airdrome/Aerodrome and it is common to all the above Part 1's. I have not looked at the Aus Part 1 for about 10 years but at that stage it was down to 6 definitions of an aerodrome one of which was Aerodrome - for the purpose of dumping rubbish. Not surprisingly none of the Aus definitions was anywhere near the same as the ICAO/IATA/real world definition.
 
MiTasol said:
The Office of Legal Drafting wrote two pages of utter crap that was later tabled in parliament and passed.
Click to expand...

You Aussies love your bureaucracy over there. Find some red tape and wrap it round any piece of legislation.

New Zealand is known for being more liberally minded that Australia and it has made relations between the two countries from a commerce perspective often strained. The Bilateral Single Aviation Market between NZ and Aus definitely favours Australia because of NZ's more liberal stance, with Aus not reciprocating, especially with the cabotage Freedom.
 
Records can certainly be screwed up. While assigned to AFCRL doing what we called severe weather penetration research in an NC-130A we were receiving both flight and hazard duty pay. This confused finance to no end to the point where the entire crew lost an entire month of flight pay that was never regained. Getting paid during TDY at another base finance was always an adventure requiring many phone calls back and forth to Hanscom Field even if we returned to to that base another season. Then there is the National Records Center fire and their new policy of not sending you copies anymore.
 
Wow! Thank's God! I thought that was possible just in Romanian army.
 

Many famous "Australians" are actually kiwis. Dr Fred Hollows and Russell Crowe come to mind. The first a man of honour and compassion. The second not.

This cartoon could equally apply to Australian aviation
 
Last edited:
I found that on both the Private Pilot and Amateur Radio written tests you had to guess whether they meant the scientifically correct answer or the one the guy who wrote the tests thought was true.

Example: "Adding carb heat has what impact on mixture?"

I knew that adding carb heat reduced the mass of the air and therefore enriched the mixture. But I'm a mechanical engineer and that issue was never taught in private pilot ground school, so I figured they would not know that and I replied "None." The answer they wanted was in fact the real correct answer, so I got that wrong.

All too often such tests amount to trivia quizzes.
 
MIflyer said:
All too often such tests amount to trivia quizzes.
Click to expand...
All too often overeducated specialists overthink simple questions.
I instructed for awhile near where a nuclear power plant was being built, and I had lots of engineer flight students. These guys were smart and fast learners, but had an uncanny ability to get exam questions wrong by trying to outguess the exam writer. Many of them seemed to have had the ability to make a "common sense" interpretation of a question educated out of them. Communicating with everyday people was problematic for a lot of them.
 
When I was at OC-ALC we got an AFTO22 form from WR-ALC saying they wanted us to change the overhaul manual for a Ram Air Turbine. They were having trouble with getting their overhauled units to pass testing. They wanted to increase the allowed wind speed needed to get a given output based on the fact that air is less dense at altitude. I never figured out exactly what they were talking about because they in reality did not know what they were talking about. We could hardly go to the expense of testing RATs at different altitudes and I did not see what that had to do with their inability to make the things meet spec.

Even worse than overthinking is overthinking when you do not know how to think about it.
 
I used to encounter situations where installation instructions were evidently written by engineers with no hands-on experience with their product.

One example was a new line of onboard video systems for LEO vehicles, that were model specific (in this case, for a 2011 Chevy Tahoe). The system came with a custom overhead console and while it was well designed, the assembly process indicated in the manual was insane.
So I called customer support and they had to transfer me to the tech department.
After explaining my situation, the tech put me in hold and went and got an instruction manual. He tried to go over it with me, gave up and transferred me to the engineers that designed it.
The guy in the engineering department told me "oh, it's very straightforward, sir! There shouldn't be any problem".
I asked him if he has installed one and he said no, he hadn't.

I hung up.

Long story short, I figured it out and it looked and worked fine - after using every single expletive in the English language (and several in other languages).

I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I have years of experience doing technical installation including design and fabrication, and this was most certainly not "straightforward".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)

Similar threads

The 'no-nonsense' twin-engined fighters for 1938-1943
2 3
Replies
42
Views
5K
Shortround6
S
Menu
Log in
Register