Gear

Eclipse pilots can now add one more go-to aviation app to their repertoire of iPad favorites, Eclipse Aerospace announced on Wednesday. The new app, custom made for pilots of the twin-engine Eclipse jet, offers a variety of tools to streamline the flight planning process and improve situational awareness in flight. In addition to emergency procedures, […]

At the indoor static at Heli-Expo Garmin was showing off its STC retrofit of the G500H flat panel avionics into the popular Robinson R44 four-place piston powered helicopter. The STC can be applied to every iteration of the R44, including those with Spartan panels — the seven hole versions — and those with all the […]

(February 2012) Flat-panel avionics systems for light airplanes, which seemed like the stuff of science fiction just a handful of years ago, have been around long enough to advance to a second generation. As far as Garmin avionics are concerned, that second generation of glass panels takes the form of G2000, a system that makes […]

Ever wished you could have synthetic-vision capability on your iPhone? Hilton Software, maker of the WingX Pro7 app for the Apple iPad, has just added support for the device, including 3-D synthetic-vision capability and optional AHRS and ADS-B integration. We haven’t had the chance to try it out yet, but company founder Hilton Goldstein says […]

(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) Back in September my column Going Direct entitled “The Chart Is Dead,” I referred to work that Jeppesen is doing to unhinge the chart from our old ideas of what paper is and what it represents. In the brave new world of data-driven depictions, the “chart” is not an object but instead a […]

(January 2012) You’re most likely carrying fewer and fewer or perhaps even no charts around after the introduction of aviation chart applications for electronic flight bags such as the iPad, and there’s no longer a need to carry a separate flight computer since there are apps for that too. With less and less stuff required […]

All you wanted for Christmas may have been the new Garmin 750 for your airplane. If you were lucky enough to get the new touchscreen avionics or if you’d simply like to play around with the new system, you can at the very least try out Garmin’s new GTN 750 iPad 2 training app, which […]

European aviators can now install Garmin’s GTN 650 and 750 GPS/navcom systems after EASA signed off the validation paperwork for the STC Garmin received from the FAA in March for the touchscreen navigators. To achieve EASA’s validation, the Garmin 650 and 750 had to meet European regulatory requirements, such as 8.33-kHz VHF communication, immunity from […]