Sorry for the birdwalk, but I’m reminded of current goings-on in my town where Elon Musk’s largest building in the world is nearly completing.

The $1.1 billion gigafactory is a single building with a footprint of ~2,000,000 square ft (~4.3M in useable space across multiple floors).

The building is 1.21km long, happening to run parallel to the highway, so to drive “past it” at highway speeds it takes every bit of a full minute of drive time.

Due to the curvature of the earth, the slab at each of the far ends of the building are ~1 inch “lower” than the planar high point of the center of the slab.

It’s all in one county.

 

Actually since most of the highway speeds in Texas are 65 mph an up, it would take a little less than 45 secs. But still, WOW, an impressive sized building to be sure.

 

LOL - I was thinking "So he's the guy always driving slow in the fast lane!"

 

Hey @redpcar and @cicindela, here’s a guy that thinks the maximum speed limit is relevant anywhere within 10 miles of Austin city limits

You’d be lucky to get up to 70kmh on a Sunday morning - not unrelated to Tesla moving global HQ here, on the heels of every other “Big Five” (well, other than Microsoft, because Dell is already here )

Austin and three of its suburbs are all 4 collectively in the top 20 of fastest growing cities in North America, while it’s transportation infrastructure is… not.

Hey Elon who can build the world largest’s building in 18 months during a supply chain bottleneck, any advice?

 

Loved those old Roadrunner cartoons

Courtesy of Avgeekery.com via Facebook.

 

Experience, a high level of skill and a generous sprinkling of luck!

 

But did he use his tachymeter?

 

Well, I'm sitting in Chicago waiting on the line guys to pull this Hawker out so we can finish up a maintenance check.

But I have another topic in mind: 5G interference.

I let the topic swirl around my head over the last several weeks, reading opinion pieces by people who presumably have no real aviation experience or who have some sort of vested interest in seeing 5G go big. Maybe it's simply that they are an average wireless consumer and they want greater download speeds or whatever. Still, the commonality in all these articles is that the author seems to suggest this whole thing is just a pissing match between two major industries (telecom and aviation) and that there's no real issue.

I've seen claims that the FAA is just pushing their weight around and that it hasn't done any real research on whether interference is actually a risk.

The other day, I flew to Kansas City and witnessed first hand what a 5G tower does to on-board equipment. I now fully understand why the FAA issued a NOTAM about it.

The 5G interference with our radar altimeter was immediate, loud, and crippled that system. Had to just turn it off. Now, using the radar altimeter was not imperative for the approach category we were flying, but for the big birds that's another story entirely.

So, this begs the question: are the same people demanding 5G on their iPhone 14,321x going to be very happy when they find out they can't fly to their next vacation to Instagram their dinner & duck face?

Is 4G good enough? Could a different frequency band be used for 5G?

From my 10 years in aviation, I can say with utmost confidence that making the change on the aviation side of things will take four times longer and cost 10x simply due to the bureaucratic legalese inherent in the industry when compared to telecom & the FCC.

Call me biased, but I think that's a pretty objective look at the current state of affairs.

 

I think most people expect that whoever is in charge will figure it out, so they don't likely have any opinion. Having said that, I've never met anyone demanding 5G...

 

It seems that it is all about frequency bands, and the bands allocated are different in each country. The USA has authorised a band close to the radalt band but it may not be in common use everywhere. There is a technical discussion over on PPRuNe where some people know whereof they speak. https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/644134-faa-ads-re-5g-interference-3.html

 

PM sent.

 

Around the world in 260 hours. Youngest woman to circumnavigate the globe by air. The adventure of a lifetime...
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe...e-pilot-sets-solo-record-20220121-p59q7p.html

 

Really something.

For the non-pilots in the room, any color on why her route looks the way it does?



I’d suppose there must be some “rules” around what counts as “circumnavigating,” that I’d presume hinge on something like an average latitude (otherwise a quick spin around the north pole would count, wouldn’t it?). Perhaps instead it involves touching all the continents, which it appears she’s done?

Now, I get why she didn’t throw herself way out over a body of water, but there’s a lot of coast-hugging here, when the uninitiated like me would think she was not only avoiding large bodies of water but also large expanses of land?

Then despite all the coast-hugging, there’s a rather intentional looking avoidance of China?

What a truly remarkable chance to take!

 

This thread seems like a good place to share this: today I formally enrol in helicopter pilot training, with the objective of obtaining a Private Pilot License in the next 18-24 months. Why am I doing this? Simply because it's been a lifelong objective of mine -- to learn to fly Something. At age 64-1/2 I realize it's time to either sh*t or get off the pot.

Deciding What to learn to fly was not easy. Fixed wing? Glider? Rotorcraft? Long story short, it's Helicopter for me.


This shot is from my training intro flight a couple of weeks ago, taxiing back to the hangar at KBUR.

 

There was a lot of planning went into this from the young lady which was probably equivalent to ten times the actual flight time.

There are a number of reasons she would have to avoid certain places such as:

1. Large areas of water being the biggest because at best you have 5 to 6 hours maximum fuel reserve in an ultralight at rather slow speeds. My best mate flys an ultralight replica Storch with a stall speed of 26 KTS so a good headwind has you at walking pace.
2. Big rocks sticking out of the ground commonly referred to as mountains must be flown around.
3. Not every Civil Aviation Authority accepts ultralight aircraft in their airspace for various reasons such as transponder, safety equipment (ballistic parachute), height restrictions, proximity to commercial airways and so on.
4. Flying over war zones, restricted airspace, unfriendly countries etc.
5. access to ultralight friendly airports as they are not always welcome everywhere.

There are pilot members here who can add to this list because I am sure there are many other reasons.

The route shew flew over Asia is impressive to say the least and she would have spent a lot of time looking at water below her.

 

I’d assume planning was more like 100X-200X! I once rode a saddle mule, solo, for 40 days and 400 miles across the Sandhills region of Nebraska from South Dakota to Kansas; which is to say, I can only glimpse at some empathy for what it must take to plan for this young woman’s trip!

As far as generally hugging coastlines, I suppose coastlines tend to be populated and so perhaps there is a larger density of runways or other emergency landing opportunities. (I notice that in Europe she did more cross-country, which may be incidental or maybe because Europe’s population density is higher/more distributed than say the central U.S.).

Still leaves me interested in the backstory on that China-avoidance

 

That’s awesome! Good for you!

 

Still leaves me interested in the backstory on that China-avoidance [/QUOTE]

Apparently it was Covid related.

 

Last night flying up and down the US East coast ..check out the winds and GS going south then north. Luckily North was the last leg home