Piston

Piper Aircraft announced on Monday that it had secured an order for 20 of its Pilot 100i single-engine trainers for flyGateway Aviation Institute, a flight training organization based in Pennsylvania and Delaware. The order was placed during EAA AirVenture 2021. The school, an affiliate of Liberty University, will take delivery of the first 14 aircraft […]

This diesel-powered gem has undergone so many design enhancements and improvements it should be called ‘Diamond DA40 NG 2.0.’

The bitter cold of a February day in Minnesota in 1999 etched itself in my memory like frost on the windshield of an old Subaru hatchback. As an assistant editor in Jeppesen’s aviation-courseware department, I’d been thinking through the mechanics of flight training every day, working to translate abstract concepts into print and onto the […]

Let’s get this straight from the beginning: The Van’s Aircraft RV-14A is not an off-the-shelf airplane. Every one of them out in the wild is custom-built. Even its recommended 210 hp Lycoming Thunderbolt XIO-390 engine is hand-assembled, polished and ported by a select team of Lycoming employees. And the “A” denotes a nosewheel version, with […]

For an airplane with an eye-popping paint scheme, N225HL stayed well-hidden for a couple of months prior to its debut on January 28. Cirrus Aircraft will mark 2021 with the delivery of number 8,000 of its SR-series aircraft, celebrating the milestone with a limited-edition series of eight special SR22Ts. Five-Hotel-Lima is the first of the […]

When flying regularly takes a course over inhospitable terrain or open water through instrument meteorological conditions in the dark of night, that’s when many pilots depend on the safety and security of having a second engine in case of trouble. Today’s multiengine piston aircraft are extremely capable, and with advances in both engine and avionics […]

Turning to Bart Jones, who was sitting beside me in the cockpit as we flew over the Florida coast, I told him the battery wasn’t working in my headset. The whomp that active noise reduction creates when the power’s going made for quite a distraction. After a beat, and with a nonchalant shrug, he took […]

Long before I became a pilot, I read something somewhere about the extreme dangers of shock cooling a piston aircraft engine. The article didn’t specify which engines. It tossed a large, wet blanket over every Lycoming and Continental ever made. The idea of cylinders cracking on a steep descent with all that cold air passing […]

Universal Flight Concepts, based in Waco, Texas, has delivered its current Part 141-approved training programs using 10 Tecnam aircraft. On January 28, Universal announced that it has agreed to purchase an additional 18 Tecnam aircraft over the course of 2020, bringing its fleet to 28 total airplanes. The flight training organization has served Baylor University’s […]

More than 72 years have passed since the Cessna 172 first appeared on engineering drawing boards in Kansas, and the airplane still figures into the training plan for many pilots who learn to fly around the world. While the powerplant options continue to evolve, with the JT-A burning Jet-A, and an electric-powered version in the […]