Search Results for: general aviation inc

Now that the weather is turning warmer, the days are growing longer and you’re having a hard time thinking of anything other than your airplane and all the places you’ll fly this summer, you’ve probably been dreaming about upgrades too. If you’re the typical aircraft owner, your wish list is probably a mile long and […]

Not a winter goes by without someone sending me an e-mail that includes the sentence, “You aren’t really suggesting I don’t fly my airplane in IMC in the winter?” It’s usually from the pilot of a very capable piston single or light twin that is not certificated for flight in icing conditions; often the pilot includes something like, “I live in the Great Lakes and we get icing a large part of the year.” Sometimes I get a similar question about passenger and baggage loads. “The engineers at [insert airplane manufacturer name here] wouldn’t have designed the airplane with six seats if it couldn’t carry six adults, or at least four adults and two kids. Do you really mean I can’t fill the seats and the fuel tanks?” A current trend is questions about synthetic vision systems in glass cockpit panels or cutting-edge heads-up displays. “With an essentially VFR depiction of the runway, I can make a zero-zero takeoff and even a zero-zero landing ‘if I have to’, can’t I?”

One of the first few things primary students learn is the stall. More accurately, we learn how to enter them and recover from them, the idea being to avoid them and, when we can’t do that, to survive the event. At first, all these stalls are more or less straight ahead. But as we gain time and experience, our fiendish instructor will introduce other types of stalls, like the cross-controlled variety we might get into when botching a turn from base to final in the pattern. You probably mastered straight-ahead stalls early on—you wouldn’t have gotten very far in your training if you hadn’t—and were trained to avoid the cross-controlled variety by carefully planning and executing your turns when low and slow, like when in the traffic pattern.

With the strong backing of its new Chinese owners, Cirrus Aircraft on Wednesday announced that the long-gestating Vision SF50 single-engine jet program has received full funding through certification and into initial production, now anticipated to start in 2015. “Today is simply a tremendous milestone for Cirrus,” said Dale Klapmeier, CEO and cofounder of Cirrus Aircraft. […]

“Kick the tires and light the fires.” It’s a comment often heard at general aviation airports. And while many say it with a grin and actually perform a preflight before they take to the skies, most pilots probably don’t take the time to preflight sufficiently. And if they do, it is possible that some items […]

Twice in a lifetime is two times too many; two times when the operator of a moving machine stared a hole right through me and rendered me invisible. In both cases perfect conditions prevailed—nothing obstructed the view, yet our machines converged at a good clip. My first experience came at the hands of the driver of a 1977 Cadillac. My solution was to lay down a vintage motorcycle. It wasn’t my preferred choice, but obstacle and traffic conflicts made lateral maneuvering unwise. The second time came courtesy of two pilots in a Skyhawk during a VFR arrival to a non-towered airport in Florida’s panhandle.

In this article, I will ask readers to suspend disbelief until you have read the article completely. I am sure you will have your own opinions, about both the article and my own motivation in writing it. I believe, however, that most of you will appreciate the message I am trying to convey and that you will also observe how the stakeholders in aviation safety may be approaching the subject in completely different ways. The key questions are not only about how effective they are individually but how they can remain complementary.

I have before me a bound volume containing a year’s worth of Flying, a gift from an old friend and collaborator, pilot and photographer Baron Wolman, who picked it up at a swap meet for $4. The year, 1916, will surprise anyone who knows that our esteemed publication first appeared, under the name of Popular […]

Take an engine from a 1970s Ford, Toyota or Chevy and put it next to one built today, and the differences are easy to spot. Dig down into the performance and economy figures, and there’s no comparison between the 30-plus-year-old technology and today’s — the newer engines are better in almost every way imaginable, with […]

The ** Aircraft Electronics Assocation**‘s 55th annual convention opened its doors yesterday to avionics dealers and manufacturers who said they are finally seeing concrete signs of a turnaround after a rough few years punctuated by the global economic crisis. There were fewer new product introductions at this year’s show compared with past years, but the […]