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One surefire way for airplane makers to get a lot more performance out of their existing designs is by adding a turbocharger. It’s hardly a new approach. It’s been popular since the 1960s. And just in the past few years Columbia, Mooney and Cessna have all introduced turbocharged models, all based on good-selling existing airplanes. […]

When I first started writing about small airplane shared ownership options back in 1998, there weren’t a lot of choices available. OurPlane had been doing business for a while and had locations (and an airplane or two) at several airports in the United States and Canada. Down in Atlanta, another company, AirShares Elite, was just […]

If you’re looking for a bargain on a 30-year-old piston single with a run out engine, well then, you could be in luck; the prices are down and the inventory’s up. It’s a classic example of supply and demand. But assessing the market for used (or if you prefer “pre-owned”) piston singles is a lot […]

When Piper announced its new PiperJet at the National Business Aviation Association’s 59th Annual Meeting and Convention last October, it promised to create a whole new category of personal or business airplane. With an expected top cruise speed of 360 knots, IFR range of 1,300 nm, an operating ceiling of 35,000 feet, and all of […]

The sight was breathtakingly sad. A middle-aged woman wearing a bright red blazer scurried across the tarmac to her waiting NetJets Cessna Encore. I sat on a bench just outside the entrance to our FBO, transfixed, wondering why she was hurrying. I had seen her before. A few minutes earlier I had watched as she […]

In many ways, my AirVenture experience at Oshkosh this year was one of my best. On the day before the official opening of the show, I won a Garmin 496. It was during Garmin’s press conference where the new top-of-the-line GPSMAP was introduced. The contest was to guess closest to the number of handheld aviation […]

With tense trepidation, I watched the path of Hurricane Ernesto. For days prior to my son’s wedding in New England the storm lingered over Cuba. It was projected to get loose in the Gulf of Mexico, threatening our home in Tampa. Then the computer model shifted course eastward, away from home but towards the Atlantic […]

From the beginning the FAA has treated jets differently. In almost every area of certification the standards for jets have been more stringent than for propeller-driven airplanes, and one of those jet standards had been a requirement for two pilots. That rule remained in force until 1977 when Cessna won approval for single-pilot operation of […]