Safety

This group of six airplanes posts a similar safety record but engine failures among Mooneys and Commanders are a concern.

While most aviation insurers will survive the largest claims in history, expect rising premiums to cover the losses.

The sporty Tiger and Pipers Archer appear to be the standouts; the Skylane has the lowest fatal accident rate.

Some high-dollar gadgets don’t directly effect safety much. The best investment may be the most mundane: Training.

Its bad business for insurance companies to deny claims but occasionally they do it anyway.

The CO Guardian runs quietly on ships power and although its less prone to false alarms, we think its overpriced.

The Iceman detector sees the stuff form while Mid-Continents gauge shows icing potential. Both are worthy products.

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When we reviewed Comm1s radio communication training program in the March 2000 issue, we had a beef: It included only a few full-route clearance scenarios, in addition to the occasional amended clearance. Now we know why.

Far from being an oversight, the folks at Multimedia Software withheld significant clearance practice from their IFR communications training CD (which lists for $120) because they were planning to market a follow-on product called Clearances on Request.

Like the earlier product, this is a computer-based training aid of the sort thats becoming standard in the flight and even airline training realm. It has up to 10 hours of training on nothing but AT…

If the party is all but over on Wall Street, the crowd may soon be thinning noticeably in the aviation insurance biz.

After more than a decade of competitive rates for aircraft owners, nearly everyone in the insurance business is talking about the latest hard market. What that means, simply, is that premiums are rising and you’ll have to jump through more hoops to get the coverage you want.

Why? Complex reasons, really, but a leading factor is that underwriters have been suffering significant losses and many havent seen much if any profits. Further, the big underwriters are consolidating into fewer yet bigger companies, something that doesnt bode we’ll for competition.

Its no…

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Anyone affluent enough to own an airplane didnt get that way by wasting time, thus the FAAs written licensing exams are supremely galling. Populated by too many dreary, pointless questions that have little connection to real-world flying, the writtens are potholes on the road to actually learning to fly.

The GA training industry has risen to the challenge, producing self-help courses on video, computer and audio tape media sharply focused on little but a passing grade. The latest-and the most impressive-are interactive computer offerings for the instrument rating by Jeppesen and King Schools. The latter has also released a new CD-ROM-based IFR flight training system in pa…

Sometimes its called due diligence. Some brokers consider it research or homework. To most would-be buyers, its little more than paging through a stack of records and notations that may, at times, be incomprehensible.

Whatever you call it, an exhaustive review of an airplanes logbooks is the only way you have to separate the sellers tall claims and promises from reality. This should be obvious.

Yet time and again, anxious buyers gloss over this task or skip it entirely. Nine times out of 10, theyre lucky; no undue surprises develop. But more than a few owners could have avoided buying uneconomic wrecks if theyd just examined the logs more carefully and asked a few question…

American Eagle Insurance Co., the flagship of the American Eagle Group and the erstwhile official insurance company of the AOPA, slipped gurgling beneath the waves as it went into receivership late last year. The company had been under the conservatorship of the Texas state insurance department since the preceding July.

Most of its customers have found shelter elsewhere-either with other companies or through fronting arrangements with other underwriters. The large unanswered question, however, is whether Eagle will be able to pay claims relating to incurred-but-not-filed losses. We suspect that in this regard, some customers may come up short.

American Eagle and predecessor, A, had…