You just don’t know how we’ll a new headset will hold up until it serves hard time in the harsh flight environment. Audio cables get pulled and eventually get caught in seat tracks, microphone booms get twisted and bent, plus the headphone ear seals and main frames live hard, sweaty lives.
We wondered about all that and more when we easily recommended the new Lightspeed Delta Zulu in an Aviation Consumer field report over a year ago. So to see how it would hold up, we tossed our demo set in the relentlessly abusive long-term test pool. We handed the set out to ham-fisted students, demanding flight instructors and charter pilots, plus we tried—hard—to get the set to fail during our own use. Despite the torture, the $1199 Delta Zulu soldiers on.