Safety

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…

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To hear the old heads tell it, back in the mid-1970s training boom, you could hardly find a spot in the airport parking lot, it was so jammed with students cars. (They didnt drive BMWs back then.)

Could happen again, we suppose. Student pilot starts are on the rise, sharpening the perennial dilemma that FBOs and flightschools face: Whats the best primary trainer?

Twenty years ago, it was either the Warrior or the Cessna 152 and although thats still true in the 90s, those airframes are tired. There are no new 152s and a new Warrior is too pricey to be an FBO trainer. New 172s are being bought by flight academies but havent found a wide market among Mom and Pop FBOs…

It was time for the annual. Again. During the 13 months since the last inspection, Id flown my 1968 Bonanza V35A fewer than 35 hours and although little had broken in that time, I wanted to keep my costs down without compromising safety.

Clearly, that would mean an owner-assisted annual, which I had done when I bought the airplane three years before. That annual was part of the pre-purchase inspection and it was thorough and meticulous.

Being a hands-on guy-one of my hobbies is restoring antique cars-Ive always done all of the maintenance allowed under FAR Part 43.3 right out on the ramp, weather permitting. But could an annual be done on the ramp, too? I had my doubts. But th…

As much as we loathe using clichs, we can think of one that describes the current aircraft insurance market: There’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that more companies are vying for business in a relatively flat market and financial markets are flush with cash. That puts downward pressure on rates, which owners will find agreeable.

The bad news is that virtually all of those companies have abandoned the option of writing high-limit coverage. These days, $1 million smooth is the max liability youre likely to see. That may be a non-issue for private owners but for anyone operating an aircraft for business use, the coverage squeeze is on.

Market Reshaped
For o…