Accessories

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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…