willedoo

Jerry, you're thinking of David Schwimmer.

Hellenic Air Force F-16M over the Aegean Sea. It's easy to see why pilots love the F-16; it's like the fighter plane version of a sports car. It would have the best visibility of any fighter plane in my opinion. It also seems to be the most popular choice worldwide for home built cockpit simulators. The low profile and simple cockpit build would probably be a factor there.

There's two state by-elections on today in Queensland in Inala and Ipswich West. It will be the first time in 40 years that Inala has not been represented by a member of the Palaszczuk family.

Gerasimov has finally showed up in public in a propaganda video of him and Shoigu voting. It should put to rest rumours that he was killed in the Crimean command post strike in early January. He doesn't look well so it's possible he might have been recovering from some injuries which would explain his absence. Or he might have just had a bad case of covid for a while. It's hard to tell with Gerasimov as he looks fairly dopey at the best of times.

I formally withdraw the Ringo statement. Ringo's ears are different and he wouldn't have had hair that long in his younger days. That hair is a bit more 70's era.

The Beverley Hillbillies were a bit of an extended family. Granny was Jed's mother in law, Ellie May was Jed's daughter and Jethro was the son of Jed's cousin Pearl. Or at least that's the way I remember it. The hint of the actress looking nothing like the character she played made me think of Irene Ryan as I remember that was the case with her..

A young Ringo.

Irene Ryan aka Granny Moses?

She has a very Jodie Foster like face.

I suppose statistics can reveal a lot if they're properly broken down. Something like the oil and gas industry is a hard one to generalise because of the diverse nature of work. Fixed facilities like processing plants might have the odd welder blow themselves up, but most accidents happen driving on roads out on the lease somewhere. With drilling, a lot of accidents have been on or around the rig itself and are related to the dangerous nature of the machinery they operate. Then there's pipeline construction work, well servicing and seismic exploration; all varied types of work with their different hazards. If you exclude the working of the rigs, most of the deaths by accident I know of have been from vehicle accidents or crew change aircraft accidents. With crew change planes I personally know of 13 deaths, three serious injury cases and a couple of planeloads of walking wounded that were lucky to walk away. I've only had one close call in a 206 making a bad landing. The pilot landed in the wrong direction with a heap of wind up his tail and the little Cessna didn't want to touch down. When it finally did touch down, it did a big broadside to port, a bit of a fishtail, a broadside to starboard, and a bit more fishtailing before straightening up. Problem was by then we were rapidly running out of strip as we had traversed most of it ten feet off the ground. We pulled up with about six foot of strip left and very smelly brakes. It's the only time in my life I've assumed the brace position (twice). Beyond the end of the strip was a gradually rising sand dune, so in the worse case we probably could have stood on our nose or flipped over if we'd overshot it. Not preferable options but better than trees. Obviously it was a dirt strip. The funny thing is that the nervous, relatively inexperienced pilot went on to become a very experienced, confident bush pilot within the next two years. That was due to the big number of hours he put in when we had crews in the Kimberleys and were flying out of the base in Queensland.

The reasons for quad bikes overtaking tractors is fairly evident I think. Modern tractors are much safer than their older versions, and when tractors were of a less safe design there weren't any quad bikes around to compete in statistics. In those days you got around in the farm ute or a two wheeled conventional ag bike which is a lot safer than a quad bike. In the last 20 to 30 years there's been an explosion of quad bike use on farms. And now they have the side by side two seater buggies that ome mentioned.

I think tractor rollovers used to be one of the leading causes of farm deaths, but I'm fairly sure quad bikes are the leading cause now, at least in this state. My dad broke a leg on a quad bike rollover and a brother got some severe lacerations riding one when he hit a tensioned fence wire at full speed. He was lucky the wire caught him in the mouth and threw him off the bike, as a bit lower would probably have resulted in a decapitation. I was almost killed on a tractor when I was fifteen and still have permanent injuries as a legacy. In the hospital there was another young bloke the same age in the ward and he had lost a leg in a tractor rollover a couple of days before my accident. Adding to all that, our next door neighbour was killed on a crawler towing a scarifier. When I finally got out of hospital and went to ag college, a local girl was completely scalped when her plaits got caught in a chain drive on a potato digger. Also at the college, a few of the local farm hands and one of the lecturers all had half a hand missing from chaff cutters. These are just some of the people I personally knew or knew of who had farm accidents, but there were always plenty of other examples in the district from time to time. From my experience, I can understand why the stats show mining to be a lot safer than farming.

I've never worked in mining apart from doing an occasional short term contractor job for small time alluvial prospectors. I spent a fair portion of my life working in the oil and gas industry and saw quite a few safety changes over the years. Primary companies like Santos have long had strict safety rules for their employees, but as contractors, we had a much slacker system back in the day. That all started to change as the primary companies began mandating their safety rules for contractors to fall in line with their systems. No more shorts or T shirts on the job; long pants, long sleeves buttoned at the wrist at all times, hats mandatory when outdoors, long ankle lace up boots only, drug testing, drive-right vehicle monitors and the list goes on. It was all worthwhile and not over the top in my opinion. We were also lucky to be in a relatively low risk/low accident rate sector. The drill rig crews had the most dangerous job in that industry.

There's been plenty of public comment about the downward spiral of Twitter since Musk bought it. Rebranded as Xcrement, any useful staff have been laid off and the nutter himself seems to have a big hand in how it's now run. Apart from driving away major advertisers and letting all the dictators, racists and extremists back on the platform, they continually tweak the algorithms to make it a much less user friendly place. Probably most people access Xcrement on their phones. I visit it regularly via a laptop and only occasionally with an Android phone. The odd thing is that Musk's Xcrement is a totally different experience for each device. With the laptop, it's business as normal. The feed suggestion 'for you' page displays the regular accounts that I show interest in or are following, plus any new suggestions are usually high quality. Advertising is at a minimum and generally good quality. On the other hand, the phone experience is nothing short of awful and getting worse by the day. Advertising is at saturation level and most of it is low quality spam and dropshippers. As for all the accounts I either follow or show regular interest in, they keep disappearing increasingly and are replaced by a million dog and cat videos or the TikTok variety where people stage cr*p to get views and likes. The way the algorithms are now, you have to continually keep adding a like or opening the posts of the regular interest accounts or they quickly drop off the radar and get replaced with spam. It's getting almost non viable to access Xcrement on the phone as you have to spend most of the time adding likes and blocking garbage. It's odd as viewing on the laptop is a pleasant experience. They must have different algorithms for different types of devices because the viewing experience is unrecognisable from the one to the other.

The reason for the safety stats in mining is because it's a highly regulated and supervised industry. The opposite of that is why farming has such a poor safety record. Farmers aren't as regulated or supervised. There are safety rules applying to farming but they aren't able to be enforced properly due to the isolated nature of working on a farm. Some farm workers roar around flat out on quad bikes without helmets, grind metal with no eye protection, leave guards off machinery, and many more risky things. Nobody really knows they're doing it until something goes wrong and they front up at a hospital. The way mining is regulated, very few capers like that occur.

This is a photo of the Freedom of Russia Legion during recent operations fighting over the border in Russia. For those who haven't seen the flag, it's the proposed Russian flag for a free Russia in a post putin era. I quite like the blue on the white background. The idea of it is to remove the blood from the Russian flag by replacing the bottom red bar with white. Blue and white always go well together on a flag, examples being the flags of Greece and Finland.

I should clarify that and add "and don't have seats that provide for placing a parachute in the crew member's seat". Meaning tub type seats where the parachute is connected to the parachute harness and the crew member sits on the parachute. The An-2 biplane seats can take a sit-on parachute, and I'd have to look at some photos, but I think the An-12 seats allow worn parachutes. Just for interest, here's an old photo of one of Viktor Bout's banged up old Ilyushins. It's an Air Cess Il-76, Liberian registered. I wonder what putler is doing with Viktor since he was repatriated from the U.S. in the prisoner swap. There's been very little news on him, but putler would have him smuggling something or sure. He wouldn't let a talent like Viktor go to waste.

This is one of the parachutes as they are stored on the wall of the aircraft.

The problem with a plane like the Ilyushin 76 is that it's not easy to bail out in an emergency. Paratroopers do it all the time from the Il-76, but that's a controlled, straight and level pre-planned event. In an emergency, it might be possible if you had long enough warning time and the aircraft was still under a reasonable level of control. With engine fires like that, the only possible egress would be via the rear cargo door/ramp. Even if the hydraulics were working, it would take some time to get that down so any people in the rear of the plane could leave. Normally (and bear in mind there's not much normal in Russia these days) the crew and passengers would be wearing a PN-58 parachute harness. The PN-58 system is an emergency system for aircraft like helicopters and transports that don't have ejection seats. The PN-58 parachute packs are stored hanging on the wall of the aircraft, and if needed, have a quick hitch clip-on arrangement to quickly fasten to the front of the worn harness. The problem would be getting to the parachute and getting it on if the plane is starting to dive and toss about, and even if you can do that, you still have to get safely out of the aircraft. Photo below is the PN-58 harness and chute at a crew training session. All these glossy publicity photos are far removed from the reality that is the true state of the Russian military.

There could be a bit of truth in the rumours that an A-50 crew were being transported and went down with the Il-76 crew. The story is that they were being flown to Ivanovo to pick up a stored A-50 to fly it back to get recommissioned for a replacment for recent A-50 losses. The crash happened near Ivanovo; the Ivanovo-Severny airbase has a batch of mothballed A-50 AWACS aircraft. You would assume if it was a ferry operation for the A-50 that only the flight crew were on board and not all the radar and communication technicians that work in an operational A-50. Photo is some of the mothballed A-50's at Ivanovo airbase.

Some people are saying it's an engine but I think it's a section of the main gear. The gear was down just before the black object fell. If you put the video on full screen and freeze frame it step by step it looks more like a set of wheels. Those D-30 low bypass engines are fairly long and skinny.

It works in Russia and a lot of other countries. Trump seems to idolise dictators.

My mistake, I meant two hectares, approximately five acres.

I've often wondered just how much old Soviet equipment is still warehoused in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. I don't know how accurate the figure is, but I once read there were up to 800,000 Soviet troops in Ukraine before the Union dissolved in 1991, so there would have been warehoused gear to support those numbers. One example is the 30,000 Maxim machine guns Ukraine has restored from storage in the last two years. About ten years ago I bought a few leather flight helmets from a lady in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. They were all in mint, boxed condition, and obviously had been in storage untouched since the early 1950's. I never asked where she got them from.