Single Engine Piston

Flying high, flying far in a luxury piston single.

While most people start flight training because they’ve had a lifelong desire to learn to fly, some start training to overcome their fear of flying. During initial training, future pilots of both categories seem to have, if not a fear, a healthy respect for slow flight and stalls. Their bodies naturally feel that there is […]

When I was recently asked to fly from my home in Los Angeles to Paso Robles, I experienced an unfamiliar nervousness. Flying used to be second nature. It didn’t feel much more challenging than stepping into my car to drive to the grocery store. But I gave birth to a son in the summer of […]

I may have been the last person to consider bringing the late Stelio Frati’s F-22 Pinguino to America. Mooney apparently looked at the program, and Roy LoPresti, who also sought to produce the SwiftFury, was interested. By the time I arrived at the General Avia factory in Perugia, Italy, on a frigid January day in […]

The hope is that, as a product develops, it will mature. And I mean “mature” in the good way, you know, like expensive wine, fine Swiss watches and very fast airplanes, like the Cirrus SR22. I was the first journalist to fly the original SR22, and I’ve flown every new one since, some of them […]

AUGUST 2010 The more you think about it, the more the economics of the Cessna 206 make sense. Unlike some of the airplanes, such as Otters and Caravans, that ply the same missions as the 206 does, the Stationair is a true light airplane. It is powered not by a turboprop but by a conventional […]

July 2010 — For the past few years piston-engine giant Lycoming has been developing a new engine, the TEO-540-A1A. The designation is meaningful: It is a “turbocharged,” “electronic ignition” and “opposed” — nothing new there — version of the venerable 540-series Lycoming engine that has been a mainstay of the general aviation fleet for decades. […]

July 2010 — The Mooney 201 was a product of an earlier fuel crisis, the one that plagued the United States for most of the 1970s. When adjusted for inflation, avgas cost matched today’s $5 per gallon and up, and many pilots prized fuel efficiency matched with speed above all other airplane characteristics. Mooneys had […]

Cobalt Aircraft Industries has announced it will introduce its Co50 at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh on July 28. The five-seat all-composite Canard will be powered by a mid-ship-mounted Continental TSIOF-550-D2B twin-turbocharged piston engine driving a pusher propeller. Top speed is predicted as 245 knots at 25,000 feet burning 25 gallons per hour from its 109-gallon capacity. […]