Aviation Consumer - February 2010

February 2010

APS’s Upset Training: Practical Survival Skills
In a 2007 study going back more than 50 years, a Boeing safety group identified inflight loss of control as the number one source of airline fatalities. The 2008 Nall Report tells a similar story for general aviation. Loss of control inflight, or LOC-I in the argot of those who study aircraft accidents, includes a host of hazards ranging from garden-variety stalls to control surface hardovers and encounters with wake turbulence. LOC- I accidents happen to the spectrum of civilian pilots, from students to airline veterans. The stubbornness of LOC-I as the single largest cause of fatal accidents has a great deal to do with the way that we train. While the airlines have incorporated a number of loss-of-control scenarios in their training, general aviation hasn’t really addressed the issue.

TCM’s Lifter Crisis: Reclaimed Parts Rule
Owners buying engine overhauls have more or less adjusted to the idea that cylinders, cams and crankshafts have become a crap shoot. But valve lifters, too? These got added to the list of problem parts last fall when TCM announced that a massive batch of faulty lifters made it into the supply chain. Some showed failure wear in as little as five hours of operation. Although only engines built after June 19th, 2009, appear affected, the sudden demand has disrupted the supply chain for lifters to the extent that the industry—and the FAA—are relenting on the standard recommendation that lifters be replaced. Further, the market for overhauled lifters has become red hot and, at least well into 2010, they may be hard to come by. Only owners who had engines built after the June date need be concerned about bad lifters and not all of them may be affected.

New Cockpit Lighting: Options for All Budgets
It was close to midnight and after a long day of flying we were cooked. A couple miles out something just didn’t look right. If not for the landing light reflecting off the trees, we might not be here to review cockpit lighting upgrades. The instrument-panel lighting in that 70s-vintage Arrow was so poor we cranked in the wrong altimeter setting—misreading a two for a three in the Kollsman window. There’s no reason to live with (or risk death due to) substandard cockpit lighting. Panel upgrades require skill and a decent budget. The good news is there are several options to light up your night.

SMA Diesel Revisited: The Numbers Are Solid
Think of it: If you had an aircraft engine that burned two to three gallons less than the competition, delivered the same horsepower, weighed more or less the same and burned fuel that isn’t threatened with extinction, as 100LL is, wouldn’t you sell the hell out of it? You’d think so. But while SMA, the French daughter of aerospace giant SAFRAN, has such an engine in the SR305 aerodiesel, buying one is at best a rarified experience. There aren’t many of these engines flying, so judging their merits has been largely a paper exercise. So when the Paramus Flying Club, a long established New Jersey co-operative, invited us to examine their SMA-converted Cessna 182, we realized it represented a rare opportunity to take the measure of this engine in the wild. The club has been operating it for nearly a year and while it’s too soon to declare it a walk-away success, the airplane has proven to be the most popular among the club’s 46 members, its dispatch reliability has been excellent and the engine’s initial operating costs look promising.

Bendix-King KFD 840: An Unremarkable PFD
We asked Dan Barks, Business Director for GA Operators and Dealers at Honeywell, why this was a good time for Honeywell to offer an aftermarket PFD. His response: "Honeywell has been refocusing on GA with the Bendix-King line. We have stack avionics, portables, but the missing product was a PFD." That PFD has arrived with the Bendix-King KFD 840. The 8.5x7x7.3-inch unit replaces the traditional six-pack with a display and functionality reminiscent of the older Avidyne Entegra PFDs. That’s not to say this is old technology—the hardware and display symbology is derived from Honeywell’s high-end Primus Epic cockpit suite—but the philosophy behind the KFD 840 is traditional: big PFD designed to play with navigators and an MFD on the center stack.

iPhone Aviation Apps: Some Serious, Some Silly
We can imagine only three reactions to the phrase, "there’s an app for that." One, utter puzzlement because you’re clueless about apps, two, you recoil in disgust against the overblown preciousness of Apple’s iPhone or, last, "yeah, I’ve seen it." Apps are, of course, modest little single-purpose programs that run on Apple’s iPhone smart phone or iPod Touch MP3 players. At last count, there were more 140,000 apps and at least 195 of them are aviation applications of some kind. In this report, we’ll take a minimal survey of a handful of these but, more to the point, we’ll examine the basic Zen of apps. Are they just gimmicks or are they really useful? (It’s a little of each, in our view.) Worth noting is that other smart phones like the Android-based products and the Blackberries also have aviation apps. We’ll get to those later.

GPS Survey Favorites: Garmin, Anywhere Map
Portable GPS devices are arguably the most useful cockpit tool since the invention of the E6B. Or aeronautical charts. So it was no surprise when our reader survey on portable GPS generated well over 1000 responses. There were comments from pilots still flying trusty, monochrome Magellans to ones using the newest Garmin aera. We saw dozens of poetic waxings about most every major supplier and surprisingly few complaints. That said, no company or product escaped with no complaints and we saw some direct conflicts: Pilot A had such a dismal time with Anywhere Map that he went to Garmin and is much happier, while Pilot B finally got so sick of Garmin troubles he bought an ATC and now flies in a state of bliss. To each his own.

Used Aircraft Guide: Cirrus SR20
Only 10 years ago, the idea of a certificated, "plastic" airplane had many old-timers shaking their heads in skepticism. It looks kind of interesting, but no "real" pilot would want of those things—it’s got a parachute, fergawd’s sake! Today, the Cirrus SR20—and especially its big brother, the SR22—have upended traditional ideas of what a personal airplane should look like, how it should be used and how it should be equipped. The SR20 could be thought of as the product that started changing how the industry thinks of a modern personal airplane. Those changes have been evolutionary, not revolutionary. For example, the early SR20s, in fact, retained the too-familiar vacuum-powered "steam gauge" flight instruments, albeit complemented by a large multifunction display. Today’s copies have eliminated the vacuum system and gone all-electric, with full glass panels; steam gauges are only there for backup. And even if the SR20 responds respectably for its horsepower, performance didn’t break new ground, either.

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