I've worked in a bunch of restaurants and now work with restaurant software (we're hiring some cool positions if you are interested [1])
The one thing I'd be a bit wary about here is heat making that paper unreadable. I've seen a bunch of kitchens intend to run thermal printers in kitchens, but had to switch to impact printers because how quickly the paper would turn dark in the ambient heat in the kitchen, plus the heat lamps on expo station.
Thankfully the author isn't relying on this for anything absolutely critical (also aviate, then navigate anyways) but I'd wonder if on a sunny day without any clouds there, how quickly that paper would degrade.
General Aviation still uses lead in their gas, despite it being shown several times in enormous nationwide studies consistently to not be necessary, and often simply requires more cost in maintenance (lead builds up on spark plugs causing a lot of issues).
So environmental impact isn't high on their list already, and this BPA issue is very likely going to be completely ignored by anyone in that field.
You still have to fill it up by touching and breathing in the fumes while pumping it into the tank, so not exactly, but you're right that it does affect others as well.
I realize this is an anecdote, not data, but after flying my own plane for 5 years and getting >500 hours of flight time, plus soldering off and on for 30 years with leaded solder, my lead levels were fine at my last physical. I don’t drink avgas or anything, but don’t take precautions other than attempting to avoid getting it on bare skin.
dunno about the evidence, but I kinda figured post-combustion lead is more atmospheric than pre-combustion lead. Elemental lead doesn't really absorb through the skin (and gas doesn't evaporate too well at low temperatures) as far as I know.
Lead added to fuel is in the form of an organic compound, so I'd expect the opposite effect. Obviously there's more distribution post combustion, but from a bio-availability standpoint spraying tetraethyl lead around in equivalent quantities would be a much more severe problem.
Naively (without looking at data for concentrations in various environments), I could buy that people regularly handling / being around leaded aviation fuel are worse off than those breathing the (dilute) exhaust products.
From first look, yes, and for more or less modern engines, which really don't need lead.
But for planes, normal age more than 20 years, even exist workhorses with 70 years.
They have very old engine technologies, some literally spread gas on ground (use lead in it to lubricate valves, which are outside, like on old star engines).
So even when you walking where such plane was, you will gather some lead.
We are yes... Turbodiesel seems to be the answer even though a rebuild is not possible so they need a replacement very often :( On the other hand the unleaded gas engines like Rotax seem to be super reliable in the ultralight category, they are just not certified for real GA. I would imagine that slightly scaled up they could be a real workhorse.
Or perhaps a really small turboprop. I've seen really tiny jets so why not stick a prop on it (because jets are too inefficient at low altitudes). Might help with noise too.
There's so much innovation we could be taking advantage of :'( But we're still using engines designed in the 50s with lead (replacement) and manual choke/mixture that cars have deprecated 30 years ago.
I remember this being discussed on HN before. It felt a bit like "till receipts are killing us" which in the context of someone flying a 40 year old plane with noted defects might not be a primary concern.
I wanted to buy a thermal printer myself but couldn't find a definitive answer or evidence of the BPA part being a risk. I got one that uses BPS instead - other papers also raised concerns about this, but again I couldn't find direct evidence of health issues associated with the handling of till receipts.
I decided as the receipt printer will be used infrequently and I have been handling till receipts for the last 4 decades I wouldn't worry about it. BPA is also present in food cans and plastic bottles - the link you sent states the concentrations are higher in receipts - but at the same time I don't intend on eating the receipts or rubbing them into my skin.
Generally I'm quite cautious about chemicals in everyday life, I try and reduce the amount in our house using natural products for cleaning for example.
At the same time we're constantly surrounded by toxins so I often find myself having to do this sort of rationalisation to avoid worrying about seemingly everything all the time.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this and was just about to buy one of those super cheap thermal printers you find on AliExpress. That’s less junk filling up my house.
that's interesting, thanks for the insight -- I was aware of thermal's darkening but unaware of it's speed. I'll leave one out in the sun tomorrow, if I can have ~4hrs with it I'll be chuffed
And, of course, as you said, aviate navigate communicate first :)
Makes me wonder if "you need a receipt to claim warranty" is intentional like that.
There's a few apps that can organize / OCR receipts for you, if a photo of a receipt is adequate. I don't actually know any and I may be talking out of my ass but err. I'm sure there are!
Over here in Poland, companies usually require a "proof of purchase", which can be a receipt or an invoice. As a buyer, it's up to you which one you want to receive[0]. There's a special kind of pseudo-invoice called "personal invoice", which is like a VAT invoice except you don't need to be a company or provide a tax ID for it. This is the one you want in any scenario when you expect to hold on to the proof of purchase for longer than it takes to reach the nearest trash can - its killer feature is that it can't possibly fit on a thermal paper receipt[1], so you get it printed out using regular, durable means, on regular office paper (and/or e-mailed as PDF).
--
[0] - On-line you usually get to pick at check-out, off-line you usually have to ask before paying.
[1] - Technically it could, but it would be quite an achievement, and it's sufficiently non-standard that nobody bothers.
Worth looking at Figure 3 showing how different samples of thermal paper have vastly difference reactions to high temperatures.
Once had a set of Aliexpress plastic water carriers take 6 months to arrive to me during COVID and it when it arrived, it seemed like the plasticizers from the carriers (or the factory?) severely degraded the thermal shipping label.
We use high temperature paper (170F, 20% dark at 6mJ/mm²). It will not turn dark left many days in a truck dashboard in the summer in Texas.
I once found a stack of 7 year old receipts and they were completely readable.
I used to develop smart parking meters, and we used thermal printers in those. You can get paper that tolerates high-temperature environments like the dashboard of a car on a hot sunny day.
You should look into a roll chart. It’s a small device typically mounted to a handlebar of a motorcycle that contains directions.
As you reach each waypoint, you turn a knob and roll the next waypoint into the window. It should work just great with your receipt printer and your not limited to the length of the A pillar in your plane.
I was about to buy a plane with a longer a pillar --- darn it! I guess roll chart makes more sense indeed.
I know them from the Rally Dakar, I think up to recently they used them, I think they are super cool; great shout :)
I'd wanna grab a friend w/ a 3D printer to make one because I kind of like the flexibility of sellotape at the moment, especially the roll chart mount into the airframe
I like any excuse to mention the Jones Live Map. Back in the day it hooked up to a car odometer and when the arrow pointed to a direction, you'd take it.
It works well as long as you never miss a direction, then it gets off.
It'd be horrible with the variability in land speed from the same engine speed, but maybe that'd be part of the "fun" trying it for an airplane.
I'm a dinosaur and I'm always amazed at the technology that pilot's have available to them these days.
While complex to learn, having huge glass navigation systems sitting in front of you in a single engine plane seems so foreign to me.
I did my instrument ride in a C-172 and my commercial in a PA-44.
During both of those checkrides, I ended up having to shoot ILS approaches to minimums, in turbulent IFR conditions, with nothing but "steam gauges". The fanciest thing in the plane was probably the HSI.
On the instrument ride, I had to shoot an NDB approach to minimums in actual. That was a good time.
I assume planes don't even come with NDBs anymore. I used to tune into AM radio on them just to have something to listen to to pass the time.
I used the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator recently and loaded up the C-172. It just stared at the screen for a minute, realizing I don't know how to use a G1000 so I couldn't fly it. I mean, I could start it up and get it off the ground, but for IFR navigation? No clue. Lots of buttons and fancy graphics.
Honestly - as someone who did their primary and instrument using steam gauges, and now mostly flies a Cirrus Perspective+ system (G1000 with some extra's), you'll get up to speed in less than a few hours of digging through the manual and playing in the SIM.
After about 10 or so hours, you'll start finding so many small things that make life infinitely easier for single-pilot ops that it's ridiculous we can do x or y with so little effort.
Running lean of peak, having a TOD, programming in our steps, hitting the approach button and just letting the plane fly is black magic at times. There's no going back for me at this rate, especially when I just want to go places. I've got a single-seat Yak for when I truly want to "fly"!
G1000s are great, but it's disappointing that just about everything else has remained basically unchanged on GA aircraft for the last 30+ years. I hope that we will see some actual innovation in GA engines, airframes, and fuels soon. Fuels might be the most promising for the near-term.
The innovation/future exists, but is not evenly distributed. For example Diamond planes [1] have:
- The same G1000 (NXi)
- A composite body
- Jet-fuel burning engines adapted from recent Mercedes diesels
- Computer control of that engine through one knob instead of managing the throttle/mixture/prop separately like cavemen
- Crash testing, like impact absorbing seat structure and separately enclosed fuel tank modules that are unlikely to rupture instead of just filling the wing.
And a new one costs about the same as a new Cessna 172 that's been essentially unchanged since the 60's except for the G1000 like you said.
But "the same" is a pretty nice house in most of the country (~$600k) so everything is hand-built, so costs are high, demand is kept low. Commercial students trying to get their 1500hrs mostly just need the lowest cost, not the nicest or safest.
Another big area of innovation and also lower costs is in experimentals and/or light-sport. LSAs should be getting a lot more capable soon with MOSAIC [2]
Yes a new DA40NG is around $600k, as is a new Cessna 172. A new DA62 is well into $1.5m with the options you'd want if spending that kind of money, and a 2-year wait last I heard.
Meanwhile you could build something like a Velocity V-Twin well-equipped for under half a million. Paying for certified lawyering is expensive.
Nearly all the innovation in general aviation, particularly regarding situational awareness and safety, is happening in the Experimental category. Moving maps, synthetic vision/terrain alerts, ADS-B in and out, engine monitoring, airspeed-aware electronic trim control, fuel injection, electronic ignition, FADEC systems... yes, all are available on newer certificated planes for $,$$$,$$$, but much more affordable and accessible in the Experimental world. And, the builder/owner can install and configure everything himself. Garmin's latest G3X update includes the ability to use rudimentary set/clear logic signals to do if-this-and-that type CAS alerts, and configure your gauges to behave differently during different phases of flight. All owner-configurable.
Reminds me of my (pretty recent) sailing course :) I went on a few short sailing trips after and other people on the boat only trained on the boat we were on, which was much fancier than the one I first had to deal with. The original one had:
- tiller instead of wheel (my brain could not)
- no bathroom (bucket available)
- no furling foresail (got to change to a storm jib in strong winds)
- no auto locking winch
- no auto pilot
- no depth sensor
- no gps/screen
- no fuel gauge
- no clutches (only a couple of jam cleats that didn't work really well)
- retractable engine (so we had to lower it/pull it up manually, was fun to use it to stabilize the boat a bit when winds were strong)
Boat was also a bit smaller 31' vs 34'. I'd still take my course on that boat if I had to redo it, it was a deeper learning experience.
> The fanciest thing in the plane was probably the HSI.
The HSI is probably the most intuitive navigation instrument for me. You point the picture of the plane to the heading you want to fly into or away from the radio beacon, and it tells you whether you need to fly left or right in order to intercept the correct course.
For fun, I fly the Lockheed Super Constellation^1 in my flight simulator (FlightGear; it's FOSS) in CAT2 or even CAT3 weather mode, and try to fly from one airport to another using only the 'steam gauge' instruments and my memory of the radio navigation frequencies. Recently I've been hand-flying without the autopilot as well. I'm the pilot, navigator, radio man and flight engineer for the quad R-3350 engines all in one seat. There's something amazingly satisfying about seeing the ALSF lights appear through the jet-black haze seconds before a smooth touchdown, and I'm proud to say that I've only crashed into hills a few times!
^1: ...which predates glass cockpit instruments in airliners by about half a century
I'd have to agree (with the little experience I have). My school is the cheapest on the block and we have the oldest planes, the other day I sat in another's schools C172 and saw the G1000 and.. "damn.. look at all those colours and uh what does this button do" was just about all I could say
I think in regards to safety, screens have the upper hand 99% of the time however...
a) the 1:1 of screen X to screen Y doesn't exist, I (think) you have to pretty much learn the new system
b) there's a certain je ne se quais to instruments
c) the school that has the G1000 needs a G1000 trainer as well as an IFR trainer (though I guess that's fine because then you have experience in both)
d) too much screens may not be the best - the G600 has touchscreens now
Guessing you meant 6-pack/steam-gauge trainer, since anything with a G1000 put in is virtually guaranteed to be IFR-capable.
There's no hard requirement to learn one versus the other. If you're a new student today and looking to go to one of the big-boy airlines you'll probably never need to fly a 6-pack if the school you pick has G1000's.
Maybe my point was rubbish, just wanted to highlight that the learning curve is --> this is an IFR instrument + how it's represented/actioned thru our avionics suite
For sure, something bigboys might be happy to hear you covered in your ATP
It's hard to find NDB approaches at all anymore. Did you do IR in the US? The FAA from what I've read doesn't even encourage an instrument checkride in IMC. That's crazy you did it twice.
I went to colllege to become an airline pilot, and I was shocked that I ended up having to fly an NDB approach in actual conditions to minimums. You just don't see that anymore.
And the tolerances on the checkride is that you can only deviate from the course by a certain number of degrees.
I vividly remember staring at the ADF with the needle swinging wildly left to right as we were tossed around thinking "surely I can't get failed for turbulence"?
I also did my IFR in the 90ies on steam gauges. Our ADFs didn't even have the rotating dial, so you had to keep them synchronized with the direction indicator manually. What a pain. Moving maps in the cockpit must be the greatest safety feature ever invented.
Thanks so much for sharing. I wrapped up instrument earlier this year entirely in a TAA. Went out with my CFII a few times in steam gauge because I felt like I was missing out
It can vary greatly across the country. My instructor loved to use LORAN which one of the planes was equipped with (and was shut down shortly afterwards).
Same! My checkride was in 2001 in a 1979 Cessna 150.
My check pilot was a 5'2" WWII vet that needed a booster seat and was notorious for opening his damn door on final approach (which he did to me, luckily I was prepared).
You just have to be prepared to crab slightly for a second as a result, but it's not that big of an aerodynamic impact.
It's more to see if you can stay calm and focused on your task when something loud and chaotic and unexpected happens. You're basically supposed to evaluate it, ask for him to close it and then continue monitoring the VASI/PAPI and your instruments.
Just a small script I wrote a few days ago, but I had 2 or 3 friends publish some blogs online and I got hella jelly --- so here's my submission, so at least I can say I made something and post it.
Hopefully you like both planes and tech and very hopefully you find this an okay read :)
Any spelling mistakes, bugs, issues, ethics, please do tell me about!
Sorry if it looks rushed -- night is coming upon us and I need to take the dog out!
Hi! erm, lemme check tomorrow -- I'm using one I got second hand in facebook marketplace from a business. The printer works with the library in the article but things like font-size selection had to be retweaked
It's a generic brand one -- but on eBay I've see some for cheap; maybe (like someone pointed out) not that cheap (sorry if title was misleading, not my intention at all)
My recommendation? buy it locally or just ask a business if they are getting rid of one (that was how I got lucky)
Hi! --- fantastic question, so far, mostly due to the gentle nature of General Aviation flights and my sellotape skills, I haven't had to deal with this.
I did worry at one point, but it's surprisingly sturdy.
If it does fall --- no worries! I have my original (kneeboard) copy to go off
I wrote up a tool years ago that would take a nav log and print the charts onto long strips of receipt tape, basically as an artistic venture. The Epson thermal printers can do surprisingly nice halftone once you figure out which of the several ESC/POS raster modes they like the most, although the printing is very slow compared to the usual text speed. Unfortunately I don't think I have the scripts any more.
Not only are you mastering the art of flight training on a vintage plane, but you’re also moonlighting as a creative tech guru with your Nav log printer project.
Your kneeboard “cargo pants of the air” are legit, and turning the cockpit’s windshield pillar into prime real estate for receipt prints? Genius move.
Your journey from regex to JSON wizardry is like a flight plan through the tech skies.
I got a second-hand one for a bargain £30 with so much paper that I will be hard-pushed to use it all in my lifetime. The power supply burnt out after a year or so, so that will be another £10 or so, but I don't regret that purchase by any stretch. I've used it to print out the headlines from RSS feeds, like my own personal Telex ticker-tape machine!
This is one of those posts with tons of images whose alt text is just set to the literal string "alt text".
Does anybody know where this phenomenon comes from? This isn't the first time I'm seeing this, and I don't know why anybody ever thought that it was a good idea.
I copy pasted my <img> tags cause I had to 'remake' the blog and completely forgot to fill it in, if you are using accessibility functionality I am very sorry -- please allow me to update it briefly
The `alt` attribute is technically required for `img` tags, so if you run your HTML through a validator, or want to shut up IDE/editor warnings, you're going to have to add it. It can be an empty string though IIRC.
This is awesome, but I've been less excited with using my thermal label printer / thermal tape printer lately since realizing those labels are absolutely loaded with BPAs intended to stabilize the thermal ink. :(
I would have loved this when I was flying still. Such memories with the kneeboard and nav logs!
Fun fact: I left my plotter and E6B in my black car in TX during cross-country training and came back to both melted! I was broke and 18 so figured I would wing it, but it surely made my calculations error biased by some amount of yards because I was broke and not wanting to buy a new one!
I’ve bought a laser printer during the pandemic and it is surprising how printing stuff is handy at times. It is like having infinite additional displays for no cost at all.
But for some stuff like task and check lists, a letter-sized page is too much. Hadn’t thought about buying one of those small printers before.
I’ve been thinking about something like this but with an e ink display. I want something that has the frequencies and waypoints I need in case my iPad dies that isn’t reliant on power.
The one thing I'd be a bit wary about here is heat making that paper unreadable. I've seen a bunch of kitchens intend to run thermal printers in kitchens, but had to switch to impact printers because how quickly the paper would turn dark in the ambient heat in the kitchen, plus the heat lamps on expo station.
Thankfully the author isn't relying on this for anything absolutely critical (also aviate, then navigate anyways) but I'd wonder if on a sunny day without any clouds there, how quickly that paper would degrade.
[1] https://boards.greenhouse.io/touchbistro/jobs/5058791003