You always wanted to be a test pilot. Now’s your chance to show everyone that you have the right stuff.

Treat the annual inspection as a chance to learn about your aircraft instead of an invitation for the shop to find problems. / By Mike Berry

They can be simple or complex, but they all have failure modes. Close inspection and regular maintenance are key to reliability.

It’s that time of year again in the Northern Hemisphere. For those of us rarely straying into the teens or above, airframe icing usually isn’t a thing until late fall. Nowadays, with the typical freezing level much lower than other times during the year, we’re much more likely to see it up close and personal. […]

An aviation’s early days, there were few if any regulatory criteria on designs and operations. Pilots and maintenance personnel were up to their own on deciding what limits they would adhere to. Accidents were plentiful and often unnecessary. The public demanded that safety be improved, and government, engineers and the military stepped in to establish […]

Commercial air travel is by far the safest mode of modern transportation. General aviation, however, is not as safe. Many factors have improved both categories’ safety records over the years, but procedures and policies established by regulators/industry and implemented by commercial operators have been wildly succesful. These policies and procedures have been introduced over the […]

Despite their increasing obsolescence, vacuum pumps remain installed aboard the vast majority of piston-powered aircraft, providing the energy to spin the gyroscopes in flight instruments like attitude indicators and directional gyros. Even newer aircraft sporting factory-installed “glass” panels may have a vacuum (or pressure) pump powering one or more backup instruments. Odds are, the airplane […]

The first order of business in the inspection process is to become familiar with the specific exhaust system and components so that the aircraft is maintained in the desired condition. As always, the place to start is the manufacturers maintenance and parts manuals. This is also true when considering an aftermarket exhaust system, including turbochargers, typically installed according to a supplemental type certificate (STC). Aftermarket exhaust and turbocharger providers like Power Flow and Tornado Alley Turbo offer documentation at least as good as the airframe manufacturers, including installation instructions, parts manuals and instructions for continued airworthiness.