Pistons

Flight Design came to AirVenture with a mockup of its four-seat C4 and said that it was close to making selections for the suppliers for the engine and the avionics. An all-carbon-fiber Part 23 high-cantilever-wing airplane designed to be a kind of amalgam of Skyhawk, Skylane and Cardinal, the C4 has projected specs — if […]

(June 2011) There are good reasons that the Piper Archer is an airplane commonly found in flight school fleets. Its stable flight characteristics and simple design make it an excellent trainer. And with enough speed to get you where you want to go, but not too much to get you in trouble, as well as […]

The story feels more like the 1920s than the 1980s. It’s about an Australian pilot named Don Adams. After serving as an engine mechanic in the Royal Australian Air Force in the final years of World War II, he returned to his native Queensland and took up crop spraying, first using a de Havilland Tiger […]

Fly cross-country, land off-airport, and splash into lakes—all in a kit aircraft you can build in just two weeks.

Tecnam recently introduced two certified airplanes currently in development: the P2012 Traveller and the P Twenty-Ten. Both of the new airplanes will undergo FAA Part 23 and European Aviation Safety Agency CS-23 certification concurrently. With the capacity to carry 11 passengers, the P2012 is by far the largest airplane Tecnam has brought to market since […]

The Cirrus SR series of single-engine airplanes has been controversial since the beginning. The beginning, as some of you might recall, came in 1995 when Cirrus, which had before then been a kit manufacturer, announced the existence of “Hangar X,” the secret facility in which it was building its mysterious to-be-certified entry. When the mystery […]

When you look back at the historical arc of light general aviation, a few airplanes stand out as being so important that their introductions changed the way we flew and the way we looked at flying. At the certain risk of leaving out a few favorites, you can’t talk about the history of light aviation […]

My introduction to the Piper Mirage has been an unusual one, to say the least, because I came to fly the progenitor of the PA-46 line only after I’d flown all of the others, some of them a lot. Before the Piper Mirage, I’d flown three of its spinoffs, the turboprop powered Meridian, the unpressurized […]

(January 2010) — We were settled in at 24,000 feet, cruising along at around 225 knots true, burning 24 gallons of 100LL every hour while watching the nautical miles slip behind us. We’d taken off from Orlando Executive (ORL) in a Cessna Corvalis and were an hour into our flight, cruising at an altitude that […]

Editor’s Note: The Lockwood AirCam is a one-of-a-kind airplane, tough, capable, ingenious and elegant all at once. Designed as a photo platform for a National Geographic_ story on the remote and pristine Ndoki Rain Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the AirCam soon evolved into a commercially available product that continues to attract a […]