Aviation Consumer - March 2010

March 2010

PiperSport LSA: Sleek, Comfortable
For the established manufacturers, the light sport evolution has presented an opportunity and a dilemma. The opportunity is that LSAs might gin up the market for certified aircraft by offering buyers a low cost of admission. The dilemma? How to capitalize on that. Do you leave LSAs to the upstarts or build your own? Cessna built its own, Cirrus stuck a toe in the LSA water and withdrew it—or at least delayed the plunge—and now comes Piper with the announcement that it will offer the former Czech Aircraft Works SportCruiser as a rebranded PiperSport. The announcement came at the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo in January in Sebring, Florida. Piper’s new CEO, Kevin Gould, explained that buying and marketing someone else’s design made more sense than spending hard-to-come-by developmental dollars to ultimately build an airplane that’s not much different from the dozens already out there. Point taken.

Avgas Replacement: Chicken, Meet Egg
Compared to piston aviation fuels research, mushroom farming is a daylight operation. That’s not to say the fuel work is secretive, it’s just that it goes on more or less constantly, but nothing meaningful seems to come of it. At least you can have the mushrooms on your salad. Against this backdrop of apparent non-action comes yet another entrant into the 100LL replacement sweepstakes, this one called G100UL. This new fuel comes at the problem from far out in left field from a company known more for burning fuel than creating it: General Aviation Modifications, Inc., the Ada, Oklahoma, mod house that shook up the hidebound world of aircraft engine research with its radical ideas on lean-of-peak operation and an almost religious conviction that turbonormalized engines are better than turbocharged engines. With G100UL, GAMI is again running against the grain and, to a degree, challenging the accepted notion that before a new fuel can be widely tested, it has to be certified. But, says GAMI’s George Braly, that’s backwards. There’s no point in reducing entire forests to pulp to certify a fuel if refineries aren’t interested in or can’t build the stuff profitably, thus GAMI’s idea is to field its new developmental fuel to a select fleet under an STC while simultaneously pursuing regulatory approval. To a degree, that will test the economics, too, since production will have to rise to at least the pilot-plant level to supply a small fleet experiment.

Upgrading to WAAS: Only Few Options Exist
In February 1996, the FAA’s Technical Standard Order (TSO) C129 put IFR GPS navigation on the map. It was a complex installation with equipment that was quirky to program, but early adopters gained GPS-direct flight plans and GPS approaches—even though GPS was "supplementary navigation." Today’s IFR GPS installations are all about the augmented WAAS signal that’s worthy of sole-means navigation. They’re still a source of confusion and expense, but WAAS installations yield impressive automation and capability. Before you decide if WAAS is for you, you need to understand some behind-the-scenes facts and why you could be disadvantaged without WAAS GPS in your aircraft.

Engine Shop Survey: Zephyr Gets Top Marks
It’s just a sad fact that a wear item could have a replacement price tag up to a third of the value of your aircraft. That’s the way it is with engines, yet most owners accept this and worry more about surviving the engine-change experience with a reliable motor that will last rather than finding the cheapest solution. But the best path to getting that reliable motor isn’t clear cut. Should you do a field overhaul or get an engine from the factory? Is it worth shipping the engine cross-country for that overhaul or is a local shop just fine? Does it matter who does the engine installation itself? Every few years, we ask our readership, and that of our sister publication AVweb.com, to weigh in with their real-world experiences on engine overhauls. The latest results are consistent with the past: Your best bet is a field overhaul from a shop with a solid track record for quality work and after-the-sale support.

Product Support: There’s a Limit
The term "product support" means different things to different people. For example, someone in the market to buy a new aircraft may worry about whether the local FBO has personnel trained to maintain it. Meanwhile, a renter pilot buying a new headset wonders what will happen if an earcup cracks five years from now. Both pilots may also be in the market for a handheld GPS: Will database updates for it still be available in a few years? Perhaps because of the relatively high prices we pay for these and other products, there’s often the expectation of manufacturers supporting them forever. And Jeppesen should continue offering custom database updates long after the memory space required outstrips that available in the hardware. Good luck with both. So, how long can we expect to receive a manufacturer’s support for their products? What factors into a manufacturer’s decision to discontinue support of a product? Are our expectations unrealistic? If so, why?

Plate Reader Roundup: Many OK, None Ideal
Call us overly picky, but we have yet to find a digital approach-plate solution we can completely endorse. Perhaps the problem is that they have yet to surpass the bar. That is, they’re almost as good as paper when what we really want is something better than paper. In fairness, the e-reader solutions for approach plates are superior in three critical ways: You can carry plates for the entire country without risking a hernia, updates are a breeze (so long as you’ve got some free time and a good internet connection) and there’s no wasted paper. The readers all support PDF documents, so you can also load useful items like your aircraft handbook or maintenance manual if there’s space to do so.

Used Aircraft Guide: Mooney K-Model - Goes Fast, Sips Gas
Of age mellows people, the same thing might be said of airplanes, at least if the airplane in question is Mooney’s M20K series. The airplane arrived in the GA market at a time when turbocharging was relatively new and the demand for high flying aircraft was thin. Mooney didn’t get the M20K’s turbocharging system right on the first try and the airplane developed a reputation as a maintenance hog. Thirty years later, that reputation has been mostly burnished and the fact that the M20K bores along between 160 and 200 knots on relatively little fuel has improved the model’s used price. Still, the cabin is small and with a single door, hard to get into. For that reason and others, Mooneys have a bit of cult status to them. They are in no way everyman’s airplane in the way that a Cessna or a Piper is. But if cruising fast yet miserly is your wont, the M20K models—the 231, the 252 and the Encore—are strong contenders.

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