Industry News

[IMGCAP(1)]Try this: Call up a close friend and ask him to put down his Millers and come out to the airport to have a look at the latest installation in your beloved Skylane. Ten to one hell ask you which GPS you bought.

Tell him youve just installed a shoulder harness. There are no odds here. Your friends going to tell you that hes in the middle of a hot cribbage game with his mother-in-law and he cant get away.

Such is the glamour of seatbelts and shoulder harnesses. In the aircraft classifieds, you’ll find proud owners still pimping Mark 12s, Cessna 300 radios and wing levelers. But seatbelts? Not a chance. As one grizzled old FAA bureaucrat told us: Flying airplanes is no…

[IMGCAP(1)]Its a common complaint in the aviation biz: You spend a ton of money on your airplane-say for an engine, radios, paint or some such-and the job goes sour. Either you don’t like the results or what was supposed to work doesnt.

In the retail industry, redress is simple and usually instantaneous: Take the stuff back and get a refund. Sad as it may be, it doesnt work that way in the airplane business. Although customers enjoy some protection from warranties, warranty performance is clearly limited and in most circumstances, its largely at the pleasure of the manufacturer. The better companies-the David Clarks, the Mattitucks and the Penn Yan Aeros-routinely perform beyond the…

[IMGCAP(1)]Is customer service in the airplane business dead and buried?

Not quite, but at least three buyers who recently bought new airplanes from Mooney have the impression its on life support.

Two have sold their airplanes in disgust, one is suing Mooney for breach of sale contract and another is engaged in a long-running squabble over warranty performance that may yet end in a lawsuit.

Such suits arent exactly new in the GA industry, nor are warranty disputes. Nonetheless, the fact that Mooney is subject to three at once raises this legitimate question in any potential buyers mind: Can these guys make a reliable airplane and support it to the extent that some customers won…

Screen Resolution
Once again, you have done an evaluation of a new GPS unit (Garmin GPS 295) and you have included a comparison chart of all the competing hand held GPS units features and specifications but youve left out one of the most important quantitative specifications: the resolution of the displays. I believe this is more important than the size of the display.

A small high-resolution display can display a surprising amount of information without becoming cluttered and unreadable. I fly with a 10-year-old Argus 5000 which is still state-of-the-art except that its monochrome.

Its display resolution is 512×256 pixels. And although rather small, it allows for a…

AI Back-Ups
Your recent article on the various gyro back-up options was interesting, especially in light of recent accidents that were the apparent result of loss of vacuum. I agree that a second electric AI is probably the best bet, especially for single-engine aircraft. I think that the following points are sometimes overlooked when considering backup options for the vacuum pump or AI:

The vacuum pump is guaranteed to fail eventually, and should therefore be replaced periodically before it does. Perhaps every 500 hours.

If youre going to install a second engine-driven vacuum pump, then dispense with the electric clutch arrangement and let the pump run full time, just l…

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For a couple of years before the General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 (GARA) was enacted, almost every alphabet group involved in general aviation was beating the drum pushing for its passage.

Essential, we were told, as a means of keeping the greedy lawyers at bay while opening the doors for a new golden age of GA with more than 2000 new piston aircraft a year being promised by Cessna alone.

And so Congress passed GARA and the President signed it. The law of the land now generally cuts off the airframe and component manufacturers liability tail, meaning they cant be sued for personal injuries or death caused to GA aircraft occupants beyond 18 years fr…

Mapcomm Morass
Your recent article on color map navcomms is a bit nutty. Youd think that pilots are having lots of difficulty with failed radios and with getting lost. I doubt that these are even on the pilot-killing top-ten list.

The attitude gyro is a much more important and deadly problem. The Bonanza panel you show would never be the choice of a pilot who had lots of simulator experience with failed gyros and night IFR experience. Whats wrong?

The nav and com frequencies and setting knobs on the Apollo and GNS 430 are way too small to see and use.

The moving maps are too far out of the sight line and too small to be useful on an approach. The giant turn co…

Journalists who have covered wars have a saying: The first casualty is the truth. The same can be said of squabbles between customers and companies who try to sell them things, something we see a lot of around here.

As part of Aviation Consumers charter to its readers, we find ourselves as a neutral third party in many of these disputes. I wish I could say that being a referee is fun and rewarding but the fact of the matter is that its neither. But as the old clich goes, someones got to do it.

Fairness dictates that we listen to both sides of the sad story and try to draw some kind of conclusion that will prove useful to our readers. Very often, these disagreements degrade to finge…

Diamond Star
I enjoyed reading your review of Diamonds new DA40 Star in the May issue. It was interesting to read your review side-by-side with the one in AOPA Pilot.

Your perceptions appeared to be 180 degrees apart on entry/exit ease, stall behavior and landing characteristics. Left me wondering whether you had flown the same airplane. In my view you missed the most glaring ergonomic faux pas in the Star cockpit, the stick. If they had gone with a side stick, or at least a yoke, that would have been fine. But that between-your-legs stick is a deal killer right there.

Despite its sleek appearance, the DA40 is neither a Pitts nor an Extra, its a travelling machine…

[IMGCAP(1)]If the Zen of abstract needles and steam-driven gyros is your idea of a good time, the emerging GA cockpit may soon be a disappointment. The flight-deck-as-video-game concept that NASA has been flogging for the past decade seems about to come true.

At this years EAA AirVenture bash in Oshkosh, we saw the first workable version of a highway-in-the-sky virtual reality 3D display. Never mind that some ankle biter broke the thing with a series of impromptu aileron rolls and a software glitch or two hobbled the systems higher features, we were impressed.

Lots of Color
This system-called SmartDeck-is no breadboard college engineering project. No lesser than BFGoodric…

[IMGCAP(1)]How are these guys gonna do this? Eclipse CEO Vern Raburn has more than 5000 hours of flight time and has owned 30 aircraft. He joined Microsoft shortly after its start-up and has been a senior exec at both Symantec and Lotus Development. We recently interviewed Raburn seeking more detail on Eclipses plans.

Youve been quoted as saying for the past several decades, the managers in the GA industry have been in zombie mode, with no innovation and no risk taken. But what about recent products such as the Lancair Columbia and the Cirrus SR20?

The industry has been in survival mode, with the exception of avionics. Its only because of companies like Garmin and…

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When light aircraft production took its final serious nosedive in the mid-1980s, the die was cast for engine overhaul shops and for Lycoming and Continental. Until then, the two engine makers had been happy building motors for new airplanes.

The Great Downturn changed the rules. With only a trickle of new airframes coming into the market, Lycoming and Continental sought new business from the only source available: Overhaul work.

This has proven a mixed blessing for aircraft owners. It has brought unprecedented competition to the overhaul market, putting downward pressure on prices, especially for new cylinders.

On the other hand, factory competition has driven many f…