Not surprisingly, when youre about to fly an airplane with more than enough torque and P-factor to roll you inverted in a heartbeat, malicious stall behavior and the ability to blow through the 250-KIAS-under-10,000-foot speed limit and laugh, the FAA and insurers are going to have something to say about it.
Ive turned down rides in cool warbirds and open-cockpit aerobats because once I got pretty sick doing aerobatics-and I was the one on the controls. For me, the rotten experience makes the ReliefBand therapeutic watch worth the $95.
With some new flagship piston singles flirting with the $1 million mark, its logical that qualified buyers are eyeballing the entry-level turboprop single market. That could give Texas-based Evolution Aircraft (previously Lancair, before it was sold last summer) more opportunity to sell its Evolution Turboprop experimental airplane kits. If you think the average new Cirrus, Cessna TTx or Mooney owner doesnt have time to build an airplane, you may be right. But building an Evolution isn’t like building a typical homebuilt in the garage.
Weve long urged aircraft owners to retrofit shoulder harnesses for all seats of their airplanes if at all possible. The simple reason is that a restraint system that keeps your head and upper torso from smacking into the instrument panel or seat in front of you during an accident sequence is the single most effective mod you can make to your airplane to radically increase the chance of everyone aboard surviving an accident.
There are good reasons to make oxygen available at altitudes less than those recommended by the FAA. Face it, unless youre using a pulse oximeter on every flight (we certainly don’t when flying at lower altitudes), you don’t really know how your physiology is reacting on a given day. We think blood oxygen saturation is an important biometric to keep on top of.
Back in the day-as in 1939-the Ercoupe was designed to be exceptionally safe by making it resistant to stalls and spins. But the airplane racked up a number of firsts, including being the first successful production GA airplane that had a nosewheel, plus a fully cowled engine. This contributed to more speed than most of its counterparts had. Better yet, an Ercoupe can handle a crosswind of twice the velocity that can be dealt with by almost any other airplane.
Weve been following the debate over the existence of a pilot shortage with some interest. We think that one piece of evidence has shoved the needle to the Yep, there is one side of the scale so definitively that the debate is over: Flight schools are actively recruiting flight instructors and paying them a living wage. In some cases flight schools are also offering hiring bonuses.
When L-3 introduced the Lynx NGT9000 multifunction ADS-B transponder in 2015, we nearly dismissed it for all but the highest-end applications. With a starting price that put it we’ll north of ten grand, the NGT9000 seemed like a questionable investment for buyers looking for an affordable path to ADS-B compliance.
I read Larry Anglisanos commentary about BasicMeds altitude restriction in the April 2017 Aviation Consumer. I can only think that restricting BasicMed pilots to altitudes below 18,000 feet is related to limiting them to less complicated aircraft and not the altitude itself. Perhaps the FAA just doesnt want jet pilots flying around with BasicMed certification and while I don’t agree, I think we are lucky to have gotten what we did.
Lets get this out of the way, shall we? Cirrus salespeople arent apologetic that a fully loaded 2017 SR22T GTS comes with an eye-widening invoice north of $900,000 when you tack on an extended warranty. Cirrus offers less expensive models, of course, but the turbocharged SR22T is the most popular seller. Just how many buyers would spend nearly $1 million for an unpressurized piston single, you might ask? More than you might think.
I read the article on owning and maintaining classic and antique aircraft in the March 2017 issue of Aviation Consumer and can certainly relate to the challenges of keeping these old birds. Ours wasnt quite as exotic as your examples-we had a polished 1949 Beech A35 Bonanza-but even with the benefit of continuous production, parts were occasionally a challenge.
The FAAs recently announced BasicMed rule drew cheers from owners and pilots, but there’s still confusion about what effect it will have on the industry and worry that non-AME doctors wont sign off on the FAAs new medical checklist. At press time, the FAA had published a draft of the checklist in AC 68-1 and although BasicMed wont be available until May 1, 2017, the AC serves as a template for pilots to convince non-AME docs to sign the approval.
