Weve long urged aircraft owners to retrofit shoulder harnesses for all seats of their airplanes if at all possible. The simple reason is that a restraint system that keeps your head and upper torso from smacking into the instrument panel or seat in front of you during an accident sequence is the single most effective mod you can make to your airplane to radically increase the chance of everyone aboard surviving an accident.
For the 2017 model year, Cirrus released the G6 SR20, which gets both an avionics upgrade and a new IO-390 Lycoming engine. Cirrus said its decision to re-engine the entry-level SR20 is significant for a couple of reasons. For one, it plans to aggressively market the aircraft to fleet operators whove expressed a strong preference for a four-cylinder Lycoming over a six-cylinder Continental. Moreover, the IO-390 substantially reduces weight, while also stretching the TBO for high-use operations.
There are good reasons to make oxygen available at altitudes less than those recommended by the FAA. Face it, unless youre using a pulse oximeter on every flight (we certainly don’t when flying at lower altitudes), you don’t really know how your physiology is reacting on a given day. We think blood oxygen saturation is an important biometric to keep on top of.
Touring either Lycomings factory in Williamsport or Continentals in Mobile is like a stroll through time. Cheek by jowl with ancient hand-operated machine tools are modern CNC machining centers that would be at home in a Ford or GM plant. In late March, Continental revealed that its ready to scrap the old stuff for good.
Is there a value proposition in an airplane that cruises two-thirds as fast as a near million-dollar Cirrus, uses only one-quarter the fuel and costs one-fifth as much? The Bristell LSA, an Eastern European import were examining here, certainly tests the notion. Like the Tecnam Astore we reviewed in the January 2017 issue, the Bristell NG5 stretches the slow-simple-cheap ethos of the light sport airplane to the breaking point. Given its sophisticated avionics, high cruising speed and attention to interior and baggage space, the Bristell is clearly conceived as a high-end traveling machine, not a bump-around-the-pattern flivver.
In February 2016, Garmin purchased Maine-based DeLorme-the maker of topo maps and the inReach portable two-way Iridium-based satcomm navigator. The inReach tech was a good score for Garmin because it has a place in multiple markets including aviation, outdoor and marine.
Back in the day-as in 1939-the Ercoupe was designed to be exceptionally safe by making it resistant to stalls and spins. But the airplane racked up a number of firsts, including being the first successful production GA airplane that had a nosewheel, plus a fully cowled engine. This contributed to more speed than most of its counterparts had. Better yet, an Ercoupe can handle a crosswind of twice the velocity that can be dealt with by almost any other airplane.
When L-3 introduced the Lynx NGT9000 multifunction ADS-B transponder in 2015, we nearly dismissed it for all but the highest-end applications. With a starting price that put it we’ll north of ten grand, the NGT9000 seemed like a questionable investment for buyers looking for an affordable path to ADS-B compliance.
A colleague faced with an engine swap on his Baron recently asked me a tough one: Will a factory remanufactured engine-as opposed to a quality field overhaul done by a respected shop-greatly influence the resale value of the aircraft? Moreover, will the Baron be more difficult to sell without factory engines? The quotes he got showed almost a $10,000 delta, per engine, between a field overhaul using new cylinders and a Continental reman. Before hitting the pavement and asking several industry pros to weigh in, we threw the question out on sister publication AVweb.com to see what readers would do. The results were predictable.
Lets get this out of the way, shall we? Cirrus salespeople arent apologetic that a fully loaded 2017 SR22T GTS comes with an eye-widening invoice north of $900,000 when you tack on an extended warranty. Cirrus offers less expensive models, of course, but the turbocharged SR22T is the most popular seller. Just how many buyers would spend nearly $1 million for an unpressurized piston single, you might ask? More than you might think.
While wireless connectivity is taken for granted outside the cockpit, its recently begun to see some use in the cockpit. Portable ADS-B devices connect wirelessly to our portables, but wireless communications with panel-mount, certified avionics is far less common. Garmin changed that with its RS-232-based Flight Stream 100/200 wireless hubs.
When we last looked at insurance for older pilots, the insurance market was in the midst of a soft market cycle, or at least we thought it was. Almost four years later, there are even more insurers than there were then. As the GA fleet in the U.S. continues to gradually shrink, there are more insurance dollars chasing fewer airplanes. As a result, rates and underwriting guidelines are even softer now than they were then.
