Safety

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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…

Its New Years eve 2000, the dawn of the great millennium and youve been tooling around the city sky line watching all the swell fireworks.

After you land back at homebase the taxiway lights suddenly flicker and go black, you get momentarily lost and chop up several light stanchions, hurling blue glass into the crisp night air. Damn, you mutter; Im in for an engine teardown.

So you call your insurance agent at home on New Years morning and report the bad news. No problem, he says, hell call you on Monday with claim information. Unfortunately, when Monday rolls around, the news gets worse. Youre not covered.

Turns out the taxiway lights were controlled by an airport computer th…

In her article on The Great GA Sell Job in your November issue, Joan Perkins did a great job. Her report brings to mind our own experience with Sunrise Aviation in Tucson, Arizona more than 10 years ago, which underscores her experience exactly.

Sunrise Aviation was started by Two wonderful and talented flight instructors who were long on training skills but short on business experience. My wife, Jacqui and I became acquainted with them over the leaseback of our first airplane.

The first time the instructors approached us about investing in the flight school, we declined. The business got worse and the lease was in renegotiation when they approached us the second time. We a…

For those of us in the market for aircraft insurance, it is, as they say in the classics, the best of times and the worst of times.

Fueled by a robust economy, the markets are brimming with capital to underwrite everything flyable. And yet, many buyers and brokers are finding the coverage they want hard or impossible to come by.

One of the longest periods of post-war prosperity shows signs of continuing into the next millennium. As a result, pilots are buying their first airplanes in relatively large numbers and even more are moving up to bigger and faster models, often when they lack the experience to do so, at least in the insurers eyes.

General aviation manufacturers a…

Its a given that a large deficiency in GA training is the lack of nuts-and-bolts mechanical information. Weve all seen pilots-student and otherwise-pre-flighting, checklist in hand, without a clue of what to look for.

Owners in particular have an incentive to fill in these chuck holes on the road of knowledge, especially after the first couple of annual invoices, which appear to be executed in Sanskrit, except for all the zeros.

We recently attended one of the Cessna Pilots Associations two-day seminars and found it to be a useful, cost-effective method for an owner/pilot to address this knowledge gap. CPA was founded in 1984 by John Frank, former director of the American Bonan…

A fighter jock can be forgiven for sniffing at the shallow inadequacies of general aviation pilot training: It takes but 60 to 80 hours to graduate from witless passenger to certified aviator, the briefest flash of time that necessarily ignores much of what a pilot should-or would like-to know.

One aspect of training that gets short shrift-okay, no shrift-is crash survival, specifically ditching. Military aviators endure a grueling, soggy dose of this training, both in dunker tanks and occasionally in live water exercises. GA pilots, on the other hand, are referred to section 6 of the Aeronautical Information Manual and told to have a nice day.

Recognizing this, several companies o…

Although the recent demise of IFT-Pro might suggest otherwise, the market for computer-based IFR training and practice software is alive and well. Hardly a week goes by without a reader phoning or e-mailing for recommendations.

And have you looked at the prices of these things lately? Capabilities that used to cost several hundred dollars are now available for around a C-note.

Last time we looked at these programs, our focus was on the sort of instrument practice programs the average pilot would find useful and affordable, which eliminated all of the bona fide PCATDs. Well do the same this time. Obviously, weve kicked out a slew of self-proclaimed flight simulators which are b…

Last month, we reviewed the three big name IFR flight sims,Aviation Teachwares ELITE, ASAs On Top and Jeppesens FlitePro. Among these, no hands down winner emerged, at least for buyers shopping for a sim program for IFR brush up.

Each had distinct advantages and disadvantages, depending on your budget, training preferences and hardware. Hearing some favorable comments about some impressive game programs-thats right, games-we decided to take a look.

Despite being spring loaded to the dismissive position because ofthe toy connection, we came away convinced that, for some buyers, these are a solid, cost effective choice. Youll need a heavy duty machine, however, including a…

As with most things in life, the paper part of aviation training can be at best tedious and at worst onerous and just plain wrong. In a perfect world, all ground school instruction would be cheap, conducted by enthusiastic and qualified teachers at times and locations which don’t interfere with frenetic schedules and Santa Claus would be real.

In your dreams. Realizing this, scads of vendors have developed PC-based instructional software intended to provide a reasonable simulacrum of aviation nirvana. We don’t pretend we looked at all of them but what follows is tour-the-horizon view of some major players.

Simple Test Prep
At their most basic, this variety of ground…

Even if youre not one of those dotcom zillionaires, if you own a moderately expensive airplane, youve probably accumulated a nice tidy cache of wealth youd like to retain for your retirement years.

Owning an airplane, however, puts that wealth at risk. One of the biggest problems to face aircraft owners in recent years is the lack of higher limits of liability coverage beyond the run-of-the-mill million bucks, a sum thats chump change by modern insurance standards.

This is an expensive problem for pilots transitioning into bigger airplanes, but it plagues everyone who needs significant limits of liability, including people who have owned the same airplane for years.

Why It H…