Accessories

Our annual take-it-to-the-bank review of the best products and services in general aviation.

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We sometimes wonder why more owners don’t save themselves a few bucks by changing their own oil. Once you get a method down, its not time consuming but, admittedly, oil changes can still be messy.

One solution-actually, three solutions in the form of three tools-comes from Deal Associates, a small manufacturer of maintenance and other aircraft accessories.

We first saw this companys gadgets at Sun n Fun last spring, including their tiedown kit mentioned on page 11 in our Gear of the Year report. Reach Deal at 336-599-3325 or www.dealassoc.com.

Deal sells three oil change tools, an oil drain filter, a knob wrench and a filter c…

For short-term trips out of your regular coverage area, FAA/NOAA charts offer the best value if not the best quality.

PS Engineerings CD player has superior sound but AI is the only choice if you want AM/FM, too.

[IMGCAP(1)]The ugly side of having an aircraft sound system is lugging around all those CDs and, worse, shuffling them around the cockpit along with charts, plates, flashlights and all the rest of the cockpit blather.

One intriguing alternative to this being hawked at Sun n Fun by Gulfcoast Avionics is a clever product called a Personal Jukebox, a high-capacity CD/MP3 storage device.

The PJ is little more than a miniature hard drive with an audio section but at 6GB, it has the astonishing ability to store the equivalent of 125 CDs or about 100 hours of music. Each CD or track can be accessed and played via a menu system, in order, by CD or randomly, by song.

To load the music, yo…

Rosens aftermarket sun visors are top of the line but replacements from Ultravisor are the better value.

Forget chain and nylon webbing; polyester rope is the best choice. Fly-Ties is the top portable anchor.

Jeppesen still has the best of the best. But if you cant stand all that paper shuffling, Air Charts is the top value.

Although a tad pricey, the RS Beeper Box controls pre-heat switching from afar, using a standard pager.

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Ever since the days when ADF replaced LF as the navigation mode of choice, music has been an option in the GA cockpit, albeit a limited one. AM radio is noisy and despite its lofty price, the audio section in a typical ADF doesnt hold a candle to a car radio costing a quarter as much.

The introduction of the CD player has changed that, as has the stereo-capable audio panel. With the availability of high-fidelity music in the cockpit, audio panel engineers quickly took note and introduced music canceling, which mutes the music when anyone speaks through the intercom or an incoming ATC transmission arrives. With all this capability, owners are taking note and the sale of t…

Its all about angles and drift, son. Thats all you gotta know.

Thats what our first instrument instructor, a crusty old military type, had to say about flying a perfect ILS. A centered needle merely measured the results of flying a perfect intercept. Keeping it there required heading discipline.

Glitzy though they may be, new-age GPS mapcoms don’t help in this regard for a couple reasons. For one, the display is center stack and out of the scan. For another, unless the box is customized just so, matching bearing and track to hold an approach course is like stacking greased ball bearings; more luck than skill. After all these years, flying the needle is still the method of choice….

Although glutted and confusing, one thing is certain about the portable GPS market: If you don’t like the current models, wait around a couple of weeks, something else will come along shortly. With any luck, it might even better or at least cheaper than the current crop.

And so it was this spring, as Garmin and Lowrance rolled out yet two more portable GPS navigators into a market that hardly lacks choices. Garmin has gussied up the venerable GPS 90-one of the first mega-seller handhelds-with its 12-channel GPS chip and christened it the GPS 92 ($549 list, $499 on the street.) Lowrance, obviously intent on making its own mark in aviation GPS, introduced a new model, the AirMap 100, wh…