Search Results for: Citation X

We witness the most powerful Caravan’s remarkable new abilities.

A homebuilt airplane can be built, as the name suggests, in the comfort of your own garage. (Photo courtesy of Justin Twilbeck)| As we all know, the cost of flying has increased tremendously over the past few decades, and today a factory new airplane is too expensive an option for many would-be airplane owners. While […]

Earlier this week at a Cessna Citation owners conference in Wichita, Cessna President and CEO Scott Ernest responded to a blog in Tuesday’s Flying eNews entitled “Cessna CJ Hiatus: End of the Niche Jet.” The article wondered what Cessna’s slowdown in Citation production, announced earlier in the week, might mean in the long run for […]

From paper charts to satellites in space, Flying’s Top 50 Navigation Innovations counts down to the single most noteworthy navigation innovation of all time.

As I was talking with Dr. Martin Smith about the research he and his associates at Presage Group were doing on unstable approaches, he commented that visual approaches “were a little more seductive than instrument approaches in terms of continuing with an approach that is unstable.” Dr. Smith said even though all of the participants […]

SimuFlite’s level-C King Air 200 simulator can be transformed in a few hours from round instruments to a B200 model’s EFIS gear.| Morning light was just beginning to illuminate the New York City skyline in soft shades of lilac and pale vermilion as I swung the King Air 200 onto John F. Kennedy International Airport’s […]

The only time ice on the airframe is a good thing is when it’s tied down and you really didn’t want to go flying today, anyway. Otherwise, it’s always something to be avoided. As we all should have been taught, ice adhering to the wings, tail and other components tends to add weight and drag. If it forms on an airfoil, the surface’s lift characteristics can be dramatically different, in addition to the weight and drag. Bad karma all around. But ice can affect other systems, too. The pitot/static system is problematic, as is the electrical system, as more current is demanded to keep things warm. Depending on the aircraft, ice also can extend the landing gear, fail an engine or cause critical electrical failures. The NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) recently updated one of its database report sets, the one covering icing incidents among commuter and general aviation aircraft. The incident descriptions have several lessons for us and highlight airframe icing’s complications, even if having the stuff on the airfoils turns out not to be a factor.

Sometimes it’s the small things that matter and, if the claims of Premier Aviation out of Concord, California, are true, a simple wheel cover has achieved impressive performance improvements for the Cessna 400 twin-series of airplanes. The company recently received the sign off from the FAA for an STC to install its dome wheel cover […]

Since adopting new standards of categorizing aircraft for their wake turbulence, Memphis International Airport has increased its operational capacity by an estimated 15 percent. Under a new FAA system called Recat (for “re-categorization”), the new standards refine how aircraft wake turbulence levels are categorized. This makes for significant differences in determining following distances on landing […]

As more and more technology is welcomed into our formerly round-dial cockpits, many pilots have expressed growing frustration over the lingering need to do some things the old-fashioned way. In the new, high-tech cockpit, flat-panel screens, all-electronic flight instruments and portable, tablet-size computers with built-in GPS dominate our must-have lists. Along the way, these much-welcomed advances have helped simplify the pre-flight planning task. But much of the information we need for every flight remains stuck in the abbreviated, ALL CAPS format used when DC-3s and J3 Cubs were the cat’s meow. The notice to airmen (Notam) function is perhaps the best/worst example of how international regulatory agencies have failed leveraging new technologies to improve dissemination of flight-critical information. But now, thanks to an unlikely set of circumstances, an overhaul of the Notam system is underway. Here’s what’s going on, why and what you can expect.