In Australia the climate is conducive to making face freeze not an issue.
There is also a lot of fascinating country to see.
No better way than by Tigerschmitt.
If you have time to spare.
And if your kitty is sufficient
why not learn on a Citabria with Jim Drinnan at Camden
just out of Sydney
then pick up your own DH82A?
several of which are always in Aviation Trader
for 80 to 100 G oz dollar.
if you decide to visit the wise, I mean wide, brown land
I would be happy to introduce you to a few
Tigerschmitt owner / operators
and a few Czech pilots too
ex FSO Griffo here on proone
he's got one too.
as I did once upon a time
Everything in their favour that posters here
have said is true
what the author of the following little
satirical piece has to say is very funny but absolute bollocks
THE ABORTION CALLED THE TIGER MOTH
I've plenty of soul, just no patience for that horrible abortion of an aeronautical design, the DH82. It's all well and good to BE FLOWN about Byron Bay in one, but to BE THE ONE FLYING is an experience I wouldn't wish on my mother-in-law or my worst enemy, which ever one happened to be standing closest.
I list only some of its foibles as a complete list would do your head in.
1. The engine's upside down, which is a bad place to begin the whole design process for a start. Open the tap and it makes more noise than horsepower.
2. The glass wasted on the joke of a windscreen would have been put to better wartime use making storm doors for submarines, where they would have been found infinitely more effective than they are as windscreens on Tiger Moths. A louder, draftier, more uncomfortable place cannot be found in all aeronautica.
3. The ailerons are misnamed. They should be called "Adverse Yaw Generators" because that's all the confounded use the blessed things are. Either that or the ones on the example I flew were reverse-rigged.
4. The designer of the trim system deserves a special place in purgatory for this nasty little device. The trim control is notched, not smoothly adjustable, which means you set the power setting you want, find the trim notch closest to that, then fiddle about with the throttle for the entire rest of the flight futilely fighting to find the exact point of trim - never have I been so utterly and needlessly distracted by so necessary yet so useless a contrivance as that rig!
5. To top it all off, the harness was invented by Harry Houdini in his early years as an INscapologist when he thought the crowds would pay to see him get INTO impossibly difficult and complex webbing and knots. I had an easier time learning to tie a bowline on Helsal in a Force 8 than I did trying to understand the Cat's Cradle that is the harness in a Tiger Moth.
Other than that, they're fine machines and every aviation museum and aeronautical university should have an example of one - so they can be studied in excrutiating detail as examples of every single thing NOT to do in designing an aeroplane.
Did I mention too that I'm not particularly fond of these things?
Last edited by Fantome; 22nd Jan 2014 at 14:53.