Search Results for: Cessna 172

“It totally changed my life,” Genesah Duffy says of her first flight. “The best experience I’ve ever had.” She was 25 when she took a discovery flight in a Cessna 172 out of St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport, and from there she was hooked. Genesah started out as a parts manager at Propellerhead Aviation, and she […]

Purdue Aviation is set to receive the first jet-A-burning diesel Cessna Turbo Skyhawk JT-A, which it plans to take delivery of as soon as the airplane receives its FAA certification, expected later this year. The Skyhawk JT-A is powered by a four-cylinder Continental CD-155 compression ignition engine mated to a three-blade MT Propeller composite prop. […]

TruTrak Flight Systems is now selling autopilot install kits for the Cessna 172 F through R models and the Cessna 177 after the Experimental Aircraft Association obtained the STC for the installation. TruTrak received “low risk parts manufacturer approval” from the FAA on April 3 for the non-TSO’d Vizion autopilot. The company says it is […]

I suspect that the majority of professional pilots encounters their most interesting jobs early in their careers: places where the pay is rotten, the airframes have 70,000 cycles on 50,000 flight hours, and tight finances put everything into a perpetual state of “What’s going to fail next?” My first flying job was in a Cessna […]

Advancing age and retirement bring on a certain sense of freedom and may, in fact, inhibit one’s social filter. And though I have worried mightily about what the devil I would do with myself once unemployed, I can report from two months in, so far, so good. An older friend told me long ago that […]

In 1958, as a stunt intended to promote the new Hacienda Hotel in Las Vegas, two pilots, Robert Timm and John Cook, stayed aloft in a Cessna 172, regularly refueled from a racing pickup truck, for 64 days and 22 hours. (Why they didn’t stay up another two hours and make it an even 65 […]

Just a little bit lower.” Those words are a great way to star in an NTSB accident report (right up there with “watch this”), since they usually precede a dangerous maneuver. While low passes are certainly not a new ­invention, the motivation for them seems to have evolved lately, and we can thank the smartphone. […]

Every instrument approach procedure we fly ends in one of two ways: We either see the runway environment and land, perhaps after circling to align ourselves with a runway, or we dont. When we dont, we fly a missed approach procedure designed to get the aircraft back to a safe altitude and position from which the next steps can be taken. Those next steps can include trying the same approach again, shooting a different one or diverting to a different airport. Its not that hard.

One of the first and most obvious choices we make when using a personal airplane is routing. We want to get from Point A to Point B, usually by the shortest, most direct route. So far, so good. What if that route increases the consequences of the risk in question, namely that our sole powerplant will fail at the worst possible time? Maybe change the route?

The old saying tells us you cant be cleared for takeoff until the gross weight of the paperwork exceeds that of the aircraft. That hasnt changed much since Flight Service received reports on Teletypes necessitating cryptic abbreviations to conserve precious bandwidth on 75-baud lines. Calling Flight Service used to be required to file a flight plan and get a weather review from a specialist with information unavailable anywhere else. Technology has changed all that.