Accessories

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.

The age of the Big GPS unearthed an annoying truth: They don’t fit in the cockpit. Now that weve evolved to the Really Big GPS, things have only gotten worse, so any attempt to mount a portable navigator can only be called a varying degree of compromise. But compromise we must, so we recently set out to review a range of gadgets designed to mount a portable navigator in the cockpit in such a way that makes it actually useful. Most of these are from RAM Mount Products, but there are others as well, including stock offerings from the GPS makers. For this article, we’ll concentrate mostly on RAMs offerings.

Although there’s plenty of portable GPS out there, the market isn’t as competitive as it once was, with Garmin dominating…well, the world. Two of the hottest products are both from Garmin, the GPSmap 696 and the aera series, Garmins first aviation touchscreen. These represent a conundrum for buyers in that they have nearly the same capability, but at different price points. And “nearly” isn’t the same as “exactly.” The 696 has some features the aera doesnt and vice versa. One outlier in this equation is whether Apples large-screen iPad can step in for either one of the Garmins.

Bose has always held a place at the top end of noise-canceling headsets, with a history dating back to 1989. The company has been virtually silent in the aviation arena for the past 12 years, resting on the continuing strong sales of their Headset X. But even the Bose devotees have been getting restless due to the lack of auxiliary music input and a Bluetooth connectivity for phones (to be used, uh, on the ground only, of course). All the while, Lightspeed Aviations Zulu has been steadily increasing its dominance in the premium headset market by offering active noise reduction (ANR) on par or exceeding that of the Bose, along with music and phone connectivity.

There is no perfect cockpit GPS. Some folks want a big screen; others need portability. Some want all the frills and some just need the essentials. What the iFly does best is what it does right after startup: display scanned charts. The screen is crisp and readable and the charts can be zoomed in and out by on-screen buttons. It renders charts quickly enough to avoid annoyance. The aircraft position is superimposed, as we’ll as any flight plan. As these are scanned charts, they are only presented north-up. Panning the charts is a matter of sliding your finger on the touchscreen in style of an iPhone/iPad. The hardware has a good feel under the fingers and we rarely saw a screen touch misunderstood by the system.

The world of noise-canceling headsets is largely ruled by the high-end units like the Bose X and Lightspeed Zulu. If pilots baby their ears, it seems they go for the best they can buy. But there’s still a place for good deal on ANR, be it for backseat passengers or just to stretch your own flying dollar. Headsets Inc. offers a drop-in module that fits a wide range of existing headsets and helmets. OK, its not quite “drop in.” Some wire clipping and soldering is involved. The company also sells complete headsets with their ANR installed headset, and they revived the DRE Communications line of headsets, which includes one with ANR.

The iPad may be many things to many people, but there are several things it is not: a moving map, a good navigator or a datalink weather display. I doubt if Garmin will even feel a minor nick in sales from iPad competition. The iPad is, however, an excellent plate reader. There are several ways to obtain and manage plates and Im sure this function will improve as the market matures. It can also do enroute charts and sectionals reasonably we’ll and it flat aces things like weight and balance and E6B calcs.