Search Results for: foreflight

It’s Saturday morning in small-town America, circa the early 1990s. My five younger siblings, flannel-clad in pastel jammies, are sprawled across the living room furniture watching Bugs Bunny gleefully thwart Elmer Fudd’s latest wabbit-hunting schemes. Mom is in the kitchen whipping up a batch of pancakes for her hungry brood. Dad and I are on […]

A few years back, when innovative tablets like the iPad and Google’s open-source Android devices were first overturning long-held ideas about the direction of personal computing, we told you about eight must-try aviation apps. You loved them all, and even suggested a few more that we might check out. Since then a lot has changed […]

Efforts from companies like Swift Fuel and GAMI to find a replacement for 100LL may get some more serious attention now that the EPA has released its advance notice of proposed rulemaking regarding the need to eliminate lead from fuel. Converting in-use aircraft/engines to operate on unleaded aviation gasoline would be a significant logistical challenge, and in some cases a technical challenge as well, the EPA said. The EPA also acknowledged that a joint effort with the FAA will be critical and has not set a date for the rulemaking, but said it would like to see leaded fuel phased out as early as 2017.

With so many aviation apps available its simply not possible to mention them all, but here are some of the highlights. Fire up the Apple App Store to check em out.

Apps for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) can do everything from get a weather briefing to viewing charts and terminal procedures (a.k.a., approach plates). While the prospect of replacing several pounds of paper charts with a small, reliable, lightweight device is certainly attractive, there are issues to consider; its just not that simple. Heres an honest rundown on just how easy (or hard) it is to use an iPhone for some common aviation tasks.

As the FAAs ADS-B network stands up, anyone with an appropriate receiver can obtain its free traffic and weather information services, TIS-B and FIS-B, available via ADS-B IN. Mix in some software, and we can display the results on a tablets moving map using only a portable receiver, often resulting in better situational awareness than when relying only on whats in the panel.

Diamond Aircrafts single-engine turboprop prototype completed its maiden flight in January, in Austria. The DA50-JP7 seats seven and is powered by a fuel-efficient Ukrainian-built 465 hp AI-450S engine. Diamond plans to also offer a Tundra version of the aircraft, featuring beefed-up wheels and landing gear. Certification is expected in the second half of 2016. Also in January, Nextant Aerospace announced the first test flight of its remanufactured G90XT design. The project, which launched about a year ago, matches a refurbished King Air C90A with the new GE H75 engine, a Garmin G1000 cockpit, electronic engine controls, dual-zone air conditioning, and many more upgrades. Certification and first delivery are expected in the second quarter of this year.

Despite the very real recent advances in EFB software-including features like ForeFlights synthetic vision and Xavions energy-management capabilities, described in the sidebar on the opposite page-there are some things gadgets still cant do in the cockpit:

The loss of SpaceShipTwo during a test flight in November wont shut down Virgin Galactics space-tourism project, according to CEO Richard Branson. Branson also said he still plans to be aboard the first commercial passenger flight. NTSB staffers said their investigation wont be complete for about a year, but in the first few days after the accident, they found that the aircrafts feather mechanism — a rotating tail boom intended to slow the aircraft on descent from high altitudes — was prematurely deployed, and initiated the breakup of the aircraft at about 50,000 feet. Pilot Peter Siebold was injured but survived, and co-pilot Michael Alsbury was killed. A second spaceship is already under construction and is expected to launch in 2015.

Today’s flight instructors are coming to terms with a new presence in the cockpit of their training aircraft: the Apple iPad. Students are bringing iPads with them to run one of a few apps that give them unprecedented situational awareness, a level of situational awareness, in fact, that makes old-school aviators wonder how in the […]