With explicit permission from the author, Duif on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SAMicro :
Ja manne,
This stuff is making me a bit cranky and I fear I may experience a sudden sense of humour failure!!!
This is what my oxygen starved brein has understood (when it is not thinking of sex and flying) from what has been said:
1. A new 582 short block costs nearly R30,000 (incl labour and VAT) to instal onto a trike and replacing a crankshaft and stuff with labour will cost a similar amount. It is proposed by Rotax that this is done after 300 hours which means that every hour that you fly you need to stuff R100 into the kitty, plus R100 for fuel, plus R100 for replacing wings and other stuff that gets old and shriveled up on the trike after say 1,000 hours and you see that it costs me R300 an hour to fly.
2. Now for that price I can get one lap dance plus a drink or TWO table dances AND a drink from the tap in the toilet at Teasers. Going up the scale on a trip to the Vaal Dam and back and I can get seriously shlozzled and have two lap dances. Leaving Gauteng and in no time me myself I will give the lap dances and the strippers will have my babies.
3. I believe that Rotax don't give a shit because the market for their 912's in light sport aircraft world wide is booming to the point that they no longer see the 582 as anything more than a nuisance value product. The market is wide open for competition but there is nothing else worth mentioning.
4. It is said that the trike manufacturers could take the bull by the horns and produce an alternative and less onerous engine maintenance schedule but they are too scared to do this as they feel that they might be sued by a disabled microlighter or his grieving spouse who wishes to relocate to the Bahamas.
5. Alternatively it is said that the regulations have been promulgated, they are now the LAW and the AP shall henceforth and even forevermore not sign off engines that have not been opened up at 150 hours to check the wear of some of the stuff inside (nobody is mentioning this but it is also bloody expensive) and which have not had their crank changed at 300 hours.
6. It has also been said that no AP's belong to this e-group and therefore have no idea about this development because they have not been officially told about it and that they can therefore continue to AP as they always have done (and I reckon that when they are officially told about it they will resign as AP's because it is not worth the stress and because they dont wanna loose all their flying buddies by doing the CAA's dirty work for them).
7. It appears that if you hangar your plane on the coast and fly it once a month you better start taking dancing lessons after 100 hours because your engine is gonna look like the anchor chain of a Lesotho registered ocean going tramp steamer and it may stop. (Funny though how Rotax seem happy that their engine is used in all the Jet Skis........???) On the other kidney, if you fly in Chwanisbeg and fly a couple of times a week, then your engine will last forever - Like mine did before I took it to blerry Margate where sure enough, it stopped overhead Margate field
! I agree that okes at the coast should not be allowed to fly. But what about the okes who live a little inland. Say Pinetown or Stelenbush or Matatiele or Kakamas? How fast is their engine going to rust? And if I went beserk and took my plane down to the coast just once to show the okes how to fly formation, how bad is that?
I dont know the answer to all this. But I do know that as part of my training, I was taught to CONSTANTLY keep an eye open for emergency landing places because, like the sign says on the box in which the engine is delivered - THIS HERE ENGINE STOPS AND WE DONT KNOW WHY - or words to that effect. That is precisely why I take extra bog roll when I fly over mountainous regions or forests or anything that does not look like a mielie field. Because that is what I accepted when I went into this game. We are not supposed to fly over built up areas for that very reason. We switch off our engines overhead our field to practice dead stick landings all the time so we know how it feels. General aviation dont do that. And trikes deal with engine failures better than General Aviation planes because of their low stalling speed. Impact energy is exponentially proportional to speed. Every mile per hour slower that you land makes a huge difference to your chances of survival. Do an engine out on a Boeing and you are unlilely to live, despite what the nice lady with great legs up front tells you. In fact I would find it somewhat undignified to die with my head between my own legs and an oxygen mask over my face like they teach you on the serious planes. Conversely, I can realistically expect to survive an engine failure on my trike.
Engine failure and trikes go hand in hand and we have been taught to fly with this in mind. Do the CAA understand this? I dont think so. So how is this regulation going to help us? I dont believe that replacing the crank will make much of a dent on actual engine failures and it will make even less of a dent on actual trike flying fatalities. I know that the engine on my plane is not as reliable as a Lycoming etc. and I have had real live engine failures in the same way as countless fellow trike pilots and have survived to become a little wiser. If this had made me unhappy, I would have stopped flying trikes. But I did not. I accepted the risk.
Maybe the manufacturers hould have us sign up front a declaration that we undertand that flying their trike is risky business and that we should seriously consider running a strip joint or knockshop instead but that if we persist in wishing to buy the trike and have discarded the idea of suicide by sleeping tablets, then we hereby state than we understand that the engine is liable to stop unexpectedly and flying the plane is not like flying a General Aviation plane and we exonerate said manufacturer/AP/engine maker/spark plug supplier from any guilt or complicity arising from our demise. Seriously.
We should put a big sign on the passenger seat saying " All ye sinners who parketh thine arses upon this stool shall be flying in the valley of the shadow of death for thy pilot is thine enemy and hath not annointed a new crankshaft with oil". This should put them in the picture and preclude the CAA form having to protect innocent passengers.
What gives me a urinirary tract infection is that the CAA is actually making it more expensive for me to fly without actually making me better off. More paper, more yakking, more laws, more enforcement, more jobs for bureaucrats but NOTHING about training, NOTHING to improve survival stats, NOTHING to make it more accesible to the public and NOTHING to stimulate aircraft production and real job creation. And why pick on us and our passengers? What about kayakers and their passengers? And rock climbers and abseilers and powered paragliders and water skiiers and rubber duckers and divers and off roadbikers and and and ???? I guess that as trikers, we are not doing enough to hang onto our specific niche in aviation and are allowing ourselves to be bundled with conventional PPL type aviation.
As trike pilots, we should be in the experimental aircraft category where we take full responsibility for the consequences of operating our aircraft the safety of which is so utterley dependent on weather conditions and pilot skill as to make regulations virtually meaningless. It is all in the training. Not in the regulations. ( To this end, I would really push for a formal "advanced MPL course" for pilots with over 100 hours to firm up the stuff they learnt on their basic course and deal with all the stuff that crystalises after 100 or 200 hours in the air - turbulence, engines, airframes, out landings, formations, radio work, etc.).
I suggest that what we want to do is go back a step or two and regularise the situation which pertained 10 years ago where our safety was in our hands and where the average pilot benefited from the experience of the AP's, the Instructors, the specialists, the sky gods etc. whose advice carried a lot more clout than a lousy piece of pointless regulation which will be expensive and difficult to enforce and will make criminals of a whole lot of perfectly good pilots.
There are over 1,000 microlighters in South Africa. I have counted a miserable 17 blokes who have taken the trouble to air their view on this forum. Clearly the vast majority have no idea what is happening and many dont care because they will simply leave flying and AP'ing and go sailing if flying gets to be too much of a hassle and tooo expensive. The first step towards getting any change methinks would be to draft a petition and getting it signed. Each flyingschool / club / airfield should start one. Our leaders and betters should try to pull all the thoughts aired in the last two weeks together into a coherent petition and circulate it for signature.
Duif
lees net gister in die nuwwe SAflyer die DJ&A verslag aangaande ongelukke. Wel daar was tien "regte vliegtuie" , een gyro een KIS en ek vergeet die ander een maar hy was ook n ZU. Kan nie onthou dat ek een "microlight" (rattex engine probleem) gesien het nie....dag ek vra maar net 
