Accessories

For years, Lightspeeds Zulu was our favorite headset for its winning combination of comfort, quiet and features, like Bluetooth cellphone connectivity. Last year, at Oshkosh AirVenture, Bose leapt into the 21st century with their new A20, improving their ANR and comfort, as we’ll as adding Bluetooth for cell phones and a jack for external audio. We tried an A20 at Airventure, on the long ride home and beyond. Our verdict was that head-to-head, we preferred the Bose, but werent sure it was worth the $200 price delta.

Your 45th birthday is a memory. You caught yourself squinting at the gauges on a recent approach to minimums. The near-vision test on your last medical? You passed it-barely. You have presbyopia, or old eyes. This term probably made sense 120 years ago, when 40 was old, but the term persists. Its the result of the loss of elasticity in the crystalline lens in the eye, which allows us to zoom focus on near objects. Because its the lens getting stiffer, not the focusing muscles getting weak, no amount of exercise will resolve the problem. The problem gets worse with age, no matter what you do. To better understand your options for progressive lenes, take a look at your vision in general. If youre nearsighted and wearing distance-only glasses, you may have excellent near vision without your glasses and be more comfortable without glasses for reading than with progressives. That works fine at home, but not in the cockpit, so progressives are still a necessity.

When gas was cheap(er), no one thought about doing avionics training on the ground. After all, how long does it take to learn to tune a radio and center a needle? Glass panels changed that. Now, even if you have a sim program, you still have to seal the deal with some seat time in the airplane. Thats best done on the ground, preferably with the engine off and thats where a ground power unit comes in. Not many owner hangars have these valuable gadgets, but a new offering from Audio Authority, the 2860A GPU, might provide a reason to buy one.

I was interested to read your article on in-the-ear headsets in the February 2011 issue as I converted to an ITE system 3 1/2 years ago. I fly a turbonormalized Cirrus SR22. At Sun-n-Fun 2007 I bought both the Quiet Tech Halo and the Clarity Aloft with the intention of testing them to evaluate them against my Bose headsets. Going into my test I felt the Bose would be superior and the Clarity Aloft would beat the Halo, based on appearances.

After flying with iPads and iPhones ourselves and talking to many pilots who also do, we’ve concluded there are those who’ve had the internal GPS lose its location—and those who will. The issue isn’t accuracy, so much as reliability. Some apps purposely don’t offer items like georeferenced approach plates because they don’t trust the GPS. But that may all change. There are add-on GPS units for the iPad/iPhone hitting the market. Two of the first are the plug-in Bad Elf and the Bluetooth GNS 5870 MFI.

If youre absolutely determined to kill yourself in an airplane, you’ll have to find a better way to do it than gassing yourself with carbon monoxide. The world is so awash with CO detectors across a range of prices and capabilities that we cant imagine many owners havent at least considered these gadgets. And the good news is that all of them work quite well, even, you might be surprised to know, the $4 cheapie stick-on detectors that all your friends tell you are a joke. (They arent.) How real is the risk of your exhaust or a perforated heater doing you in? Its real enough, although not the level of risk that should keep you awake at night. On the other hand, given the choices in detector technology, there’s no reason you cant eliminate the risk entirely or at least tamp it down.

After a couple of hours, most people are ready to get out of a traditional, skull-clamping headset. Go eight hours in a sweaty cockpit, and wearing even a top-of-the line Bose A20 or Lightspeed Zulu gets old. The alternative is an in-the-ear (ITE) headset, which is fundamentally a pair of earplugs with speakers and a mic. don’t knock earplugs. When inserted correctly, they offer noise reduction comparable to all but the best ANR headsets (We tried. Its true.) They don’t clamp down on your head or cause sweat to bead up around your ears, either. Still, they arent for everyone. They require more practice and patience than a headset you can just toss on. They arent for pilots who jump in and out of aircraft all day. ITE headsets are small and light, but the thin cords and tubes are more susceptible to tangling or breakage. And then there’s earwax. It will get on the earplug tips (call them eartips) and require keeping a bag of them on hand to replace as needed.

For the pilot of even modest equipage, a flashlight is something of a necessary fetish item, so much so that some pilots we know carry a half-dozen in the cockpit. Fear of darkness or just prudence? Both, we think. A decade ago, most of us bought a D-cell bat handle with a penlight backup, but now the market is flooded with sophisticated LED choices. And in our view, LED is the only illumination type worth considering, given the variety of choice, low power consumption, durability and color choices. And what choices there are. We shopped the popular pilot emporiums and Web sources for some practical choices and winnowed the field down to 15. You might pick an entirely different 15, but we have to start somewhere.

Its easy to pick out a couple of pilots talking: Look for the folks bending their hands through the air trying to recreate a visual for that death-defying turn to final immediately followed by three consecutive touchdowns from one landing attempt. Technology can now put more fact into these fish stories or offer a better way to debrief exactly what happened right before the CFI hollered, “My airplane!” These three solutions hit different, but overlapping, missions. None are cheap, but all do the job they set out for. The NFlightCam is small and to-the-point, so we will be too: The thing works great. The camera is actually a ContourHD 1080 wearable camcorder thats less than four inches long and weighs about five ounces. NFlightCam replaces the standard mic with a circuit and cable to record cabin audio from the intercom. Thats plugged into any headset jack and can be connected inline so you can use a headset in the same outlet.

We get glimpses into the thinning aviation market whenever we do a round-up article like this. Out of the eight companies we contacted, we ended up with only four still in business and interested in participating: Aero Covers, Bruces Custom Covers, Kennon Aircraft Covers and Macs Airplane Covers. We found Bruces and Kennon to be the walk-away winners, albeit with different strengths. Its our opinion that you cant go wrong with a cover from Bruces. The company has patterns at the ready for common and uncommon airplanes and plenty of experience making them work. Need a cover for your F4U Corsair? They can do that.

Before the fan-boy and anti-fan emails start pouring in, lets get one thing clear: Were pegging the iPad as the best bet for most pilots for replacing paper charts and approach plates in the cockpit. This is not a surprise with a device designed for reading stuff comfortably. Weve said before and were saying again: If you want advanced functions-GPS navigation, TAWS, on-board weather, or even some kinds of interactive documents-then the iPad may let you down. Most importantly, it may let you down unexpectedly, as with the iPads GPS that works great, except when it doesnt. There are at least two external GPS units for to the iPad, but we havent tested them.

Reviewing sunglasses is like reviewing clothing: Its grossly subjective and one size never fits all. But there are some important qualities to look for when choosing sunglasses for the cockpit. Special-purpose sunglasses arent cheap but the price tag isn’t a reliable predictor for performance. While sunglasses are an important part of pilot ego, we think theyre also a critical tool. In addition to protection from both visibly blinding and damaging UV sunlight, they should reduce eye fatigue, aid the eyes in transitioning from daylight to darkness and add clarity for effectively spotting traffic. They must also be comfortable under headsets for hours at a time and work we’ll with modern cockpit glass displays. And they have to look good.