Safety

The depressing drone of bad economic news yielded one little nugget that especially caught the attention of many owners last month: AIG, the insurance giant, was overleveraged and on the ropes. Deemed too big to allow to fail, the federal government engineered a hasty bailout package that has since ballooned in cost. What does this have to do with the AIG policy on your Skyhawk? Or your USAIG policy on your Bonanza? Is the insurance business about to tank along with the stock market? Not exactly, but thats not the same as saying AIGs well-regarded aviation insurance division hasnt been nicked by the credit crisis. It has, but only as a result of a general loss of confidence in certain businesses in general. For a detailed report on this, click on the podcast link at right, which appears on our sister publication, www.avweb.com. In that audio segment-no MP3 player required, by the way-you can hear an explanation from our aviation insurance guru, Jon Doolittle.

Emergency locator transmitters (ELTs) are one piece of equipment airplane owners love to hate. They don’t work very we’ll and they always seem to need replacement batteries. Beginning next year, the government will cease satellite monitoring of 121.5 MHz ELTs, making what didnt work that we’ll to begin with instantly all but useless. Rather than invest as much as $4000 in a new 406 MHz ELT, one option owners have asked us about is carrying one of the new 406 MHz, GPS-enhanced portable locator beacons or PLBs. Theyre relatively inexpensive, have a good record thus far and can do double duty as an ELT and a rescue-me beacon for the car, the boat or outdoor activities of all kinds. While this makes sense, there are some limitations. Read on.

The long-awaited age of the VLJ has begun. The Eclipse 500 and the Cessna 510 Mustang are the vanguard of the new movement. Eclipse is now building almost one new jet airplane each work day. Cessna delivered 45 airplanes in 2007 and is ramping up to build two Mustangs a week. There are already close to 200 VLJs out there. By this time next year that number will have more than doubled, and soon other manufacturers will be swelling the ranks of Jet-A consumers. One of the looming worries for VLJ builders and potential owner-pilots is what the cost of insuring these jets will be, or if it will be available at all for budding jet pilots.

We sometimes think that another word for hypoxia ought to be denial or, at the very least, the phrase “false sense of well-being” should morph to “self-delusion.” In the aviation press, we have beaten the hypoxia topic to a pink pulp, because it lends itself so readily to the pointing of a boney finger at the profoundly stupid things pilots sometimes do. In this regard, hypoxia is the multi-headed beast-we can be dumb about ignoring its dangers, dumb about ignoring training meant to mitigate the risk and really dumb when it actually happens. And how often is that? We don’t really know, because even if an accident is caused by hypoxia, the post-mortem may offer only speculative conclusions. In many GA accidents, the true cause may drift downwind with the smoke from the wreckage simply because light aircraft forensics are so inadequate.

For aviation insurers, its the best of times and the worst of times. In many traditional parts of the aircraft insurance market, an overabundance of capital and new insurers is forcing premiums-especially those for corporate airplanes-down to new lows. At the same time, buyers are snapping up new airplanes of all sizes faster than manufacturers can build them. And the two new market areas of the decade, Very Light Jets and Light Sport Aircraft, are beginning to take off.In some ways, Light Sport Airplanes are an insurers dream. If the glass-half-full guys are even remotely right, there will be shoals of them. And from an underwriters viewpoint, theyre attractive because they have what insurers call “low severity.” Severity is essentially the average cost of an accident.

Heres a surprising statistic: Of the just under 600,000 pilots listed on the FAAs records 90,000-or about one in six-are flight instructors. How many actually actively teach? Probably under 50 percent, but instructor certificates are perishable items and the poor slugs who own them must renew them every 24 months. There are various ways to do this, but the most popular seems to be the flight instructor refresher clinic, or FIRC. For decades, these courses meant a three-day weekend sitting in a stuffy conference room with a bunch of other renewing CFIs in a ritual butt-numbing marathon. The dawn of the internet brought the option of grinding through 16 hours of online training sitting alone in front of a computer. All the drudgery without the camaraderie. Aint technology grand? But are these courses any good? Are they even tolerable? We looked at courses offered by American Flyers, Gleim Publications and a collaboration between Jeppesen and AOPA. Each approaches the online challenge differently, but they can be compared in three key areas: content, organization and price.

In the days before even modest sedans had six airbags, vehicle sniffing radar and kiddie seats that could double as nuclear containment devices, car guy Lee Iacocca once famously said safety doesnt sell, style does. Four decades later, in the airplane realm, safety apparently does sell, given the success of Cirrus with its full-airplane parachute system.

If you fly for fun or for a living and you have shopped for life insurance, you probably heard the agent draw a breath when he learned you were a pilot. If you fly, you pay more for life insurance. A lot more. My own experience in buying life insurance is typical. After asking my age, weight, whether I smoked and a number of other health-related questions, the agent quoted me the companys most attractive rates, with all the appropriate disclaimers.

Like everyone else in general aviation, we often pine for the technology thats standard equipment in cars. But for reasons related to economics and the federal government, these take their time trickling down to little airplanes. One of these technologies is airbag restraint systems.

Nothing is more basic to aircraft and automotive safety than seatbelts. But it took the FAA awhile to figure that out. It wasnt until 1978 that the FAA required all pilot and co-pilot seats to have lap belts and shoulder harnesses. After 1988, all cabin seats were required to have shoulder restraints.

Like the old saw about getting to Carnegie Hall, the only way to master the Garmin G1000 is practice, practice, practice. If youre a sometime user of this system or new to it entirely, youre wasting good money if you show up for your G1000 flights unprepared.

Our trials revealed that all three perform well. But you’ll need to train and practice to handle them we’ll in a real emergency.