The Cessna Pilots Association was at one time the largest Cessna owner type club, setting the standard for which plenty of other owner support organizations eventually followed. It flourished through the 1990s and we’ll into the new millennium, but the unexpected passing of its founder and president, John Frank, led to a near immediate technical […]
You wrote an eye-watering check to the avionics shop for the latest and greatest gear, but that doesn’t mean the new suite is invincible. An electrical failure in a single-alternator, single-battery aircraft will make the unprepared wish the vacuum system wasn’t in the rubbish bin on the shop floor. Herewith is our plan for affordable […]
If you do it right, they say, you may never have to touch the brakes while landing. But it seldom happens that way, and that’s why tires and brakes take a beating. We lock the brakes, we ride them, we overheat them. And the chain reaction—at best—means premature brake wear. At the worst, it’s a […]
After a one-year hiatus, the big airplanes and pilots who fly them came to Las Vegas for the 2021 NBAA-BACE gathering. The mood was positive, and not unlike the lower-end piston market, things are hopping in the bizjet and turboprop world. New airplane announcements, new avionics projects and certification, retrofit programs for old jets and […]
Keep a straight face. Couldn’t do it, could you? This subject is proof positive that every pilot’s idea of humor effectively stopped developing as a four-year-old making potty jokes. We’ll go further than making fun of discomfort and express our concern that the pressing need for a bathroom may we’ll be a safety of flight […]
As aviators, we see no irony in being sustained aloft by an ongoing series of violent explosions of a volatile chemical mixture generating a hearing-damaging roar that calms us to the point of somnolence. Yet when that soothing roar ceases, without our command, and the resulting silence brings us to a level of terrified hypervigilance […]
I remember the drill like it was yesterday. Self-announce the 45-degree entry to downwind by shouting into the Telex hand mic, stow the Telex mic between the knees, power back, carb heat on and work in some flaps as the cabin speaker in the old Cessna 150 screeched with garbled combined radio calls from every Unicom within a 100-mile range. Those were the bad old days of flying without headsets, of course. Then I stepped up a layer in the food chain and blew my college partying wad on a David Clark headset and never looked back. I think my first model was the company’s H10-30-you know, the set with the signature green domes, shiny mic boom and clamping pressure higher than a college-age teenager on a Friday night.
It’s the airplanes with the first-generation fuel selectors you want to be cautious of. In August 2019 the FAA issued an airworthiness concern sheet (ACS) that requests PA-28 owners and operators of first-gen fuel selectors (these are the round, flat-plate selector assemblies installed in the lower sidewall) to provide operational input. It wants to know if operators have mistakenly selected the Off position instead of the intended Left or Right Tank position. It could turn into an AD.
The only downside to not getting the FR endorsement on the first time you fly with a CFI is that if your 24 months has expired since your last FR, you can’t fly as PIC (that includes solo) until you get a new endorsement. Um, that’s also a very good reason for not putting your FR off until the last moment as the realities of aviation karma include delivering lousy weather for the one day you have available for the FR flight before it expires.
At AirVenture I was looking at the new Garmin GPS 175 to replace my old GNS 430. The Garmin rep told me there was a nice rebate available if I traded my GNS 430 for a new GTN-series navigator-something like $4000 toward the GTN. I asked what they were doing with the trade-ins and he said they refurbished them and sold them, but I’m guessing not in the U.S. I asked if that meant that Garmin was continuing to support the GNS 430W and he said absolutely.
