Street priced at $745, the TSO-certified Pro-X2 is hardly considered an entry-level set, but it has enough smart features to satisfy buyers expecting modern, reliable tech. This includes good noise-canceling circuitry, a rugged yet comfy frame and reliable Bluetooth connectivity for tablet app and music interfaces. After our October 2019 field report, we tossed the […]
Our recent battery satisfaction survey returned 3332 responses. Since the question prep was a joint effort between Aviation Consumer and sister publication KITPLANES magazine, 45 percent of the respondents own experimental aircraft and 52 percent own certificated ones. The rest were S-LSAs. As you see in the graphics on the next page, since we surveyed […]
Buying an aircraft battery used to be straightforward. Historically, there was nickel cadmium for turbines and lead acid for smaller aircraft. That has changed with the advent of lithium batteries. These days, when it’s time for a replacement (and as our survey proves, it may be sooner for some brands), take some time to determine […]
It’s a good thing that more CO detectors are showing up on the aviation market because pilots may never give carbon monoxide in the cabin the consideration it deserves. Even I had an eye-opening moment flying home from AirVenture last summer in a friend’s well-maintained Cessna and found my Aithre Shield portable monitor registering 40 […]
Upgrading to electronic flight displays and a data-hungry GPS navigator? Add a reliable GPU (ground power unit) to the budget. That’s because you’ll have the master switch on for extended periods while loading nav data, uploading flight plans and fetching engine trend data. If those chores don’t kill an otherwise healthy battery, messing around with […]
A new panel upgrade could be a few thousand dollars to the cost of a small home. But don’t forget about the ongoing costs, which include database subscriptions, firmware updates to the avionics hardware, the cost of computer hardware to support the database upgrades, database cards and your time (which for some is priceless). Avionics database […]
At 15 months since the professional application of the System X Element 119 ceramic coating product on my Grumman Tiger, I was anxious to see how it was holding up. The aircraft was painted in November 2020 with a basecoat clearcoat finish (see the January 2021 Aviation Consumer for a report) and I had to […]
Lightspeed knows its new $1099 Delta Zulu headset won’t appeal to all buyers, especially those needing a budget-priced set. Still, after spending some time with the feature-rich Delta Zulu, we think it hits enough high points to attract the attention of some buyers who might otherwise spend their money on a Bose A20. There’s a […]
Anyone who works on airplanes—for cosmetics or maintenance—has at one time or another complained about how awkward it is to get to the belly and bottoms of the wings. The belly is often rather low, and on a low-wing airplane, undoing the many access panels on the wings or just degreasing or polishing the underside […]
Cabin fires can have catastrophic outcomes, and while rare, the risk can be greater when you factor in all of the lithium-ion-powered portable devices that get carried on the aircraft. The battery-powered stuff in my Rockwell cabin includes a SPOTx tracker, a Garmin GDL 52 portable ADS-B receiver, a Garmin inReach Mini satcomm, an iPad […]
Face it, the majority of aging general aviation cockpits just weren’t designed for the portable digital revolution. Heat has always been the enemy of solid-state electronics, including batteries. For panel avionics, internal and external fans help in fighting the premature failure of small internal components. But the heat buildup from solar radiation plays havoc on […]
When the single alternator in a single-engine airplane decides to take the day off in the middle of a flight, the resulting unpleasantness spans the spectrum from inconvenience to terror depending on the weather and the endurance of the aircraft battery—and individual batteries for instruments and portable devices that can help the pilot keep the […]
