Uncategorized

As terrific as on-airport cafés and crew cars are, there are plenty of times a few inconvenient miles separate the airport from your real destination. A bicycle small and light enough to carry with you could make all the difference in multiplying your aircraft’s utility. The good news is that the recent surge of interest in biking has brought several more folding bike options onto the market. We’ll just look at compact folding bikes—small wheels and frames to minimize space and weight. There are also full-size folding bikes that we may look at in a later issue.

Airplanes, like people, often start out being one thing but as they age, they become something else entirely. And so it is with Cessna’s now-venerable Caravan that began life as an unglamorous box hauler that few would ever see on the ramp in daylight. It then became a niche utility airplane for the bush, capable of hauling not just the fisherman, but their camp and a couple of boats, too. Of late, it’s finding yet another niche as a short-haul commuter airplane.

We’re not exactly big on heaping kudos on products that don’t exist. On the other hand, we know an exceptional idea when we see one and at least a couple of those are trickling out of tiny little Pipistrel Aircraft in Slovenia, thus we are picking Pipistrel as our company of the year for its innovation and creativity in aircraft design.

During the summer of 1968—and I’ll date myself here a little—I was putting the finishing touches on my first car. It was a 1956 Chevy rodded up with a 283, fuel-injection pistons, a Duntov cam, a 411 rear—the works. I could never get the fueling right and as was the custom in those days, I kept throwing carburetors at the problem until in a fit of supreme pathetic excess, I borrowed a friend’s Edelbrock manifold mounted with three two-barrel Holly carbs. That did it. It also yielded gas mileage of about 8 MPG which, even in the days of 28-cent-a-gallon gas, was unsustainable on my summer-job salary. My next car was a Volkswagen. An economist would call this price elasticity response, but I called it sanity.

I had the ACF-50 corrosion treatment applied to my 1978 Piper Seneca II in 1991, and there is still a bit of weeping around rivets to this day. Maybe it was applied too heavily. Had a fuel bladder replaced in 2000, and there were no signs of corrosion in the wing. I purchased the aircraft brand new in 1978, and it has always been based within 6 miles of salt water and has flown hundreds of hours at or below 1500 feet AGL over salt water as a Coast Guard Auxiliary aircraft, but always hangared.

It’s fair to say the entire foundation of the GA industry was built on the back of the dowdy Cessna 150 and 152. But even the newest of these airframes date to aviation’s Jurassic age. Some in the industry thought the light sport wave would fill the need for new airframes as the old 150s and 172s become uneconomical to operate. To a degree, that has happened, but the wave has been more of a ripple than a tsunami. LSA sales have been modest at best and these airplanes have proven more kite-like than even the venerable Piper Cub. Flight schools have found LSA economics less attractive than was originally thought and maintaining an old Cessna is just more profitable.

The iPad cockpit revolution has been slow to incorporate data-link weather. Many iPad fliers take their downloaded weather from the FBO and work with that, what 3G they can get in the air and calls to Flight Service. Datalink weather for the iPad via ADS-B has actually been around for a while (“Portable ADS-B WX,” May 2011 Aviation Consumer), but limited coverage and limited pilot acceptance has mean limited equipage. Now that Baron Services, who supplies the XM weather service to XM/Sirius, has entered the iPad age with their Mobile Link will datalink sweep the iPad universe?

For the moment, let’s set aside the vulgar discussion of money and consider whether turbine aircraft are all they’re claimed to be. Well, of course they are. Case closed. Turbines are faster than piston-engine aircraft, fly higher and since all the engines’ moving parts are always rotating in the same direction, they’re generally more reliable. Moreover, the owner of a turbine aircraft is untroubled by that pesky problem of whether a high-octane fuel will be available and what it will cost. There’s no argument that Jet A is the world fuel of the future and it’s available in parts of the world where high-octane avgas has long since disappeared.

Mag compasses live hard lives. They bake in the sun-splashed heat of the windscreen. They sustain endless amounts of airframe vibration, which not only makes them a challenge to read with accuracy but also contributes to ultimate failure. You probably don’t think much about the compass in your aircraft until it spews its fluid all over the instrument panel and you realize FAR 91.205 requires you to fix it. Replacement options are slim and while a vertical card model is considered a step above the traditional whiskey design, installation technique is critical, and surprisingly expensive.

If there’s anything surprising about light sport airplanes, it’s that there isn’t much surprising about light sport airplanes. Bolt a 100-HP Rotax to a 750-pound airframe and you get something that climbs about 500 FPM, cruises about 110 knots and ranges to 500 miles. Will that be high wing or low wing? Amidst this calm sea of sameness, does opportunity lurk? Renegade Aircraft, a small startup you’ve probably never heard of, thinks so. Renegade is marketing an upscale, sporty LSA that represents the sharp wedge of handful of LSAs powered not by Rotax, but by Lycoming’s new O-233 engine.

Two of the tenets of good habit formation is that you give people a motivator to do the right thing, and you make it easy to do so. Up until the fall of 2010, the Aeronav Services branch of the FAA could have been a poster child for building good pilot habits on keeping current with airport, approach and charting data. Printed charts were available at virtually every FBO and digital charts were a free download for all.

One thing not emphasized in the article in the Cessna 150 is that the non-aerobatic 150 is a great little spin machine. The straight-tail models in particular are wonderful. William Kershner’s book describes how an extended spin will get going faster, then slower, then faster in a cycle. Climb up to 10,000 feet and you can demonstrate this for yourself. Given how long it takes to get that high, it’s not something you’ll do more than a couple of times, but it’s certainly educational. The straight tails will recover from the spin more or less on their own—I never quite had the nerve to let go of the controls and see if it’s completely true. But that doesn’t seem to be as true of the swept tails.