Search Results for: Garmin G1000

New King Airs are wonderful airplanes, but they do cost what new airplanes of that caliber cost. As with any new model, a factory-fresh King Air gives you a lot of things you can’t retrofit affordably, if at all, into a 20- or 30-year-old airplane. That’s why people keep buying new King Airs. While there […]

What is there left to say about the Cessna Skylane? You’d think not much. After all, it’s an airplane that’s been in production (with one decade-long break in production from the mid-80s to the mid-90s) since 1956. During that time Cessna has built more than 20,000 Skylanes, making it one of the most popular models […]

The entire normal operating checklist for the new Embraer Phenom 100 light business jet fits on both sides of a laminated card that you can slide into a shirt pocket. While other business jets need giant spiral-bound pages upon pages to go through before liftoff, the Phenom is designed to cut pilot workload to a […]

Less than a year after an insolvency debacle that left its engine supplier in ruins, Diamond has achieved European certification for its DA42 NG-powered by Diamond’s own Austro diesel engines. The 170 hp Austro engines have 20 percent more power than the Thielert engines they replace, while nevertheless claiming lower fuel burn. Certification by the […]

There are many things to love about the turbocharged Mooney Acclaim, more than 230 of those things, in fact, and the Type S follow-on has a few more to add to the mix, bringing the total, according to Mooney’s accounting, to 242 … knots, that is. The Continental TSIO-550-equipped Acclaim has been around for a […]

“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 […]

Are you a proactive or reactive pilot? From our early primary training days, weve learned to fly by the airspeed indicator and listen for the stall warning horn when we venture too close to the lower edge of the planes airspeed envelope. Or, we live with the monotone blare while practicing the stall series. But what does it really tell us? Like other traditional primary instruments, there is some level of lag in their indications, and the information we receive is delayed or incomplete. Enter the angle of attack (AOA) indicator. While ubiquitous in gliders, where lift is life, chances are good your primary trainer did not have such instrumentation on board, although your training covered the concept of angle of attack. Ah, stalls. During primary training, we memorize the aircrafts stall speeds, clean and dirty, in 1G flight. We are further admonished that the stall speed increases as the wing loading, as well as gross weight, increases. And then theres density altitude to consider. All these factors conspire to sabotage lift, and while the dissipation of lift has its place (such as right before touchdown), its better to be proactive in preserving lift than chasing its loss.

Since its certification back in 1994, the hallmark of the remarkably successful Pilatus PC-12 turboprop single has been its tremendous flexibility and utility — with a cabin full of passengers and cargo, it can go from a cozy dirt strip to the city lights a thousand miles distant, flying far above the terrain and much […]

L-3 Communications has announced it received FAA Technical Service Order (TSO) authorization for its SmartDeck glass panel avionics suite. At the same time, the company announced Supplemental Type Certification (STC) approval for the Cirrus SR22 G2. That gives Cirrus owners the option of having the SmartDeck installed as a retrofit. No price was announced for […]

The most common questions I am asked by pilot friends is which airplane I plan to buy next, and which airplane do I think they should buy next. Clearly it is a topic every pilot thinks about a lot, and it remains a hot topic because there isn’t any clear-cut answer. For many years the […]