Search Results for: Lear 45

When you were seven, your mother sent your father to the store for milk, and he came back three years later—but only because he got lost. At least that’s the way your mom liked to tell it. Now it’s time for your dad to see his granddaughter (your daughter) graduate from the University of North […]

Pricey EFIS retrofits have been available for years, but today the market offers more affordable options. Plus, most all of the choices permit removing the vacuum system, saving weight and space with an all-electric instrument suite totally immune to dreaded vacuum pump failures. New standards for instrument certification allow blanket approval via AML-STC (supplemental type […]

February 2, 2020, Florence, Colo. Piper PA-28-150 Cherokee 150 At about 1355 Mountain time, the airplane collided with terrain shortly after takeoff. The flight instructor and student pilot were both seriously injured; the passenger was fatally injured. The airplane was substantially damaged. Visual conditions prevailed. An eyewitness watched the airplane’s takeoff roll on Runway 29 […]

I love flying and, like many of you reading this, I enjoy sharing it with others. I regularly invite family or friends for a flight. For all but one of these flights, things have gone well. I can’t fully describe how vivid the lesson I learned was for the one flight that went awry. Picture this: […]

Some mentor, long ago, explained aviation weather to me: “There are two kinds of weather you never want to fly in no matter the aircraft,” he said. “Icing and thunderstorms.” He wasn’t wrong. But until we gain some experience, sometimes it’s hard to tell when we’ve gotten too close to either weather situation. Put another […]

One of, and by no means the only, impact of the Covid-19 disease and its rampage through the U.S. is the effect it’s having on essential workforces, like health care professionals. Its impact also has been felt among the ranks of air traffic controllers, who often work in close proximity to one another. To its […]

After several weeks of not flying, I had finally found the time and energy to unlimber the Debonair and get some air under its wings. I was out doing some basic maneuvers and just letting the airplane exercise itself before heading off to a nearby non-towered field for some landings and cheap fuel. I had […]

After a weekend with friends at Kentucky’s Lake Cumberland, my niece and her husband were packing up for the drive home. Somebody tossing garbage bags into a dumpster spied a bundle of discarded Playboy magazines in pristine condition all from the 1980s. “Any of you guys interested in old Playboy magazines?” My psychologist nephew-in-law, Jim, […]

Flight instructors are required to renew their certificate every two years. CFIs with a specific number of successful checkride recommendations during the previous two years can however, renew based alone on that record—but that may not be possible in the current environment. Recently, the bottom has fallen out from underneath flight schools because of the […]

Despite their increasing obsolescence, vacuum pumps remain installed aboard the vast majority of piston-powered aircraft, providing the energy to spin the gyroscopes in flight instruments like attitude indicators and directional gyros. Even newer aircraft sporting factory-installed “glass” panels may have a vacuum (or pressure) pump powering one or more backup instruments. Odds are, the airplane […]