Search Results for: general aviation inc

Since the deadline was established, rumors about how the FAA will handle the coming transition have ranged from extending the deadline at the last minute to dismantling every non-compliant aircraft within Class B airspace and selling them for scrap on January 2. Im so old I remember when Mode C first was required in certain airspace, and ATC would routinely accommodate non-complying aircraft. Later, they wanted at least an hours notice, and the request could be denied. In my experience, ATC has always tried its best to cut some slack on Mode C, especially if everything was working when you took off.

True story: A USAF F-105 Thunderchief pilot was shot down over North Vietnam, ejected and landed in the jungle. Coming up on his emergency radio, he was told a rescue mission was on the way, to hide out and to come back up on the frequency in an hour. The pilot waited for what seemed like an hour and called back; he once again was told to call back when the hour was up-in 55 more minutes.

There’s no recognized certification for aircraft sales brokers, so why hire one in the first place? In fact, there aren’t even certifications or regulations providing consumer protections for aircraft buyers outside of the Universal Commercial Codes and import/export requirements of individual countries. Most aircraft buyers, it is assumed, are sophisticated enough to look out for […]

The threat from Axis submarines prowling the East Coast of the United States was scary and very real. Onshore shelling terrorized civilians, but the real low-hanging fruit for the submarines was on the seas. By as early as August 1942, Axis subs had caused the loss of thousands of lives, mainly merchant mariners, and sunk […]

There are plenty of reasons to want to own and fly a jet. Jets are made for capable, reliable transportation. They come equipped ready to do the job with pressurization, anti-icing and deicing, and substantial turbine-style cockpit displays and avionics. Most important, they come with jet engines. There is nothing better than jet engines. They […]

Various government agencies think its necessary to potentially render GPS useless throughout hundreds of square miles of the NAS nearly every single day. We who live in the West have experienced this for years. From my home in Santa Fe, NM, I get at least one, sometimes a few, notices of nearby GPS outages every week. But, more recently, those of you in the East have begun to feel more of the same pain.

Boeing took the first steps to get its 737 MAX aircraft back in the air in March with a software update to reduce the influence of an automated pitch control system and reduce the chances that it will trigger spuriously. The focus of the update is the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which was chiefly designed to counter the MAXs tendency to pitch up at high angles of attack while being hand flown and push the nose over in the case of an impending stall. In the original design, MCAS used data from one of two angle of attack indicators to determine the deflection angle of the horizontal stabilizer. Its believed faulty data from an AOA played a role in the fatal crashes of a Lion Air MAX 8 last October and an Ethiopian Airlines MAX 8 in March. The new software is reported to draw data from both AOAs and limit the MCAS to moving the tail feathers only once, instead of repeatedly countering pilot inputs. Implementation of the software was expected in April after FAA review.

When we got BasicMed, something wed done for a long time was taken away. BasicMed applies to acting as pilot in command. But, with BasicMed youre not legal to act as a safety pilot for your buddy whos under the hood practicing approaches in VMC. So, you exercise the workaround of agreeing ahead of time that you, the safety pilot, are indeed the PIC for this flight (more on that in a moment), then youre once again good to go even with BasicMed … if, that is, the aircraft insurance agrees. Lets look more carefully at all this.

Since glass displays first emerged in general aviation cockpits, most systems have been designed with one stand-alone primary flight display and a separate multifunction display. Some displays have been split in two, having a smaller PFD on one half and an MFD on the other. When introducing its new Avilon system, Sandel Avionics chose a […]

SocialFlight has added a new feature called Burger Flight, which makes finding a terrific airport restaurant as easy as tapping on a screen. Burger Flight is included in SocialFlight’s free app, and it shows airport restaurants as burger symbols on the map. Thousands of airport restaurants are featured on the moving map. In addition to […]