Doing air-to-air photo shoots is a patch of great fun denied so many aviators. You need the right subject, the right camera ship, the right weather, the right pilots, the right photographer, the right camera and the right attitudes ... and you need them all available at exactly the same moment. Earlier this week it all came to together as Cirrus Melbourne pulled the door off a Baron, strapped Flightpath editor Rob Fox into the back and had him take photos of a chasing Cirrus Australis carrying me and earthrounder Ryan Campbell. Silly good fun, but it has produced some remarkable photos. Sorry, you're going to have to wait until the March-April edition of Australian Flying to see them. Thanks to everyone involved from the Cirrus Melbourne pilots, the engineers and even the CASA approvals team!
There's a beaten-up old saying that goes "Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it." It was not that long ago that we were all screaming at CASA because they weren't consulting, so they buckled to the reasoning and have launched on a comprehensive consulting program ... so much of the industry are now wishing they'd stop! Their latest program launches on Monday, but this one is in response to Recommendation 8 of the Forsyth Report and is all about CASA, their performance, regulations, consistency, strengths, weaknesses and all that. It's very important that we take a Bex for our consultation fatigue and get stuck into this one. We asked for it; now it's here. CASA probably needs to brace themselves for a barrage of criticism that will border on abuse, but we in the aviation community need to remember that emotive language, bulldozer reasoning and mud-flinging never gets noticed; it's just too hard to understand compared with simple logic presented concisely. The link to the survey is not yet live, so you've got the weekend to plan out what you want to say.
Serial aviation investor Simon Hackett has launched Agile Aviation, an umbrella brand that brings his new luxury charter operation, Avia Aircraft and Cirrus Melbourne under the one banner. His new charter venture will use Pilatus PC-12s and a Citation Mustang, operating initially out of Moorabbin, but expanding soon to Adelaide and Bankstown. Hackett is a lover of both technology and aviation, which attracted him to sink money into companies like AvPlan, and Avia, which runs two CKAS full-motion GA simulators. Clearly, Hackett believes in GA in Australia, as he has a history of shrewd investments that pay off. Perhaps there are other investors out there that should take a good look at what he's doing.
Lightspeed's announcement of their new Tango wireless headset has caused a bit of a stir. In the press release (and most articles derived therefrom) Lightspeed made the claim that the Tango was the first premium wireless headset (something we resisted in our news article). That claim ignores Western Australian company EQ-1, which has had a premium wireless headset for some years now. Happily for EQ-1, the Tango release came at a time when they were going to Series 3 of their product, which strengthens their claim to have beaten Lightspeed by a couple of years.
Is a successful long-term aviation partnership on shaky ground? At the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) convention in Las Vegas this week, General Electric announced their new turbo-prop engine and nominated Textron Aviation as their first customer. Although the outlined plans included only the new, yet to be developed single-engine turbo-prop (SETP), it must raise questions about the future of the P&W PT6, which powers two other Textron products: the King Airs and Caravans. With the PT6 driving just about every other SETP on the market (the Rolls Royce in the Airvan 10 is one exception), it is hard to see why Textron would consider the new GE motor a better option. What have they seen in this design that the PT6 wouldn't do? And if they're right, why would they not leverage that capability over to the King Airs and Caravans? Not making a fundamental change to two out-right market winners is one reason, but that sort of denies the imperative of constant product improvement. We can but wonder what Pratt & Whitney thinks of all this.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch