In the May 2022 issue of Aviation Consumer we reported on the recent effort by the general aviation alphabet groups and the FAA to revive the collapsed Piston Aviation Fuel Initiative (PAFI) under the snappy new name EAGLE (Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions). Along with it was a request to Congress to increase its funding […]
HEADSETS AND CRASHWORTHINESS Turns out those two words shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. The point was driven home when we got a letter from Sigurour Olafsson, a passenger who was in a Kitfox that flipped over during a forced landing. With some gnarly photos as proof, Olafsson explained how the Bose A20 headset […]
That’s the least of the chores at hand. A woman who lives in Wethersfield, Connecticut, said she was nearly mowed down by a low-flying airplane when she was walking her dog. It was flying so low, she claimed, the pair had to duck. And so goes one piece of the buffoonery that doesn’t help the […]
An amusing and depressing part of the job here at the magazine is scouring the accident reports for the safety data we assemble in the Used Aircraft Guide. If we didn’t laugh, we’d cry. There is some horrific and fascinating stuff, all of it making me wish I had gone to work for the NTSB. […]
You probably heard the buzz about 5G wireless broadband cell towers interfering with aircraft radar altimeter systems (also called radio altimeters). And now there are two FAA Airworthiness Directives (AD 2021-23-12 and 2021-23-13) in place. The latter is focused on helicopter operations. In part, the ADs say that radio altimeters are unreliable if they experience […]
GARMIN RADAR INSTALLS Regarding the article authored by Larry Anglisano in the August 2021 Aviation Consumer, WX Radar Upgrades: Garmin’s GWX 75 Is Top, the article mentions the Cessna 210 and also includes a photo of a Cessna T210 with a 10-inch radar pod. The article never explicitly states that Garmin’s GWX 75 will play […]
Just over a year ago, the NTSB introduced a new accident database search engine called CAROL (Case Analysis and Reporting Online). For anyone seeking an aircraft accident report for an accident that occurred on or after Jan. 1, 2008, CAROL became the required search engine. The user-friendly search engine that I’d used with great success […]
In the world of aviation accomplishments, the prestigious Robert J. Collier Trophy is a pretty big deal. And deservingly, the award for Garmin’s AutoLand acknowledges the huge engineering effort that brought to market airplanes that land themselves when the pilot can’t. To me, the engineering talent that made this possible sort of got lost in […]
At the NBAA-BACE show in Las Vegas this past October, Honeywell was showing a clean-sheet avionics suite called Anthem, and I almost missed the nearly silent announcement. I wondered why the company didn’t make a bigger deal of it at the show. This worries me because the system—the new standard for integrated avionics partly because […]
Presenting my Avionics Bootcamp lecture in a crowded hangar of Grumman owners at the Grumman Owners and Pilots Association’s (GOPA) annual convention and fly-in last month got me thinking about the value of well-organized type clubs. Sure, there are some politics, and large gatherings of A+ pilot types … well, you understand. But these events […]
The NTSB holds a fascinating position in our government—it is the righteous gadfly buzzing around the federal regulators of transportation safety, annoying them, criticizing them and constantly urging them to act more resolutely to decrease the number of deaths and injuries to Americans due to any mode of transportation. The NTSB has no regulatory power. […]
Closely watching the announcements from AirVenture this past July, I was waiting for something different from the avionics world. You know, a new product that makes you say, “Now that’s what the market really wants,” but it was a bust. The short list includes products that hit the sweet spot on price, are relatively easy […]
