Cockpit Accessories

What does a watch do? It tells time, of course.

What does a pilots watch do? Well, it tells time, too. But traditionally, it also has a stopwatch function, often called a chronograph, a high falutin word that simply means interval timer. Since pilots are also navigators and navigation traditionally requires highly reliable timepieces, the would-be buyer may vaguely assume that a pilots watch slices the seconds with laser-like accuracy, a notion the ad agencies for Rolex, Brietling and others have done nothing to dispel. (Its not true, of course.)

Then there’s the look. There’s nothing quite like a shimmering gold-cased watch with a dial the size of a dinner plate and festoo…

Datalink this, datalink that, hardware, software, service providers, subscriptions, bit charges, message costs. Holy cow, is this beginning to sound sort of familiar?

Datalink is a generic term that has come to represent text and data services delivered into the cockpit. If you think of it as Internet in the sky, youve got the concept.

For a potential buyer, there are three distinct issues involved; the services provided, the link medium and the airborne hardware. Right now, the industry is in its infancy, funded by various groups with differing agendas, not the least of which is the government.

In other words, none of this stuff is resolved to the extent that you can make re…

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During those first few hours of flight training, when it was still iffy whether youd be better off to forget flying and buy golf clubs, you probably got some gruff advice on logbooks. From an FBO counter selection of exactly one, your CFI probably grunted, Here, buy this.

Each page completed and carefully totaled thereafter was its own little milestone and its great fun to flip back through those pages, no matter how far down the airway youve traveled since.

Paper logbooks arent treasured, however, when youre filling out the application for the private or instrument checkride and you just cant get the subcategories to add up to the totals. The odd misplaced dec…

[IMGCAP(1)]Worrying about how density altitude saps aircraft performance is a little like your mother reminding you to take your galoshes to school. Most of the time, it didnt matter but when you needed the boots, you really needed them.

Our guess is that most flat lander pilots don’t have to worry much about density altitude computations, either. Even in the heat and humidity of high summer, most of us operate off long enough runways or at light enough weights for denalt not to be a serious issue.

At higher weights or at mountain airports, the sanguine attitude wont wash. Every year, there are a handful of wrecks in which pilots ignore the effect of density altitude and assume the…

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Bicycles and airplanes go way back. When Orville and Wilbur sloughed their cycle shop to experiment with airfoils at Kitty Hawk, the bond was born. Bikes are still a cheap, readily transportable means to get from A to B.

But putting bicycles in airplanes has been a different story. Some owners have been stuffing $20 Raleighs into Cessnas and don’t want to hear of anything else while others have spent thousands on jeweled little cycling machines with zero utility. The problem: If you could get a bike into an airplane easily, you didnt want to ride it very far when you got it out.

Thats changed. Technology is giving us better bikes. Lightweight alloys, new designs and…

In dusty corners of tee hangars all over this great land are the corroded remains of a variety of pilot toys-engine pre-heaters too complex to bother using, personal ramp tugs that couldnt pull a cork out of a Cabernet, desktop kneeboards from the 30-seconds-over-Tokyo phase of our flying and the like.

More common than any other discarded artifact are the bones of portable conveyances designed to get pilots from airports to motels, beaches, appointments and assignations without recourse to rental cars or taxis. Folding bikes, motorized skateboards, model-airplane-engined Schwinns, collapsible mopeds, inflatable ATVs…well, maybe not inflatable ATVs, but certain…