Safety

On the heels of the suspected decompression and hypoxia-related TBM900 crash that took the life of Larry Glazer, the president of the TBM Owners and Pilots Association, and his wife Jane Glazer, a non-pilot physician asked if there are onboard systems that monitor the health of a pilot’s body during flight. That got me thinking. With all of the available avionics integration, why not include body health monitoring in the interface? You know, important stuff like blood pressure, heart rate, pulse and of course oxygen saturation levels.

We stand on them, we ride them, we ignore them-and yet, fortunately, they rarely let us down. However, as good as brakes have become, their enemies are still neglect and corrosion, which can lead to that horrible feeling of nobodys home when you rock forward with your toes-followed shortly by the sounds of bending metal.

Despite an overall slow market, there is a steady growth in owner-flown turboprops and jets. TBM has no shortage of buyers for its hot new 900, Maibu owners are stepping up into JetProps and Meridians, Baron pilots are buying King Airs, Cirrus owners hold delivery slots for Vision SF50 jets, turboprop owners are looking at under $1 million price tags for nicely equipped Citation IIs and writing checks, and everyone seems to be salivating over Eclipses.

Goodness knows, there are a lot of ways we can spend money on improving our airplanes and plenty of folks who will promise us the moon in terms of performance or glitz or impressive panel displays. Many times the sales promotion includes a claim that the product makes the airplane safer. But which products do? New paint? Hardly. Glass panels? No proof, yet. Retrofit shoulder harness? You bet.

Life keeps getting in the way of flying. We know that the best way to keep our skills and judgment level high is to fly frequently and take recurrent training every six months—just like the pros. But with seven-dollar avgas, we certainly aren’t flying nearly as frequently as we would like, and few of us schedule recurrent training more often than required by the FARs.

in the Garmin GTN navigator owner survey (March 2013 Aviation Consumer), some respondents dinged the product for having a steep learning curve. Moreover, we heard from owners who took Garmin’s factory training course, commenting that it was too short—and fell short—when it came to mastering some of the subtleties of the system’s feature set.

Weight kept the whole-airplane parachute idea in the world of fantasy for the first 70 years of powered flight. It took a terrifying ride to earth aboard a broken hang glider and new materials technology to allow Boris Popov to found Ballistic Recovery Systems and develop a viable arrangement that could successfully deploy a parachute and lower an aircraft and its occupants to earth. BRS products (BRS, as “Systems,” is the company; as “System,” is the device) began saving lives in the ultralight world and expended successfully into FAR 23 airplanes with the Cirrus line and a retrofit for the Cessna 150/152. The number of lives saved as a result of BRS deployment is approaching 300, according to BRS company numbers. (Our research shows 48 deployments, of which 36 were “saves,” with 76 lives saved in Cirrus aircraft—most, but not all, of the other saves were in ultralights.)

It’s been over a decade since we last looked at aviation life rafts. While there have been noteworthy changes in the industry, numerous evolutionary improvements and some new offerings, it’s also a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Winslow still, in our opinion, offers the best rafts—you pay a premium, but we feel you get the value for your dollars.In this article, we’ll focus on the most commonly available two- to six-person life rafts from EAM Worldwide (EAM), Revere Supply Co. (Revere), Survival Products and Winslow LifeRaft Co. (Winslow). With a few exceptions, these life rafts are not certified in accordance with FAA TSO-C70a (we call them “non-approved”) and are generally significantly less expensive and often weigh considerably less than approved life rafts.

When we visited the Cirrus Aircraft factory in Duluth, Minnesota, last month, we couldn’t help notice the positive vibes that echo throughout the operation. There’s reason for boardroom fist pumps. Production slots for the new G5 SR22 are sold out through October, the SF50 Vision Jet is we’ll on the way toward certification and delivery in 2015, and the competition is struggling to sell half as many aircraft as Cirrus did last year. Cirrus built a total of 253 aircraft last year alone. Unlike other manufacturers, Cirrus doesn’t distribute aircraft to a dealer network, so production is based on customer orders.

You can retrofit instruments and avionics in your aircraft panel, so why not custom retrofit your own simulator to match the layout? That’s the concept behind the new Flight Training Cockpit Advanced Panel, which is sold by PilotMall.com. The tabletop simulator—which uses Saitek ProFlite electronic instruments, avionics and controls—allows for a custom layout, thanks to a modular and interchangeable design. The simulator’s instrument panel is made of 14-gauge steel and mimics a real panel, which even includes a glare shield.“We’ve been selling the Saitek flight training instruments and avionics panels for years, but customers have recently been asking for an easy way to mount the instruments to make the suite look and function like an actual aircraft panel,” said PilotMall’s Neil Glazer. The Advanced Training Cockpit is appealing to owners who might rearrange the instrument and avionics panel in their own aircraft and want to practice flying the new layout.

If you are flying a high-performance single, piston twin or turboprop, particularly if you use it for business trips, there is an increasing probability that you will get a notice from your insurer or employer requiring that you take annual recurrent training.

Ever since the price of personal pulse oximeters dropped out of the stratosphere, we’ve owned one because it is a fast and easy way check to see if we are at risk of doing something foolish because the lungs aren’t delivering enough oxygen to the brain. Now that the selection of pulse oximeters is confusingly large, with prices from about $25 to over $200, we decided to examine a cross section. We found that the lowest priced units worked pretty well, the others under $100 weren’t necessarily much better, and the most expensive was worth the money if you are going to be using it frequently, want a warranty and may subject it to a rough environment.