A fantastic aviation short film

I heard about this in one of the many podcasts I subscribe to.. It's a 10 minute short film about breaking the sound barrier, and it's damn fantastic. Just bear in mind when you watch this that 1) it's made in Ireland. 2) you tell me which bits are CGI, and 3) ALL the CGI shots were designed and rendered by the one bloke who made the movie. And he did it out of his own pocket as well, no government grants here!

Have a look here and see for yourself...

Some rules to remember

I was listening to this week's episode of The Finer Points, an excellent flying podcast, and I thought it was worth sharing what he said.

His first rule was regarding deciding what altitude to fly a trip at, and he reckons you should use a maximum of 1000 feet of altitude for every ten minutes of flight. So for my usual trip to Tauranga of 25 mins, we're looking at 2500ft. Whakatane at 50 mins would be 5000 ft. This all sounds logical and commonsense to me..

His second rule is more a rule of thumb, I guess. This is something that I've forgotten, that's if I ever knew this. He says True Airspeed increases over IAS by 2% every 1000 ft. We were doing 125kt indicated in the Arrow the other day at 5500ft and the GPS and DME both read 137, which is bang on, at least according to my feeble maths skills..

Some videos you might enjoy...

Yeah, I know the first couple of videos aren't flying related, but they're that awesome I just had to share them...


1158HP Skyline on a dyno - just listen to the sound - OMG!!


The tunnel of death - a good reason not to drive in Russia!!!


And a couple of flying videos to keep you all happy...


A very very close call in a Yak 3


First time in a jet...