Search Results for: Sporty’s

On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the quality of your weather briefing before each flight? Does the wealth of information available from mobile apps and online resources give you the feeling of being more prepared today, compared to calling Flight Service 15 years ago? Or do you find it more […]

To paraphrase a line from The Lone Ranger radio series, “Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past comes the thundering sound of a Cessna 150…Barney flies again.” This goes way back to the olden days—before radio and TV stations employed drones and live traffic cams to report […]

In 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in the Buffalo, New York, metropolitan area, killing all 49 passengers and crewmembers on board and one person inside the house into which the Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 crashed. The extensive post-crash investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the pilots were completely at fault. The captain […]

There are folks who collect date nails. There is even a publication dedicated to the hobby called Date Nails. What, one might ask, are date nails? These are the 2-inch little fellows which the railroad drove into each of their crossties. There are approximately 800 million crossties in the United States, and each is identified […]

Like a good marriage, an abiding love for aviation grows and changes over the years. The emotion is always there, but the reason for the initial attraction isn’t always the same reason you stay committed. I was fortunate to fall in love with aviation as a kid while riding around in the back of my […]

All year long we’ve reviewed, tested, and kept our eyes on the best gear that any pilot could want. From classic aviator sunglasses to the latest in flight training technology, here are our editors’ picks for the flight enthusiast in your life. Scheyden Fixed Gear C-130 Sunglasses Modeled after Scheyden’s Mustang sunglasses, the C-130 uses a […]

The latest version of the popular Stratus portable ADS-B receiver from Sporty’s Pilot Shop and Appareo Systems made its debut at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in July, giving users subscription-free weather capabilities to go along with dual-band ADS-B traffic, GPS data and backup attitude information. Designed from the start to integrate with the ForeFlight Mobile app […]

If we’d written this story a few decades ago, the list of weather resources for pilots would have been rather short — a flight service station briefing either in person or perhaps by phone, and the evening weather report on TV or the radio. Pilots thought they’d really made progress when the direct user access terminal system […]

Last summer, I traveled to Scotland on vacation for a week to attend a wedding on the Isle of Skye. I’d hardly consider the first few hours of the trip relaxing. I picked up my rental car in the center of downtown Edinburgh and was instantly tasked with operating a manual transmission from the right […]

Remember all the dire predictions about the FAA’s upcoming ADS-B equipment mandate, the ones that warned aircraft owners of a projected logjam of necessary installation work as the January 1, 2020, deadline approached? It’s looking more and more like those prognostications were spot on. With a year and a half left to go before the […]