The main images show the busy view outside of Garmin’s King Air somewhere around Memphis cruising northwestbound, and how it looks on the GWX 70 Doppler weather radar. Plan your path through—we’ll come back to it later. ADS-B may pause an active radar upgrade decision for anything but twins and turbines, but radar is far […]
It’s happened. You’ve dreamed of this forever. You can finally afford to step up from the piston-pounders you’ve been flying into the world of owner-flown turbines. You’re excited as a puppy in a shoe closet. Yet, when you discuss the idea with some of your friends with aviation backgrounds you respect, they shift into making-noncommittal-comments-while-nodding-politely […]
We flock to airshows. Throughout the world, tens of millions annually descend on airports to watch pilots dance in almost unimaginable freedom in the sky. Watching soaring gymnastics on a grand scale has inspired aviators-to-be for over a century—and we’re lucky enough to be living in an age where the dream of pulling hard to […]
The bugaboo with today’s avionics upgrades is dealing with the sharp learning curve that tags along. It’s nothing new, and in my work on the shop level, I saw countless owners struggle with their new interfaces, and some almost became smoking craters because they didn’t know how to push the new buttons when workload got […]
As we’ve been reporting ad nauseam, the hardened aircraft insurance market is presenting challenges for aging pilots and even younger, inexperienced ones looking to step up to high-performance pistons and turbines. So when reader Keith Rosema reached out and asked for advice on picking the right insurance agent, we asked two highly experienced insurance pros […]
Getting a glider into the air is a community affair—assistance is required. While a launch can be carried out via a winch and a long cable or a car and a long cable, by far the most common method is to use an airplane and a 200-foot nylon rope to launch the sailplane. That means […]
You took advantage of some free time to go flying over the weekend. It had been almost two months since your last flight, so you took the rental 172 around the pattern nearly a dozen times and got the rust off of your crosswind landings. On the drive home you replayed the flight in your […]
For decades the ultimate airplane pilots dreamed of and strived to own was a piston twin—often either a Beech Baron or Cessna 310. Beech, Cessna and Piper worked to develop brand loyalty and provided incentives for owners of their piston singles to step up progressively through the ranks of higher performance singles until they could […]
Over the last year Sporty’s (www.sportys.com) has issued the first of what is to be a series of online training courses that go beyond the usual private, commercial and instrument rating training materials. The initial two were on aerobatics and featured the legendary Patty Wagstaff. We were impressed by the content and quality of the […]
It’s that tiny, niggling detail between you and the professional pilot job or you and the traveling machine that you’ve wanted for years—the multi-engine rating. It’s the schizophrenic rating—great because there’s no written test and awful because you’ll be shelling out a boatload of money every hour you fly the trainer. We surveyed the market […]
Like the rest of the piston-single resale market, good training airplanes are fetching top dollar, even ones that might have lived hard lives on a training line. Upgraded ones that were we’ll cared for in the hands of meticulous private owners sell for even more. Using the most current Winter 2020 Aircraft Bluebook as a […]
We are encouraged but cautious when we learn of impending entrepreneurship in the aviation world. We know that the odds of success for startups are not outstanding, but for those who do their homework and find the right niche, they improve. After all, we know that there is money in aviation—we put a lot of […]
