Misc

[IMGCAP(1)]Aircraft owners are a restless lot, forever casting about for the one upgrade, gadget or gizmo that will render their airplanes truly perfect.

Leading the list of upgradeable rides is the venerable Cessna 182. Although more dowager than doxy, what the Skylane lacks in sex appeal is more than offset among its devotes by its comfort, useful load, ease of maintenance and all but complete lack of pilot-humbling quirk.

Skylanes tend to be the defensive linemen of light singles; large, powerful and relatively slow. Consequently, its not surprising that there’s something of a cottage industry aimed at souping up and cleaning up the Cessna 182. The typical Skylane is a poster…

Last summers EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh saw the introduction of a number of advanced, third- and fourth-generation ANR headsets.

The Bose Aviation Headset X created quite a stir, being a radical lightweight design purported to perform better than the market-leading Series II.

LightSPEED introduced its 25K, primarily a technological upgrade on the 20K, with expectations that it would equal Bose in performance.

DRE Communications introduced the 6000enr, a conventional-looking David Clark-type design. And last, Peltor rolled out the Model 1750 Stratosphere, returning to the ANR market after a long absence.

Vaporware?
In whats fast becoming an annoying habit amon…

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During those first few hours of flight training, when it was still iffy whether youd be better off to forget flying and buy golf clubs, you probably got some gruff advice on logbooks. From an FBO counter selection of exactly one, your CFI probably grunted, Here, buy this.

Each page completed and carefully totaled thereafter was its own little milestone and its great fun to flip back through those pages, no matter how far down the airway youve traveled since.

Paper logbooks arent treasured, however, when youre filling out the application for the private or instrument checkride and you just cant get the subcategories to add up to the totals. The odd misplaced dec…

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Whats the biggest fixed cost associated with owning an airplane? Insurance, you guess? Not!

For most of us who have leveraged ourselves to the hilt to slip Earths surly bonds, the interest that we pay the bank is our biggest cost, although we hardly notice it.

If you borrow $3,000,000 to finance one of Cessnas nifty CitationJets, your interest cost will run you around $700 per day. So who cares how much fuel the airplane uses? But even if youre only borrowing enough to cover the last $100,000 of your used Beech Bonanza, your note will probably cost you around $1200 per month.

The good news is that interest rates are the lowest theyve been in many years and…

[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…

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…

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…

[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…