No Beef Here
I don’t have a beef, but a compliment and recommendation. I recently had a carburetor problem in my 1939 WACO AGC-8 (engine quit 6 miles out) at Birmingham, Alabama. I got it going again and got back to BHM.

Cant say enough about the good service by the folks at Raytheon Aircraft Services. Bob Hemm assigned a mechanic to change the carb and let me help. (They havent seen too many 330 Jacobs.) Both stayed late to get the work completed. Its nice to come into contact with a competent and helpful facility and these folks could not have been better.

Mel Richardson
Via e-mail

Forget AirCell, Try a Blackberry
I enjoyed reading y…

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When light aircraft production took its final serious nosedive in the mid-1980s, the die was cast for engine overhaul shops and for Lycoming and Continental. Until then, the two engine makers had been happy building motors for new airplanes.

The Great Downturn changed the rules. With only a trickle of new airframes coming into the market, Lycoming and Continental sought new business from the only source available: Overhaul work.

This has proven a mixed blessing for aircraft owners. It has brought unprecedented competition to the overhaul market, putting downward pressure on prices, especially for new cylinders.

On the other hand, factory competition has driven many f…

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In the September issue of Aviation Consumer, we reported on various hangar tugs pitched to the small airplane market. One we mentioned but werent able to test was the Nose-Dragger Dragger from Skyline Aviation of Swartz Creek, Michigan.

Last fall we obtained a Nose-Dragger Dragger and have been using it to tug the company Mooney in and out of the hangar in all sorts of weather. (No snow yet, however.) Herewith is a brief follow-up report.

Like the Taildragger-Dragger, the nosewheel model is powered by a 12-volt electric wheelchair motor driving a pair of wheels through a bicycle chain-and-sprocket arrangement. The entire assembly is mounted on a frame-like apparatus, w…

Elite Feedback
As a long-time subscriber and consumer afficionado, I thought your article on the new Exxon Elite oil was interesting and exciting. I have had two adverse experiences with this oil worth relating. I was introduced to Elite at Sun n Fun in April and was given a free case.

I used two quarts immediately in my 1967 Mooney Executive 21 with 800 hours on the rebuilt engine. The flight back home was eventful in that the weather required me to climb to 11,000 feet.I went through the usual leaning procedures and had an uneventful flight until the night landing. Since I was high, I powered back. But on landing, I ballooned and had to give back some power to smoo…

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Are you $%@#%# guys living on the same planet as I am?

Were happy to say we don’t hear this sort of thing from readers often but when we do, its usually because some product or service weve recommended hasnt worked out the way we were sure it would.

Welcome to the real world of variable perceptions, where the term satisfaction is a moving target and what one aircraft owner considers good service and a swell deal, another considers the bum steer of a lifetime.

If there’s any constant truth in buying aviation products and services, its this: Even the best of service shops, those with sterling national reputations, arent capable of satisfying everyone everytime…

[IMGCAP(1)]So maybe money isn’t a consideration. Youve done we’ll in the market, sold your business or been promoted to senior VP and that ratty old 210 youve been flying just isn’t getting it done.

And neither would a light-light twin of the sort we analyzed in the June issue. The next rung on the step-up ladder is the light non-cabin class twin, airplanes that are a bit more expensive to buy and operate than light-light twins but carry more and eke a few more knots.

These are big airplanes with performance and handling that are less tolerant of an incompetent pilot than the light-light twin. Before considering one, we encourage the prospective owner to keep two ideas in mind:…

[IMGCAP(1)]The aircraft engine overhaul business certainly aint what it used to be.

For the past two decades, with the GA business in the tank, the engine market has become largely sacrificial. If any one segment gets more overhaul business, someone else loses it.

And the big losers have been smaller field overhaul shops, driven out of business by the factories who have replaced sagging new engine sales with a piece of the overhaul pie.

Costwise, this has benefited aircraft owners, exerting some downward price pressure on whats probably the most expensive periodic maintenance most will face.

On the other hand, finding a good shop to do the work is always a study in hand wringi…

[IMGCAP(1)]Which way is this thing gonna go?

Will the world of general aviation avionics tilt in favor of Alpha boxes with color maps and comms or will the mega map displays soon take over?

Neither. It now seems at least somewhat clear that large area displays such as the Avidyne FSD we’ll review here will likely co-exist with the likes of the Garmin 430 and more as-yet-to-be-announced self-contained navigators.

Whats most curious about this emerging market is that despite fundamental differences in basic product philosophy, they all do more or less the same thing. The large format multi-function displays depend on external discrete boxes for navigation, traffic and weather data w…

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In our December report comparing Mooneys and Bonanzas, we noted that the NTSBs accident database revealed a startling number of tail flutter incidents in older V-tail Bonanzas.

We found at least 10 such incidents between early 1996 and 1998 and suspect there could be more since its quite likely that not all such incidents find their way into the NTSBs files. Worth noting is that although all of these incidents resulted in serious damage to the airplane, there were no injuries or hull losses. And none of these Bonanzas were built after 1953.

Nonetheless, we think these incidents are disturbing and are thus worth examining further. In our view, any buyer shopping for an…

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Bicycles and airplanes go way back. When Orville and Wilbur sloughed their cycle shop to experiment with airfoils at Kitty Hawk, the bond was born. Bikes are still a cheap, readily transportable means to get from A to B.

But putting bicycles in airplanes has been a different story. Some owners have been stuffing $20 Raleighs into Cessnas and don’t want to hear of anything else while others have spent thousands on jeweled little cycling machines with zero utility. The problem: If you could get a bike into an airplane easily, you didnt want to ride it very far when you got it out.

Thats changed. Technology is giving us better bikes. Lightweight alloys, new designs and…

In dusty corners of tee hangars all over this great land are the corroded remains of a variety of pilot toys-engine pre-heaters too complex to bother using, personal ramp tugs that couldnt pull a cork out of a Cabernet, desktop kneeboards from the 30-seconds-over-Tokyo phase of our flying and the like.

More common than any other discarded artifact are the bones of portable conveyances designed to get pilots from airports to motels, beaches, appointments and assignations without recourse to rental cars or taxis. Folding bikes, motorized skateboards, model-airplane-engined Schwinns, collapsible mopeds, inflatable ATVs…well, maybe not inflatable ATVs, but certain…

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Jeppesens vision of the future is a paperless cockpit, a vision that has, thus far, eluded most pilots and owners we know.

Nonetheless, as one step on the road to this future, Jeppesen will soon release a new product called the Skybound Datawriter, which will make it possible to electronically transmit monthly updates from your computer directly to the datacard that fits into your GPS.

Its designed as an alternative to the present system of receiving new data cards by mail every 28 days. Datawriter users will have two options: New updates can be mailed on a CD every four weeks or they can be downloaded from Jeppesens Web site.

Jeppesen plans full release of th…