Two decades ago, when the light sport aircraft idea was being hatched, skeptics worried that lighter, cheaper airplanes flown by pilots without medical certs would lead to a spike in the accident rate. After all, without FAA oversight of design, manufacturing and pilot health, how could it not? The reality, while challenging to pin down, is mixed. According to our review, the light sport segment definitely has a higher overall accident rate than that of legacy certified aircraft. The fatal accident rate, by our calculation, is also higher at 1.6/100,000 hour compared to 0.93 for all of GA, but this varies by aircraft model and is a marginal difference because of such small numbers.

To avoid being driven to the ragged edge of sanity by the profusion of ever-specialized avionics, we like to sort this stuff into bite-sized categories. the latest is one we would have never predicted: the wing-mounted, self-powered AHRS. As if one wasnt enough, there are actually two of these devices, the Levil Aviation BOM were reviewing in this report and a new product called the WingBug, which we’ll examine in a future report.

A favorite topic of post-flight barroom chatter is anguish over the price of new airplanes and the heartfelt conviction the industry could build a $40,000 airplane if it adopted automotive manufacturing methods. If youre a believer in that, your ship has arrived in the new Vashon Ranger LSA.But it doesnt cost $40,000, its $100,000 and it may be a push to deliver on that. Against the limits of low volume, the Ranger at that price is still a high-value proposition and the company-an offshoot of Dynon Avionics-sees the Ranger as potentially nothing less than a modern iteration of the Cessna 150, with a dash of modest adventure flyer thrown in.

Aviation writers love to heap undiluted praise on the sheer fun of flying seaplanes. OK, I get it already. Float and boat flying is a ton of fun and you havent lived until youve done it. The question is, how to do it without spending a fortune and what to do with it after youve got it.

The phrase irresistible urge is as good as any to describe why some airplanes get fitted with floats. A Super Cub and a 185, sure. But a DC-3 and a Cherokee 140? And now a giant Waco biplane in the form of the companys just-introduced YMF-5F floatplane, with the F signifying floats.

Apopular (and lazy) journalistic toss away is to describe a company as owning a market. Yet no company does, not even 800-pound simians like Garmin and Cirrus. There are always buyers swimming against the tide and in the world of aviation, Mooney has made a business of scooping them up; a flea in a world of elephants.

Aft of the firewall, a new Cirrus SR22 is the epitome of the technologically advanced aircraft. But the front end of the thing is pretty much frozen in the mid-20th century: old-school mechanical fuel injection, World War II magnetos, manual mixture control. This is so because buyers have wanted it this way; a Star Trek flight deck propelled by a 59 Buick engine room.

Its axiomatic that four-place airplanes are flown with two or three seats empty for most trips. But its just as true that some owners want not just four seats, but a bunch of payload even beyond that. Thats why we have the Cessna 182 and the Piper PA-28-235/236 series. That there arent many of the latter suggests that owners hungry for hauling are a fraction of the market, at least for Piper.

If point-of-view or action cams are as common as iPads in the modern cockpit, buyers may be getting a little bored with the ordinary flat footage they produce. Enter the 360 camera, a gadget that literally has eyes in the back of its head. The 360 market hasnt exactly exploded, but there are a half dozen to pick from, with more on the way.

Its easy to see why. Although it has expanded with off-site annexes, the basic footprint of the Cirrus factory hasnt changed appreciably since the first airplanes were delivered in 1999. But it has undergone substantial reorganizations and yet another was underway when we visited Duluth in August 2017.

Now that cockpit GoPro cameras are as common as iPads, it’s only a matter of time before someone posts the ultimate deer-in-headlights moment: the shock and terror of a pilot just commencing an inadvertent gear-up landing, otherwise known as the $60K slide. It might be just as interesting if the camera kept running through the aftermath-the runway recovery, the call to the insurance agent and, ultimately, what to do if this happens to you.

As we go to press in early August, Lycoming, field shops and owners were struggling to clarify a service bulletin that requires inspection and possible replacement of connecting rod bushings in hundreds of Lycoming engines. The mandatory service bulletin-SB632-was announced on July 17, just ahead of AirVenture. Two weeks later, shops tell us they are still fielding calls from worried owners trying to understand the scope of the bushing issue.