Cockpit Accessories

A variety of upgrades and accessories are available, which quickly grow the price. There’s a rolling backpack ($89.95), dual spring leather seat with LED taillight ($44.95), universal cross grip smart- phone mount ($24.95), LED front light ($44.95) and the Accessory Pack. It includes a backpack, leather seat, front LED light and a smartphone mount ($179.95). The seat upgrade, which has dual springs, is much wider and softer than the standard seat and is we’ll worth the money, in my view.

Recall that German-based Flight Design had its own four-place airplane, the C4, in the works until it ran into financial trouble. At Aero, the reorganized company announced a rethink of the CTLS line and a new four-place project called the F4. The latter will be a CS 23-certified aircraft that’s essentially a stretched version of the CTLS. Predictably, the powerplant will be Rotax’s new 915 iS. Gross weight is set at 2420 pounds with performance in the 150- to 160-knot range. The price target is under $300,000.

Garmin’s integrated cockpit retrofit program for turbines started with the G1000 for King Airs. That program commenced over ten years ago and according to Garmin’s Dave Brown, the company sells as many today as it did early in the project. To date there are over 600 G1000-converted King Airs in the field. It’s a complete transformation that now includes Garmin’s latest G1000 NXi with the GFC700 integrated autopilot, the latest weather radar, ADS-B and a variety of other functions that modernize even the oldest King Air.

As you might surmise, there is a lot of opinion out there on that subject. You seem to be implying in your article that VGs would be a preferred choice over a STOL kit, but you didn’t actually say that. From your experience, if you were in my shoes, and money wasn’t the single most important consideration, how would you proceed and why? You would certainly make my day if you can answer this question.

A quarter century later, it’s fair to ask: Well, was it? The easy answer is yes, it was and is. But with a host of safety features such as crashworthy seats, energy absorbing structure, cabin flail space and the first-ever certificated airplane ballistic recovery parachute, Cirrus also implied that its new airplane would be safer, without actually saying the safest ever. So, how about that? Has it delivered on those claims? Answering that is not as simple as crunching the GAMA numbers to enumerate Cirrus’ inarguable dominant market share. But with a quarter century of accident data to review, it’s reasonable to take a stab at it.

The fallback, of course, is repairing/overhauling old instruments that may be left over from the Reagan era. This may or may not make sense, depending on the supportability, reliability and bottom-line cost for the work. In this article we’ll look at the market for instrument repairs and exchanges, while offering tips for deciding whether an EFIS upgrade is the better decision.

You bought something and now it doesn’t work. What recourse do you have? Can you compel the seller to exchange the bad something for a new one? If you return it, are you entitled to a refund of the full purchase price? Will the seller pay the full cost of getting it fixed? What if the something is three months old? A year? Five years? How long is the seller obligated to repair a defective product, exchange it or take it back and refund your money?

Other athletic pilots agree that it sure would be convenient if there was one device that did it all, and since we covered pulse oximeters in the September 2017 issue of Aviation Consumer, Garmin released the D2 Delta PX aviator watch. It has an integrated pulse oximeter and a variety of other biometrics capabilities. I’ve been using it for close to a year and found that while it’s not the perfect solution, it comes close, with limitations.

For example, the article referred to ADS-B ground stations as ADS-R stations, but they are not. The general term is Ground Based Transceiver (GBT). ADS-R is only one function of the GBT in which the GBT receives an ADS-B transmission on one data link frequency (978 or 1090 MHz) and rebroadcasts that transmission on the other frequency. This rebroadcast function only occurs if a client aircraft (ADS-B Out and In equipped) indicates in its transmission that it can receive only one frequency, and if the target aircraft is broadcasting ADS-B Out on the other frequency. Plus, both aircraft must be within a defined proximity (generally 15 NM horizontally and 3500 feet vertically) of each other.

Available in the app’s latest version 11 release, the new utility is standard in the Performance Plus and Business Performance subscription plans.

The $1395 GTR200B (the B is for Bluetooth) picks up where the first-gen $1199 GTR200 (still available) left off and sports the same chassis and overall footprint. Weighing just shy of two pounds, the radio measures 1.35 inches high by 6.25 inches wide and 9.39 inches deep with the interface connectors in place. That chassis is fairly deep and can pose a challenge for some panels, but it’s slim enough to save space on the face of the panel.

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