patham

You beat me to it Ross. It;s been reported a few times that when the bus drivers or ferry drivers go on strike in Brisbane they let you on for free. I use public transport infrequently, but I have gotten on a bus here only to be told that the smartcard scanner was not working. Instead of being forced to pay for a cash ticket, I got the "Scanners not working mate, its free for everyone." line. In the end, in Brissie it's the council's and ratepayer's dime. The incremental cost to each ratepayer for a free trip, vs the disruption if the service is pulled is an equation I can live with.

Awesome videography. But one of my least favourite airports. Too sprawling, confusing and difficult to get around - at least to an occasional user. Having said that, the only time I ever got good customer service from a US airline was at LAX. I was due to fly on a Dash-8 to Reno to go to the Air Races in 2007. The day before there had been a Dash 8 landing gear collapse (one of several) in Europe, and either the airline or FAA decided to temporarily ground that type that morning of my flight. The airline desk was chaotic, as that was pretty much their entire fleet, but they did manage to rebook me onto a competitor, getting to Reno via Sacramento with only 4 hours or so lost. Didn't even have to flash the credit card.

That's what I have been telling people about the rainfall this year. If it was not for the reasonable rain in March 2019, your graph shows we would have been on the 1 percentile or off the plot entirely.

I am in two minds whether it's a bit hyped in the headlines. It is a bad combination of hot dry weather over quite a widespread area, and in Queensland at least, 2 years of below average rainfall generating a large number of fires. As to if its the worst ever - typically Victoria gets the worst fires as they get more rainfall, more vegetation grows, and when that takes alight things go downhill fast. A bad fire season in Victoria (which its not AFAIK) would generally outweigh a "very bad" season in the other parts of the country. The more north you go, in general the less fire load, and less intense the fires- although that's small comfort to those who still lose life & possession. You get to the scrub in far north Queensland, and you could probably jump over or walk around the fireline if you are quick enough there is so little burning. That said, the smoke haze in Brisbane yesterday from fires that are measured in hundreds of kilometres away was pretty intense. Health agencies were warning people should stay indoors, but was probably a case of CYA. My sources in the health system indicated that nobody in Brissie seems to have had respiratory problems needing to be admitted to emergency. I gather some blame has been laid at poor fire management techniques by authorities, such as reducing the frequency of controlled burns that reduce the fire loading. The local guys are pretty good at control burns in the forest that borders my house, so I don't feel too uncomfortable - yet.

That and good skills in necromancy in reviving a post from 8 months ago !

To be fair, inaccuracies in weather prediction are pretty global. I planned my Saturday morning ride around a temperature profile that was meant to peak at 28 degrees max. It did not cool down much over the previous night, and so the temperature at the carefully planned start time was about 4 degrees higher than it should have been at about 25, then climbing into the thirties. Add all the smoke and haze in the air from the regional bushfires, it was not so pleasant: so the youngster and I took it easy and called a short one.

One last Perth anecdote. I got the worst hire car ever from Perth airport - a real wreck from a Tier 1 hire car company (Avis). 75 000 km on the clock. The helper guy said no need to check for body damage - every single panel has already been messed up - so the form for body and window damage looked like it was coloured in by a 5 year old. It drove as badly as it looked. And for this I paid full price. Part of the Perth, take it or leave it experience.

I forgot about the fake grass. I visited my one buddy who had torn up his lawn and astro-turfed it. However, you are not allowed to put fake grass down on the pavement in front of your house - I gather the council insist on natural grass, aka dust. However- horses for courses. My buddy likes it there as he has high quality beach and surf a few blocks from his house - so he has taken up daily morning surfing. Brisbane does not offer that convenience as you have to head to the GC or Sunny Coast for that.

I spent a couple of weeks there in 2012 interviewing both Perth and Brisbane for live-ability, and also another week in 2013 acclimatising to Aus. Perth in winter = pretty crummy and rainy and cold. Its a winter rain area - so think Cape Town. Summer was ludicrously hot - December was >40 degrees. A dry heat though - so much better than Brissie at 40. Hence, Perth has two crummy seasons per year, Brisbane only one (peak of summer). Advantage Brissie. Perthfontein is a better name. It really was like living back in the early 90's in South Africa. All shops closed at 5:00pm. Late night shopping until 9:00 pm one day per week. All shops closed lunchtime Saturday until Monday. No such thing as deciding to have a spur of the moment barbie! I felt Perth to be tiny. After a week of driving there I felt I hardly needed a GPS, and so I thought that it could feel very constrained after a while. After all there is not much north, south or east. I also noted that most professional people I knew tended to live in only one or two suburbs - which might indicate the bogan-ness of everywhere else. Subiaco is nice- but scarcely affordable. Stuff takes forever to get there. All manufacturing, imports etc. are all East Coast, as is most farming. Friends who lived in Perth and since moved to Brissie always complained that ordering furniture or so in Perth would add at least a month for it to be delivered, and much extra costs to the process, and I think groceries were also more pricey. Kings Park is awesome, the Perth office is right next door. To sum it up this way, typically my company historically paid 5-8% more to staff in Perth to recompense for extra cost of living. I still found it a very easy decision not to go there.

Reasons to keep your eyes open on the tarmac - Antonov 124 parked at the back end of Cairns airport. Excuse the mobile picture taken through the Q400 window. Cairns also has one of the last Shorts Belfasts parked up and rotting away in the tropical environment.

If you had mega-bucks to spare, starting up a small scale RR Merlin block casting factory could be pretty lucrative, and if you are in for penny you may as well make the other bits too. Those engines are scarce now that every Tom, Cruise and Harry has a P51.

Good call about finding a local club - that should be pretty inspiring. I think I want to keep the costs down for the moment as I also need to fund his mountain biking. So airbrush and mod- parts can wait a while. I suppose there is a sweet-spot between time, cost, effort and realism, and that will be different for everyone, and hell, it would even vary over time for the same person.

The 11 year old youngster wanted to do his first ever plastic model kit after being inspired by going to the aircraft museum a few weeks ago. He had been given a Hasegawa 1:72 Strike Eagle 4 years ago, when he was way too young to attempt it. As it stands, this kit has a gazillion fiddly bits - who has time to glue the lugs on the ejector bomb racks - especially when Strike Eagles can carry so many bombs in the first place. Tonight will be the finishing up of the armaments and maybe decals, touch up paint tomorrow. I think he did well (needed a bit of my help from time to time and me looking over him to explain the instructions and methodology). Room for improvement still - some brush marks on the paint and some joints really need filler which I was not able to get at the local shops, but probably he was as good as I was at that age (I remember starting at about age 9 though, on simpler Airfix kits). The joint lines were not helped by the Strike Eagle really being a rehash of their other Eagle kits, so the conformal fuels tanks do not have locating pins - they are just extra blobs of plastic to be as best aligned and glued as you see fit. At that age, discipline and patience to paint the inside of the cockpit, ejection seats does not exist, but I was the same back then too. I have convinced him that 1:48 is the way to go for most aircraft subjects - although I still have to finish my own Italeri 1:72 MH-53 Pave Hawk helicopter I have been carrying around for 23 years....

Bombardier sold off a majority share in its old C-series program to Airbus who have relabelled them as A220s. It has also sold off ifs Q400 and Dash 8 program to the same people who own Viking Air (who already had the rights and Type Certificates for the older DHC planes). So Bombardier are now sticking with trains and bizjets.

According to this no-name website - about $100 to 120 M. I always had it in my mind at $120M, with trip7's at double that. http://newsinflight.com/2018/01/28/2018-list-prices-of-boeing-and-airbus-aircraft/

That price seems a little high compared to the nominal list price of the plane its fitted on. But then again, it's all marketing..... Buy 2 engines, get the entire plane for free. Or buy the plane and engines cheap, cheap up front, then pay through the nose for spares and service for the next 20 years. Ps. I wonder what that last 50 c in the price buys you - that's a pretty specific number? Maybe a coke for the poor sucker who's delivered it from the stores to you ?

Car window film is a huge thing in Aus, and the dealers all pester you to use their special guy. But entirely for window tint and UV protection purposes (ooops, sorry, don't want to rub the lack of sunshine in NZ in your faces), and not for security.

Car theft in Aus is the only crime aspect that is worse than SA. In 2018, about 50 000 vehicles were stolen in each country, so when normalised to population, Aus is really shown in a bad light. The link below says about 70% are stolen short term, for joy-rides or to commit another offence and recovered. Car jacking in Aus however is so rare that it would make the news, so maybe a hundred per year, rare enough not to have its own crime category for stats. https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/car-theft-statistics.html https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/340513/south-africa-crime-stats-2019-everything-you-need-to-know/ Funnily enough, in my suburb, burglar bars on houses built in the late 70's and 80's seem to have been in style back then and look pretty common. The newer houses tend not to have. Houses from before that period in older suburbs also don't seem to have barred windows as a common feature. Most houses only have front fences or walls if they are trying to keep their dogs in, and they are a minority. And notwithstanding the car theft mentioned above, its pretty common for garages to be used as storage - or converted into play rooms, and vehicles are parked in the open driveway or out on the street.

I think I may have touched on this in the other get the hell out of here thread, so you can always search through that thread if you have a few weeks spare. In Aus, there is a pretty direct link between socio-economic environment and crime. If you live and work in decent areas, your odds of being burgled are much lower. Not non-existent, but low. Live in the cheap side, and yes, crime rates, especially property and cars are much higher. Petty crime here also follows easy transport links, from where the crims living in the cheap streets take a train ride to the good 'burbs., take a wander, find an unattended wallet, and head back home after a hard day's thieving. But yes, lost stuff tends to find you again. I lost my house keys in Cairns airport when my backpack zipper came undone, when I swung past a week later, I asked at the lounge if anything had been handed in. Lo and behold, they were there...

You are partly correct - I had omitted that detail. Its the balance of family test. It requires that the parents have at least half of their adult children living in Australia. So in your case, if it was just you in Aus and your sister in SA, then you could apply. However, because the Aus children have no clear majority - you get penalised by being shoved down the processing queue. If, in my inlaws case with 5 kids: currently 1 child in the US, one in Aus, 3 in SA, then you need 2 more to move to Aus. That would make it 1 in the US, 3 in Aus, 1 in SA, so you meet balance of family test. A simple 1, 2, 2 distribution would not hack it. And yes, the Aus term parental visa does not give them work rights, but at least they can stay for the duration.

Thanks for the update. That commitment is beyond what I would contemplate making, the only option that would seem viable was the second. Maybe if the parents were still very young and healthy the option 3 might be a worthwhile gamble...but that is what it is. With some very high stakes.

As a comparison, Aus has a variety of visa options to bring in parents of migrants. In theory they cater for a range of socio-economic level of applicants, but in practice - not so much. Option 1. Cheapskates option. Relatively low fee, full medical coverage. Very limited availability, and last I heard the processing time in the queue was about 25 years. Sign them up on this if you want to tell your folks with a straight face that you would love them to come over (although not really), but its in the government's hand's now. Option 2. Goldilocks options. High fee (above $50K per parent), full medical coverage. Limited availability, and last I heard the processing time in the queue was about 4-5 years. Effectively the fee reimburses the government for the expected health costs of the elderly parents, but in reality the true costs to the taxpayers are probably an order of magnitude higher. The family are the winners - the rest of the taxpayers - not so much. Option 3. 5- 10 year long stay visa's - and after that they have to move back to their country of origin. No medical coverage, so private cover must be bought, and like with most things, expect gap fees if things go wrong. If they go really wrong healthwise - you might end up bankrupted on their behalf.The only advantage is pretty short processing times, and the taxpayers do not take a hit on your behalf.

Yep - that's what the information boards on the museum said. I gather there were about 13 airframes that were decommissioned and cleaned up for museum display. The rest met a sad end - landfill. https://airforcesmonthly.keypublishing.com/2011/11/28/final-23-retired-raaf-f-111s-buried-in-landfill-site/

Yep - there were exhibits that were really unexpected- such as the DH Sea Vixen (not Bronco), as that was never widely used, and certainly not by Australia Apart from that you had a perfect strike rate. The others were a P2 Neptune, the split flaps of a Canberra, and the interior of a DHC-4 Caribou. The F111 is an impressive aircraft - much larger than I would have thought, and to think it was capable of Mach 2.5.

Had a spur of the moment visit to a local air museum. I was without a real camera, but took some mobile pics. I could have spent hours there...although I probably would have begged to go rummaging through all the old interesting bits (random drop tanks, wings, engines all stored at the back of the property). A box of internet smarties, hell - make that two boxes- to anyone who correctly ID's them all.