Accessories

[IMGCAP(1)]Forget crashworthiness, durability, looks and adjustability, the average aircraft seat circa 1975 fails miserably on one count alone: Comfort.

Most were built with nylon webbing that sags with time or cheap foam thats long since lost its resilience. Upholstery shops sometimes deal with this merely by stitching fresh fabric over the old stuff or by replacing the underpinnings with more of the same, although some shops make an honest attempt at improving the seats underlying foundation.

One company thats kicked things up a notch is Oregon Aero, which has made a handy little business out of marketing the heck of an open-cell foam product know as conformal foam.

This stu…

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A failed flashlight bulb in the cockpit can be serious. Even if there’s a spare handy, changing it can be a challenge in the dark or in turbulence.

How about a flashlight with a bulb that never burns out, or at least not for tens of thousands of hours? How about a light with batteries that last days, not hours?

Were talking about flashlights that use LEDs (light emitting diodes) instead of conventional incandescent bulbs. Yes, these are the same LEDs weve seen in electronic equipment-cheap key ring lights and the like-for years. The problem has been that while LEDs came in an array of colors, they werent available in white, until recently, when a white LED was fin…

[IMGCAP(1)]Since we last examined aviation life rafts four years ago, new designs have been introduced and weve seen significant improvements made to existing products. Light aircraft owners have benefited from the Part 135 and big-iron GA market, which drives raft development, for better or worse.

We were sent evaluation rafts from Air Cruisers, BFGoodrich, Hoover and Winslow. Once again, Eastern Aero Marine (EAM) and Survival Products declined to participate and RFD didnt return our calls or e-mails. Survival Products later had an apparent change of heart and did provide rafts for testing.

Our testing protocol was simple but demanding. We enlisted a team of volunteers-ranging fro…

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Is there anybody alive who doesnt have a portable GPS moving map yet? Okay, so maybe youre a Ralph Kramden fan and youre waiting for the 3D model with accompanying decoder ring.

Garmin hasnt announced that model yet but we sometimes get the impression theyre about to. In the meantime, the company is finally shipping something that comes close: A portable moving map GPS with color that rivals Garmins GNS 430 panel mount.

At a glance, the GPSMAP 295 looks like an inflated version of the GPS III Pilot, another popular Garmin product. Like the Pilot, the 295s screen orientation is horizontal or landscape, the buttons are on the right and the antenna pokes up from…

[IMGCAP(1)]Now that the wireless world stands poised to equip every man, woman and child on the planet with a PDA-personal downtime annihilator- the era of the affordable airborne telephone has finally emerged.

After literally years of false starts and technical plot twists, AirCell, Inc. has gone from the are-you-guys-still-out-there phase to genuine hardware and service thats ready for purchase.

Although AirCells network is still only about half complete, the system provides good coverage at high altitudes east of the Mississippi and by years end, most of the service gaps will be filled. We recently flew the system with AirCells test pilot Keith Griffith in a Mooney, tried som…

[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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With flight service stations as scarce as hens teeth and a computer on nearly every pilots desk, delivery of pre-flight weather information has been revolutionized over the past five years.

There’s lots of free online information out there, but there’s also a burgeoning industry in subscription weather service sites that purport to provide more and better data than you can otherwise get.

Are they worth it? Or is this just another rat-hole down which you can pour money better squirreled away for an overhaul reserve? We evaluated six pay-for-use pilot weather sites and our conclusion is that none of them are must-haves.

The Lay of the Land
Most of the p…

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In the world of GPS equipage, weve noticed an interesting trend lately. For want of a better term, we’ll call it the have and have-not syndrome.

The haves are buying up Garmin GNS 430s as fast as Garmin can make them while the have-nots are eyeing all the hand-me-down GPS boxes many of these owners are dumping to accommodate new gear.

Given the volume Garmin is enjoying with GNS 430, this is a somewhat unprecedented development in the recent history of avionics. Some of these GPS navigators were installed less than two years ago and although their owners consider them obsolete, the fact is, these units are serviceable, if somewhat poor in features compared to the newer…

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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…

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Jeppesens vision of the future is a paperless cockpit, a vision that has, thus far, eluded most pilots and owners we know.

Nonetheless, as one step on the road to this future, Jeppesen will soon release a new product called the Skybound Datawriter, which will make it possible to electronically transmit monthly updates from your computer directly to the datacard that fits into your GPS.

Its designed as an alternative to the present system of receiving new data cards by mail every 28 days. Datawriter users will have two options: New updates can be mailed on a CD every four weeks or they can be downloaded from Jeppesens Web site.

Jeppesen plans full release of th…

[IMGCAP(1)]Winter flying in the northern tier is not for sissies. The ideal winter attire for occupants of my 1960s Bonanza is a pair of snowmobile pants and a t-shirt.

The stock heating system is woefully inadequate to warm a front seaters lower extremities during below-zero operations, while the greenhouse cockpit can create shoulder-high temperatures in 70s and 80s on a sunny winters flight. At night, the airplane is bone shatteringly cold, something thats not unusual for those of us who fly in extremely cold conditions.

Like all single-engine piston operators, I can warm up the cockpit a bit with a roll of Duct tape, masking wing root vents and air intakes. New gaskets for the…