Search Results for: general aviation inc

Last spring, Garmin made a declaration of sorts. It introduced an aggressive new line of inexpensive avionics for experimental aircraft. This said, in effect, even 800-pound gorillas have to compete in a new market where avionics prices are dropping, due in part, to pressure from tablet computers and ever-more-capable apps. Within two weeks of Garmin’s […]

Controller guidance for getting an aircraft onto an approach was a hot topic at a recent Air Traffic Procedures Advisory Committee meeting of various organizations of pilots and airlines. Previously, there were two basic ways to join an approach, 1) Fly the full procedure starting from a charted route, feeder route, or Initial Approach Fix […]

Drawings like this have been “out there” for years, although I’d not seen one until a contributor recently forwarded one to me. This resonates mostly because the humor stems from a truth that is a disconcertingly sober one. Let’s explore these four forces.

Who Ya Gonna Call?Your April article on oxygen mentioned that you could only find one company who’d talk to you Well, you didn’t contact Aeromedix. We would have not only responded immediately, we would have told you that the FAA has finally acknowledged that “oxygen is oxygen” and instead of “aviator’s breathing oxygen” the FAA […]

Just as we put this issue to bed, the US legislature passed a bill funding ATC by allowing the FAA to raid our airport funds. We welcome the stay, but we fear politics and budgetary constraints may yet curtail ATC, so this article will help you be ready if/when the other shoe drops. —FB In […]

As summer arrives and the days get longer, pilots may let their guard down when it comes to weather. Icing and large hail may certainly be less of a factor during the balmy dog days, but the June, 1999 American MD-80 runway excursion and the Delta L-1011 crash in August, 1985 are some of the […]

Although they look alike, there is a world of difference between ILS, LNAV+V and LNAV/VNAV glidepaths. It turns out that not all glidepaths are created equal.

There is no question that pilots planning to fly IFR should always keep a current database in their approved GPS. Its not difficult and it demonstrates a professional attitude toward instrument flight and aircraft maintenance. In the perfect black and white world of flight schools and checkrides, this would be standard. However, in the real world of dumb luck and Murphys Law, this topic gets a little murky. …

Pilots always complain about the price of fuel–but if they could buy avgas for $1 a gallon, would that really change their flying habits? That was the question the owners of Redbird Skyport, in San Marcos, Texas, set out to answer in October. Sales soared to 30 times normal, their staff wore down, and the supply chain started to suffer hiccups. They ended the experiment two weeks early, after collecting reams of data from pilot…

Visual approaches have been in the news a lot recently. On July 6, Asiana Airlines Flight 214 hit a seawall short of San Francisco’s Runway 28L and crashed. The flight had been cleared for a visual approach to Runway 28L. The ILS was out, but the PAPI was in service, so there was some vertical […]