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There are few personal airplanes that can deliver both mission utility and attention-getting nostalgia. The venerable Cessna 195 Businessliner is one of them. Cessna named it the Businessliner because it was, well, a business aircraft.But it was not the first business aircraft by a long shot. It is probably the most practical of classics because it is a good traveling airplane that will not cripple you to keep it maintained. It is all-metal and has good parts availability, unlike such machines as the Beech Staggerwing, Spartan Executive and Stinson Reliant. It is the link between the poorly harmonized, high adverse yaw radial-engine classics of the 1930s with the feet-on-the floor machines of today, carrying on only the adverse yaw.Many vintage aircraft are indeed works of art, but the 195 is actually a practical classic. One owner refers to his 195 as a Cessna 206 that gets preferred parking at the fly-in breakfasts.A direct descendant of the 1934 C-34 Airmaster, the C-190 series represents a lot of Cessna heritage-it was the first all-metal Cessna, and the last Cessna to be built with a radial engine.When you arrive on the ramp in a 195, heads turn. Best of all, 195s are relatively affordable to buy and support. For the pilot who is on the ball, they can be relatively easy to fly.

As we researched this article, we heard about a turboprop owner who was renting a single-pilot jet. When asked how he was insuring the jet, he said that he paid a lot of money for insurance on his turboprop and it had better cover him in the jet. He then got concerned and called his broker. Fortunately, his particular policy covered him when he was flying other airplanes-but thats not always the case. If youre going to rent a jet, making sure that appropriate insurance coverage is in place is a huge part of the deal.

No airplane is perfect for 100 percent of its owners missions. Its long been common for, say, a pilot who owns a Cessna 150 to rent an Archer when more capability is needed. Weve also seen owners trade up into the class of airplane theyve been renting-the rental process having allowed them to get to know the more capable airplane and the experience theyd gained helped in buying insurance.

My airplane partner and I are upgrading the radios in our piston single to bring them into the present century and to comply with the ADS-B mandate. After much thought and discussion, we decided on Avidynes IFD540 box you reviewed in the March issue. Avidynes AeroPlan extended warranty plan offers a free warranty extension for three years. However, to get the extension, we have to sign a Waiver, Release and Indemnification document that could bankrupt us.

Utility airplanes occupy an interesting market niche. Like any other airplane, they take off and land, cruise at altitude, carry a payload and offer some creature comforts. Naturally, just about any spam-can does that and probably can do it faster, more economically and with more pampering of the pilot and passengers. But unlike most other airplanes, utility airplanes are optimized to use short, unimproved fields without drama or damage, carry lots of stuff, require little maintenance and be field-repairable, just a few of the features with which the typical tricycle-gear, all-metal single has trouble.

You wouldnt install a used oil filter on a new or overhauled engine, would you? Of course you wouldnt, and for the same reason, you shouldnt reconnect the oil cooler without replacing it, or at least having it properly serviced. Often one of the most neglected components under the cowling, the oil cooler on your engine could be in desperate need of servicing, even if its not begging for attention by dribbling oil on the hangar floor. Luckily, there are relatively inexpensive replacement and overhaul options that might provide insurance against premature engine wear. Lets have a look.

When youre traveling and want to rent a car, so long as youre 25 or older, have a drivers license and a credit card, its a piece of cake. But for airplanes, almost without exception, the reality has been that if you want to do some flying while away from home base, you have to go through the local FBO or flight schools checkout to rent one of its aircraft. That means at least two or three hours and $300 before you can take the family for a ride-a pretty daunting obstacle.

To gain sizable amounts of speed and efficiency, you’ll generally have to fly in the mid to upper teens and higher. And to do that, you’ll have to make a choice: stick an oxygen hose (or mask) in your nose or pay for the convenience of pressurization. Due to market demand and high production costs, the choices for single-engine models are limited to Cessnas P210 and the Piper Malibu.Pressurizing anything, let alone a single, is fraught with difficulty. Part of it comes in the form of mechanical woes-the engines are short-lived, often don’t make it to TBO and they cost a lot to overhaul. Pressurization adds another complex system to maintain and operate. Part of it comes in mundane problems: separate, unpressurized baggage compartments and the need to fit everything that goes into the cabin through the pilots door. Then, of course, there’s the extra premium in first place: as of winter 2015, a 1981 P210 costs about $25,000 more than a 1981 T210.

Beechcraft was never all-in in the training market. Its niche was carved out from day one with the Bonanza, a high-performance traveling machine that the company knew would attract buyers who learned to fly in something made by Cessna or Piper.Thats why when some pilots walk the ramp, they clap eyes on a Musketeer or a Sundowner and cant quite place what it really is. There just arent that many of them out there and they are far outnumbered by Skyhawks and Cherokees. But to Beechs credit, what it did, it did right, at least in terms of comfort and handling, if not performance.

First hitting the market in 1958, the Piper PA-24 Comanche was a radical departure for Piper. Until then, the company had built mostly rag-and-tube taildraggers. Instead, the Comanche was a thoroughly modern design focused on speed and good looks, and targeting the high-performance piston-single market being tapped by the Beech Bonanza and Cessna 210, among others.Pipers sleek, roomy all-metal design featured an oval-section fuselage, tapered laminar-flow wing and sharp-edged styling. The looks still turn heads today. A South African company is even building an all-composite lookalike for the kit-built crowd, the Ravin. More important for the discriminating used aircraft buyer, the Comanche lends itself to upgrading, and owners who bring the airplane up to the state-of-the-art tend to hang onto them forever. There’s no shortage of mods that step the aircraft up in speed and looks.

If its true that the SR20 flies like an SR22, its also true that it crashes like one. Thats why the Cirrus training approach for both aircraft are nearly identical. When we looked at 50 random SR20 crashes in the NTSB reports, it came as no surprise that runway loss of control events topped the chart.

There aren’t any magic bullets for eliminating general aviation accidents—but I’ve just run across a dedicated, reasonably priced simulator training program that has a lot of potential for reducing the most common type of GA accident, runway loss of control (RLOC).