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When I heard a few years back that the folks behind the Europa two-seat kitplane were in the process of making what amounted to a certified version, I was excited but, frankly, a bit skeptical too. The Europa, a popular kit made in the United Kingdom, is a terrific little kitplane, but I wondered if […]

__”You’ve got JeppView on an MX20 and you’re still carrying paper charts?” Jim Miller asked. “Why?” Jim Miller is executive vice president of Flight Options, the company that offers fractional shares of new and pre-owned business jets. Flight Options went “paperless” by providing the pilots of its fleet of 200 airplanes with electronic flight bags […]

At the National Business Aviation Association Convention in Orlando in September Cessna announced that it will build an all-new very light jet, the Citation Mustang, and will also develop a new Citation, the CJ3, which has a larger cabin and more powerful engines than the wildly successful CJ2. The Mustang, priced at $2.295 million, is […]

As a kid who grew up with the new math, I learned early on to look at numbers in new and different ways. So I was well prepared, it seems, to take an objective look at a different model of small aircraft ownership, fractionals. The idea behind fractional ownership is to give the airplane’s many […]

When newly formed Tiger Aircraft announced a few years back that it was going to reintroduce the four-seat AG-5B Tiger, last produced back in 1993, it seemed like a natural. Unlike a number of more forgettable and more obscure airplanes that have been returned to production (sometimes successfully, more often not) since the bust of […]

It’s an old question: can fractional ownership work for small airplanes? Over the last 30 years or so, it’s been tried numerous times. Sure, the terminology has changed, from “rent-a-plane,” to “time-shares,” to today’s “fractional ownership,” but the concept has remained essentially the same. Take an airplane and split its purchase price among several owners, […]

||| |—|—| | | | The title of this column is “Gear Up” because I like the symbolism of takeoff and flight. It means to me the moment just after positive rate has been established when, with a short upward pull by the pilot, the airplane is reconfigured, while accelerating, to assume the shape it […]

I don’t know if there are 10,000 lakes in Central Florida to match Minnesota’s famous license-plate claim, but I wouldn’t be surprised. As I flew over the region in the Saratoga on my way down to Sun ‘n Fun, I looked down at a landscape freckled with lakes, lakes big and small, blue and green, […]

||| |—|—| | | | Pilots and controllers are doing a pretty good job of keeping airplanes apart on the runway. During the four-year period from 1997 to 2000 there were 266 million takeoff and landing operations at the country’s 459 tower-controlled airports, and only 1,369 of those operations involved a runway incursion. That means […]