Gear

One iPad app we’ve written about in brief and liked in abundance is Hilton Software’s WingX Pro, designed by eponymous software maven Hilton Goldstein. Like its competitors, WingX Pro is a nav/charting/planning/database/safety utility app that seemingly does all things for all pilots for the slim price of $100 a year. New to the app is […]

Hawker Beechcraft‘s Global Customer Support (GCS) unit announced a synthetic-vision upgrade program for all airplanes in the Hawker and Beechcraft families equipped with Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21. The upgrade requires the addition of a new LRU to the Pro Line 21 platform. The hardware provides the flight crew with a simulated 3D view of […]

__In this age of iPads and Androids and apps, is a dedicated portable device still relevant? That’s the question that some might be asking with the unveiling by Garmin of its latest flagship portable, the Garmin 796, which at this writing was top-secret. I have in my hands the only model not located behind lock […]

There’s no question, using an iPad in the cockpit in place of paper charts and approach plates is better in almost every conceivable way – especially after the flight, when it’s time for chart updates, which with most popular apps from companies like Jeppesen or ForeFlight can be accomplished with just a couple of button […]

(September 2011) No matter how much we might want to deny it, this age in which we live is defined by new technologies, new behaviors and new ways of looking at and interacting with the real world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the fast-changing world of publishing, where the model for how we deliver […]

My wife and I visited Bell Helicopter in Texas recently for recurrent training in the Bell 407. The day following completion of our training, we had the opportunity to make a 90-minute flight in the new Garmin G1000-equipped Bell 407GX. I have extensive Garmin experience, and have flown G1000-equipped fixed-wing aircraft since Cessna first offered […]

Cessna has delivered its 100th 162 Skycatcher to Sporty’s. The airplane is the 2012 Sporty’s Sweepstakes prize and will be delivered to a Sporty’s Pilot Shop customer at the company’s annual fly-in next May. “We are thrilled that Cessna reserved this milestone Skycatcher for Sporty’s Sweepstakes,” says Sporty’s president and CEO Michael Wolf. The two-place […]

The introduction of Garmin’s new GTN touch-screen navigators, the GTN 650 and the large GTN 750, is remarkable in itself, but the fact that we’ve almost come to expect such works of seeming magic in our cockpits made me think back to the original precursor of the GTN products, the GNS 430, which I met […]

(August 2011) When Garmin purchased Pilot My-Cast and its developer, Digital Cyclone, a few years ago, it did so because the handwriting was on the wall: Apps were a part of the future of aviation information. As originally conceived, Pilot My-Cast was an app for mobile devices, mostly phones, that would allow a pilot to […]

Lancair introduced an integrated, all-glass panel for its single-engine turboprop Evolution at AirVenture called EFC900X (Evolution Flight Control 900X), including Garmin’s GFC 7X autopilot. The GFC 7X is the first Garmin autopilot to be installed in an experimental airplane and is currently exclusive to the Evolution. “This is a huge vote of confidence from Garmin,” […]