No yoke: 'Bored' Aussie test pilot passes time in the cockpit by drawing massive knobs in the air An Australian pilot has earned his coveted Register wings by telling the world how boring flying can be through the medium of flight trackers. According to Adelaide publication The Advertiser, the pilot had been tasked with running in a new engine for a single-engined aircraft to be used for instructional duties. The job …
It wouldn't be all that hard for a very good pilot to do this. Someone with "Test Pilot" in their title is usually an extremely good pilot!
If the Aussies employ pilots of this calibre (noting in particular the very finely defined E) to run in an exchange engine on a trainer, then I'm over-awed at the surplus of talent available to them. Even allowing the low res map, that's going to involve either very tight flat turns, or pulling a loop.
The letters are a lot bigger than they may look. Takes about 20 minutes to do each of them.
Yeah the tight turns are tight, but not as much as it looks. If he really did have to maintain a constant RPM all the time (which I doubt), then those would be 2G turns. I do not recall the DA-40 being certified for any kind of aerobatic flight, so that's the only option I can think of. In reality, the wide arcs on B, O, R and D are much more difficult to fly as those are not turn radii that we commonly use.
Such as Ozrunways, AvPlan or even the VNAV mode on his G1000/AP would make this easy.
The latter you could literally dial it all into the system (with custom waypoints etc) and press a button and it will do it for you. Probably take longer to configure than the flight itself but who cares.
My first reaction was "the real reason this exists is because there's a commonly used aviation tool somewhere that facilitates creation of waypoints in a drawing-like fashion - people are simply using it because it's there!". If this is a common thing, I'm even more convinced that I'm not wrong...
As the Orzie newspaper says, the gentleman is not a test pilot but a flying instructor "breaking in" the new / overhauled engine.
It is actually a nice mix of instrument and visual flight. He dialled in a radial back to Adelaide VOR to use as his baseline and then drew the letters visually. As someone else pointed out above, the aircraft (a DA-40) is equipped with a glass cockpit so you can basically see your GPS track. Still, an impressive bit of work and needs quite some concentration not to fuck up.
By my reckoning, the letters are about 20 NM long, so it would have taken him about two and a half hours to write the whole sentence.
Some people update their mood on Farcebook, others have other ways of expressing themselves. I hope his boss appreciates the free publicity, cause he would have never been able to afford a campaign like this.
I admire the skill and the amusement factor.
Funnily enough, though, while I have very little time for wank on "gender differences" (other than purely physical averages), this drawing cock-and-balls thing is really the most significant gender difference that I can think of. I've never seen a women draw random vaginas as grafitti. (Ok, there's the almost-always-appalling "yoni" art, but that's not random grafitti.)
In the people I personnally know, "penis drawers" are roughly equally distributed between all genders. Mostly because the shapes involved are simple, distinctive, easily drawn with only connected lines, and the conveyed sillyness is immediately perceived by the viewer.
Note that the "symbol" is almost always drawn erect and "upwards", because sideways it woud be an antique gun on wheels, °I° is just a face, and a shrivelled penis is as difficult to render as a vulva - i.e. too much effort. The female equivalent would be (.Y.) , which is again used equally by all genders but VERY difficult to render with connected lines.
Don't assume gender bias until you have ruled out gratuitous silliness and laziness.
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