Search Results for: general aviation inc

Photo by Bo Ryan| There is a magic number associated with every airplane — a number referred to as time between overhauls, or TBO for short. TBO is the number of hours the engine manufacturer expects you can operate the engine before it needs to be taken apart and have components replaced or repaired. The […]

The twin-engine Seminole is the latest of Piper’s offerings to receive type certificate approval from the FAA for the integrated Garmin G1000 avionics system. G1000-equipped Seminoles are expected to start rolling out of the Vero Beach, Florida, factory next month, and Piper will have one on display at AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, set for July […]

Eugene Corbett Patterson died last January. You may have a flicker of name recognition, as his obituary was in almost every newspaper in the country. The New York Times announced his death on the front page and devoted considerable space to this farm boy, soldier, scholar, journalist and editor. To me, he was the best […]

Recently I received notification of an event I couldn’t pass up — a “General Aviation Accident Reduction and Mitigation Symposium,” sponsored by the Arizona Pilot’s Association (APA) and the Arizona Safety Advisory Group (ASAG), which links many of the aviation groups in Arizona in the quest to reduce accidents, and especially fatal accidents, in the […]

| The light sport category has come a long way in eight short years. What began as an FAA initiative to bridge the price and performance gaps between ultralights and certified general aviation airplanes has evolved into a bona fide market segment all its own. Incredibly, more than 50 manufacturers around the world build light […]

Of all the major components of a conventional airplane, the tail—empennage, if you prefer—may be the least understood. Yes, we generally know it’s there to help balance and stabilize the airplane’s attitude in flight, and to help control yaw and pitch, but that’s often the extent to which we paid attention in ground school. If we were paying more attention, we might have learned airplane tails come in many different shapes and sizes, and can be placed at either end of the airplane. They can be partially or totally omitted from some airplanes, while others might be considered to have more than one.

Very few airplanes get precisely “book” performance. Some do better, some don’t quite meet the specs. Meanwhile, common piloting techniques differ from those recommended by the pilot’s operating handbook (POH) or airplane flight manual (AFM). It’s up to you to determine what is “normal” for your airplane, and the way you fly it. To learn what even a type-certificated airplane will truly do and when, you need to test-fly the airplane. For a time, I was the lead instructor for Beechcraft Bonanza training for an international flight safety organization working at the Beech factory airport. Part of the training we provided included flight in the customer’s airplane. One of the items on the flight training syllabus was to show different flying techniques, and compare actual performance received to that predicted by the POH.

As long as you’re not worried about engine failure, the safest altitude is one that keeps you absolutely clear of terrain. The FAA has created a whole suite of acronyms to do this: Minimum sector altitude (MSA), minimum obstacle clearance altitude (MOCA), offroute obstacle clearance altitude (OROCA) are some examples. These acronyms and the numbers that go with them are designed to keep you above the rocks.

The Flick,” the big picture, is how situational awareness often is described. As short descriptions go, it’s a good one. The big picture can mean different things to different people, of course, but it generally breaks down into knowing where you are, where you’re going, what it’s going to take to get there and whether the resources to complete the flight are available. The resources can be any number of things. In particular, they usually boil down to keeping tabs on fuel, weather and terrain. Lose the flick on either one of these three, and you could find yourself in these pages.

For the past two years the Environmental Protection Agency has been quietly monitoring the concentrations of lead in the air at 17 airports across the country. All showed measurable quantities of airborne lead, and two airports had lead concentrations that exceeded federal standards. The EPA’s findings from airports where the testing was carried out indicate […]