If Piper put general aviation on the map with the J-3 Cub, Beechcraft made it possible to actually go places on that map, thanks to the incomparable Bonanza. With antecedents dating to 1947, the venerable V-tail remained in continuous production until 1982, something no other model can claim.
A month after Cessna announced its $420,000 diesel Skyhawk, our test-the-waters opinion sampling drew two reactions from flight schools: impolite guffaws or stony silence. Logically, that ought to make emerging refurb projects like Redbird’s Redhawk and AOPA’s new remanufactured Cessna 150s/152s a shoe-in cinch for a market starved for affordable trainers. Well, not exactly. Both the AOPA and Redhawk projects are aimed at taming the escalating cost of the world’s most popular trainers, but the overwhelming majority of schools we interviewed about both of these airplanes say they’re still too expensive, albeit a dramatic improvement over the price of new Skyhawks, which are increasingly out of reach.
In an era when the state-of-the-art aircraft have to be baked in an oven after being laid up in plastic sheets squished together in vacuum bags, it’s hard to imagine that a wood and fabric wonder like the Bellanca Viking still exists. But it does. And although there aren’t great squadrons of them around, the […]
Pilots looking for a used aircraft usually have a mission in mind: Carry a specific payload over a certain distance in a minimum amount of time. And if you need to get to and from remote locations while mixing it up at nearby Big City International, you might have overlooked the helicopter.
T he Aerostar—with plenty of ramp appeal and utility—has a deserved rep for being blazingly fast with good range. And unlike most piston twins, it has enough power to actually climb on a single engine.
When Diamond Aircraft surprised the 2002 Berlin airshow with an out-of-the-blue new twin powered by a pair of converted automotive diesel engines, there weren’t many visible reasons why it should succeed and a lot of reasons why it couldn’t. The twin market was flat. A new engine married to a new airframe can be the shortcut to disaster and no modern engine maker had commercially converted gasoline automotive engines for aviation use. A diesel conversion? Are you kidding?
Despite an overall slow market, there is a steady growth in owner-flown turboprops and jets. TBM has no shortage of buyers for its hot new 900, Maibu owners are stepping up into JetProps and Meridians, Baron pilots are buying King Airs, Cirrus owners hold delivery slots for Vision SF50 jets, turboprop owners are looking at under $1 million price tags for nicely equipped Citation IIs and writing checks, and everyone seems to be salivating over Eclipses.
It may not be the fastest airplane to sport a big Lycoming, but on pure style points, it has no equal.
We’ve watched the evolution of the Diamond DA40 series with interest. Our first reaction to what would become the Diamond Star was to be less than impressed. We thought the canopy was a marketing ploy that would make emergency egress difficult, and the cabin looked small and uncomfortable.
When Fred Weick and John Thorp set out to design a less expensive alternative to Piper’s Comanche, it’s unlikely they thought the resulting PA-28 series would become so popular, so durable or so varied. Since introducing the Cherokee 150 and Cherokee 160 (PA-28-150 and PA-28-160, respectively) in 1961, Piper has stretched, T-tailed, turbocharged and reproduced that basic airframe tens of thousands of times.
As an emergency physician with a background in epidemiology and public health, I would like to thank Rick Durden and Aviation Consumer for the article on Safety Refurbs in the March 2014 issue. Although it was very we’ll done and quite helpful, I’d like to add two caveats.
Because of design, certification and insurance costs, the OEM industry is hobbled with a rather arcane system of pricing replacement parts. When it comes to interior plastic parts—like a window molding, hinge cover or a glove box overlay, for example—a couple of dollars’ worth of plastic becomes a $400 part simply because of its unique shape and application.
