Search Results for: southern air systems

As Embraer is getting closer to first flight of its midsize, midrange, fly-by-wire Legacy 450 business jet, the shorter version of the soon-to-be certified Legacy 500, the company announced some final design tweaks at a press conference at NBAA’s Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition in Las Vegas, which opens its doors tomorrow. A Legacy 450 […]

Flying takes a closer look at this high-production helicopter factory.

When trying to come up with a site for floatplane heaven, you’d go through a lot of places before you hit upon Texas, but this didn’t stop me from saying “yes” when Cessna’s chief pilot of propeller airplanes, Kirby Ortega, dropped me a note asking if I wanted to go float flying with Cessna’s resident […]

The Phenom 100 sitting on the ramp at Clay Lacy Aviation in Van Nuys, California, looked for all the world like a Brazilian airplane, but it wasn’t, at least not entirely. It was, in fact, the second Phenom 100 to be assembled in the United States, at Embraer‘s impressive facility in Melbourne, Florida. The Melbourne […]

(January 2012) I pulled the radar-detector-size electronic device from my flight bag, set it on the glareshield and frowned. Electrical and audio wires dangled across my lap as I plugged the first cord into the power receptacle on the far-right side of the cockpit and the others into my David Clark headset, which I then […]

(January 2012) Sitting in the darkened area control center in Zurich, Switzerland, the air traffic controller on duty could scarcely believe what he was seeing on his radar screen: Somehow, two airliners in his sector cruising at precisely the same flight level were just miles apart on a collision course over southern Germany. Keying his […]

(January 2012) Last month I reported the exciting news that the training required by the FAA SFAR issued in 2006 succeeded in turning the MU-2, an airplane that had been at the bottom of the accident statistics, into one of the safest turboprops in the air and, beyond that, into one of the safest airplanes […]

(December 2011) If you live in a snowy climate, chances are good your logbook looks a little thin during the winter months. It’s happened to me. I started flying for transportation shortly after I moved to Connecticut in the mid-1990s direct from sunny southern California. Even after I had my instrument rating, the winter played […]

__One of the things I love best about airplanes is their back stories. While the **Embraer Legacy 650** is a brand-new airplane, its story stretches back 30 years to when the Brazilian company first decided to start building airliners. My personal tour of the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 650 immediately reminded me of the […]

My goodness, it’s black out there. “Better tighten your turn,” my copilot says. “Those mountains are close.” Yeah, but how close? I wonder. Checking the Cessna Citation Mustang’s terrain awareness and warning system provides cold comfort: The entire display is awash in red. The synthetic-vision system software update for this airplane, unfortunately, hasn’t yet been […]