The NRA used this awful event by saying it proved there was a need for LESS regulation. I guess they are reasoning…

If everyone had a gun then this sort of thing would not happen. The crazy guy (always seems to be a guy) starts shooting little kids and an adult comes along and blows his head off. Therefore no unstoppable massacre.

Makes emminent sense to me in a society where the two most addictive drugs (nicotine and alcohol) are legal and hallucinogenic drugs (which are totally non-addictive and have no physically harmful effects) are so illegal you get five years for picking a specific mushroom.

D&D at the old LATCC (West Drayton) was impressive to visit. And you won’t know how they can help until you call them. Way back in the day some of our ppl pilots in 2 pa28s had headed off as an unpredicted violent squall line came through. The sky was dark in daytime with severe thunderstorms and torrential rain. They called Heathrow Approach who contacted Wycombe Air Park who were closed and got the runway lights switched on. Which saved their bacon that afternoon.

I personally would have declared an emergency and gone to Heathrow whether they wanted me or not. Sort out the huge landing, runway movement and parking fees later. The only problem I see with a Pan call is the time it takes to do the stuff they need you to do to get identified. I can’t really imagine faffing about in a squall line or in fog/stratus. Better to go IMC and climb out of it, hope there is a top nearby. Maybe an attempt at a let-down over the sea. I think the UK weather is one of the more demanding from the PPL point of view. Have to be ready for all sorts of unexpected. One thing I have noticed is the wedge-stratocumulus effect. You are stooging along and there is a thin wedge of stcu ahead. So you (for the shear fun of it) go vfr on-top. The top of the cloud starts to increase in altitude and after a time you are at FL60 and airways are coming down at you so you descend. But the base has gone down as the tops went up and you pop out into 5km of grim gloom at maybe 800ft. I hate when that happens.

At what point does the 21st begin, or rather the world end on this planet?
I’m thinking time zones etc.

Good question. 🙂

As the so-called Oltec (pre-mayan) calendar was supposedly created in South America it might matter about time zones.

I would say as this date is related less to calendars and more to the winter solstice on the 21st it would be related to the astronomical sidereal time
that the planet arrives at this point in it’s solar orbit. So maybe there is a banana skin floating at that point in space awaiting the Earth.

Why is humanity so obsessed with extinction events? I know religious fundimentalists are eagerly awaiting the end times and get their reward in their heaven. But what about the slightly saner of us, human chickens (rational theiranthropes)?

It is truly a crazy world.

Maybe if the Spanish hadn’t wiped them all out, the Mayans would’ve finished their flippin’ calendar :rolleyes:

The Mayans were not the originators of the long-count calender. Their myths say it was passed on to them from a higher level civilisation that existed long before they ever did, in the darkness of pre-history. The calendar was fully completed. The myth was that there were five suns each of about one solar year (one complete precession of the equinoxes – about 25,000 years. At the end of each of these periods the planet allegedly suffered major upheaval and change. We are no in the final days of the final sun period. No more follow. Nobody knows who created these amazing calendars but what is clear is that their civilisation has a great, long-term, understanding of astronomy and of math.

Yup, the Spanish (actually the Roman Catholic church) did a really great job of wiping out most of the amazing things the conquistadors came across. But many of their priests also documented these things before destroying them, or before they melted them down into gold.

A Russian astrophysicist has theorised that the solar system is entering an area of space with a much higher energetic level and this will cause the sun to start producing huge sun-spots (promenences) which might cause our technology problems; maybe even rip away our planet’s radiation protection. This is the sort of predictable and repeatable disaster that could cause a regular planetary disruption, as predicted in the Long Count calendar. No sun spots so far though, in fact a dearth of them, surprisingly.

It has a lot of flap down meaning the pilot wishes to fly very slowly. I would guess it wasn’t quite slow enough so he/she lowered the gear for more form drag.

Was that 747 sim the one with lots of tiny engine gauges? I think the Sublogic one was based around a pa28 Archer. This was the one that MS bought out I believe.

This is good news for pilots. This flight simulator game had improved to the point that it has stopped development of serious instrument flight procedural training software for pilots. Like all microsoft junk it dominated the flight sim industry by shear weight of money. Before this junk was purchased by MS from the small software company that wrote it there were lots of decent flight sim programs for pilots. I know, I was the author of one of them. Now almost none remain for serious instrument training use.

Also MS flight sim never worked correctly. There was a bug in the 3D engine that was present in the pre-Microsoft version and remained to the end. If you flew an approach and wished to make a small lateral position correction inside the inner-marker to the threshold you couldn’t do it without huge (!) control movements. In real life it takes only small aileron/rudder/power inputs to ‘jink’ into line with the runway even when you are over the hedge.

So let’s hope for better and more serious flight sim programs in the wake of flight simulator. 🙂

When I was a child in the 1960s (probably 1967 or 67) I was taken along to an RAF Battle of Britain airshow at (I think) RAF Abingdon.

In a hanger full of RAF aeroplanes there was what I believe was an ME 262 jet (although I have vague recollections of a Komet rocket jet too). I think it was in ww2 german markings and it looked immaculate – what I would now rate as ‘airworthy’.

Anyone else see this aeroplane?

Another thing from the 1960s that has always mystified me happened for 2 Fridays in a row at about 5pm. We were all enjoying hot summer hols from school and at this time a stream of low-flying RAF aeroplanes in close formation crossed over Bracknell coming from the south (possibly Farnborough). They were no higher than 1000 feet and included Basset twins, Argosies, Belfasts and Andovers. Of course, I didn’t know these details back then as I was just a child, but the recollection is pretty clear in my memory still. What was strange was that at that time Bracknell was a couple of miles inside the western edge of the London Control Zone and this large fleet of aeroplanes wasn’t following that edge but cutting right through it. They would have tracked east of White Waltham. Some sort of formal flypast practice for some occasion? I wonder if the aeroplane types would suggest a solution (no Comets or Britannias, only transport types and the Beagle Bassett twins.

Sarah