Other than having to write big checks, one of the toughest things about aircraft upgrades, including avionics retrofits and paint work, is dealing with the downtime. Shops tend to be optimistic in estimating completion times when trying to close the sale. And when it’s finally time to fly, expect some debugging, tweaking and maybe a […]
I’d say the trip is off to a bad start when you pull the cover off the airplane and slide into the cabin only to find holes in the panel and a bunch of empty mounting racks in the radio stack. After a few seconds the sickening reality sinks in: Somebody lifted your high-priced avionics. […]
Whether it’s cars, motorcycles or airplanes, enough dough can make anything like-new again. But if you have classic cars in your hangar (and I know a lot of you do—keep the pics coming, I love old stuff) you know that a restored ‘59 Vette won’t be a practical daily traveler. But classic airplanes can be, […]
We recently showed a piece of B-roll that shows a later-model Garmin Perspective+ equipped Cirrus on a night visual approach with a windshield full of red-over-red VASI and an approaching dark tree line underneath. There are a bunch of things going on in that six-second clip worth talking about, besides its muddy image quality that […]
Whether it’s traveling or kicking around home base I get asked that a lot lately. And it’s often from longtime airplane owners tired of shelling out retirement bucks to feed an old Bonanza or Cessna 180, especially for avionics upgrades, plus buyers are still recovering from the ADS-B buy-in. Non-TSO (but STC’d) gear has lowered […]
I remember the drill like it was yesterday. Self-announce the 45-degree entry to downwind by shouting into the Telex hand mic, stow the Telex mic between the knees, power back, carb heat on and work in some flaps as the cabin speaker in the old Cessna 150 screeched with garbled combined radio calls from every Unicom within a 100-mile range. Those were the bad old days of flying without headsets, of course. Then I stepped up a layer in the food chain and blew my college partying wad on a David Clark headset and never looked back. I think my first model was the company’s H10-30-you know, the set with the signature green domes, shiny mic boom and clamping pressure higher than a college-age teenager on a Friday night.
It’s the airplanes with the first-generation fuel selectors you want to be cautious of. In August 2019 the FAA issued an airworthiness concern sheet (ACS) that requests PA-28 owners and operators of first-gen fuel selectors (these are the round, flat-plate selector assemblies installed in the lower sidewall) to provide operational input. It wants to know if operators have mistakenly selected the Off position instead of the intended Left or Right Tank position. It could turn into an AD.
One of the biggest gotchas with major upgrades-and it doesn’t matter if it’s avionics retrofits or airframe and engine mods-is not keeping the system current with the latest software and hardware mods. These may come in the way of service bulletins, software bulletins and service letters. At the least, you may not be taking advantage of a system or its interface to its fullest, but more serious is doing nothing, potentially leaving you vulnerable to an inflight failure. That’s what FAA ADs are for, of course, but they (sometimes, not always) don’t always occur until something crashes or comes close to crashing.
At AirVenture I was looking at the new Garmin GPS 175 to replace my old GNS 430. The Garmin rep told me there was a nice rebate available if I traded my GNS 430 for a new GTN-series navigator-something like $4000 toward the GTN. I asked what they were doing with the trade-ins and he said they refurbished them and sold them, but I’m guessing not in the U.S. I asked if that meant that Garmin was continuing to support the GNS 430W and he said absolutely.
Priced at $5330, the KI300 has a backup battery for powering the display for up to one hour, has speed and altitude tapes (which can be turned off) and can be installed as the primary (or backup) attitude indicator as long as the airspeed and altimeter indicators are retained. The initial STC includes the Piper PA46 series, but the company said a wide variety of approvals will follow within weeks. I found the instrument to have a decent display, plus it has a stone-simple feature set.
These are often first-time vendors invited to set up shop in the AirVenture Innovations Showcase building at Oshkosh. I like spending time there because it’s a good place to shoot. The lighting is good, it’s relatively cool and it’s the launching ground for products that are a little different than the ones around Boeing Plaza. Some make only one appearance at the show, but others have enough momentum to come back for more. That was the case with Opener Aero, which was the attention getter last year with its BlackFly ultralight.
I wish you guys ran that digital fuel sensor article (August 2019 Aviation Consumer) last year when I committed to a JPI big-screen engine monitor for my aging Cessna 206. I was already at the threshold of my budget when I pulled the trigger on the engine monitor job, which of course included fuel quantity to replace the bouncing Cessna OEM gauges. After consultation with the shop manager, I could tell that using the existing senders would be a roll of the dice, so we ended up sending them away for a rebuild.
