Tom Benenson

At the end of the year I renewed my annual Customs decal to expedite crossing back into the States on our frequent trips to Montreal, Canada. But this year the pleasurable anticipation of trips to Montreal was stifled by the announcement by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that, despite literally thousands of negative comments, […]

“Got along without you ‘fore I met you, gonna get along without you now.” So there, Garmin Perspective in the Cirrus SR22! Just as the lyrics suggest, my feelings are mixed. I’d love to be able to get along with the Perspective-equipped Cirrus, but frankly, that option is above my pay grade. I’ve struggled along […]

Once I’ve landed, my assessment of a flight switches from the “how-goz-it” while airborne to the “how-went-it” when I’m safely on the ground. When I did my self-debrief following the last leg of my flight home after attending AirVenture in Oshkosh in August, two quotes seemed apropos of my efforts to successfully negotiate my way […]

Traditionally, a master class is given by a recognized expert in a field — usually music, but also painting, drama or any of the arts — to students who are themselves advanced practitioners of the art, but who, for professional reasons, are anxious to improve their own capability. The ‘masters’ provide advice and often examples […]

I didn’t sleep very well. I kept going over the DUAT weather briefing in my mind trying to make it read better than I knew it did. I was scheduled to fly the short flight over to Exxel Avionics at Hartford (Connecticut)-Brainard Airport (KHFD) to have the biennial IFR certification performed on my Cardinal. In […]

SMA (Societe de Motorisations Aeronautiques) has a solution to the effect of higher fuel prices if you operate a Cessna 182. Its answer? The SMA SR 305-230-1 diesel engine, designed and developed from scratch as an aircraft engine. The engine, STCed for most Cessna 182Qs and 182Rs, is a horizontally opposed, four-cylinder, turbocharged, air/oil-cooled, diesel […]

Just when I thought it was safe to get back in the pattern and that pilots were finally taking to heart proper radio discipline, I got a frantic call from my friend Jim. He was very upset about an incident that had occurred two days earlier as he was approaching the Morristown (New Jersey) Municipal […]

We always thought my dad wanted his ashes spread over Cherry Hill, the family farm and B&B in the Catskill Mountains where he grew up. But my mother vetoed our plans to airdrop his ashes from my Cardinal and said he had expressed a desire to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. And so he […]

WxWorx on Wings, the weather products that XM Satellite Weather downlinks from satellites to our cockpits, is provided to XM by Baron Services’ WxWorx. The weather products are collected at two distinct collection points, one located at WxWorx’s headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, and the other inside the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, North […]

A glass-panel cockpit is intended to make flying an airplane simpler – and safer – by presenting virtually every bit of information the pilot could ever require during a flight front and center on a single display. In more sophisticated glass cockpits, there are at least two displays: the PFD, primary flight display, that can […]