Aircraft Stepups

Aircraft shoppers often find that their favorite Beechcraft Bonanza is beyond their budgets. Fortunately, there are many attractive alternatives on the market.

Emotions aside, the aircraft you thought you wanted might be the one you can’t wait to get rid of.

If you’re building an aircraft from a kit, you probably agonize over which avionics to go with. But almost as important as the avionics suite is the electrical distribution bus that powers them—and the other electrical systems on the aircraft.  If you come from the certified aircraft world, you’re used to the old-school mechanical circuit […]

We see plenty of fuel exhaustion events in the NTSB wreck reports, and we suspect some might have been avoided with fuel totalizers. These are valuable devices, especially when interfaced with panel GPS navigators, because you’ll always know how much fuel you’ll have to a given waypoint in the flight plan.  Better yet, if your […]

Paint work is a big investment, with sizeable downtime and disassembly—and plenty of opportunity for buyer’s remorse. Doesn’t it make sense to plan every last detail of the paint scheme before pulling the trigger on the project? Surprisingly it doesn’t always happen that way, and plenty of aircraft owners are left with good paint jobs […]

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 […]

The model progression represents steady refinement, but the airplane’s configuration remained basically unchanged. In 1971, the Model A60 was introduced with a modest increase in gross weight (up 50 pounds from 6725 to 6775), but useful load and performance dropped a bit. According to book figures, the straight 60 is a much better short-field performer than the A60. However, Duke owners tell us those early figures were extremely optimistic, and that the A60 is only slightly inferior in takeoff and landing performance to its predecessor.

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.

One of the biggest gotchas with major upgrades-and it doesn’t matter if it’s avionics retrofits or airframe and engine mods-is not keeping the system current with the latest software and hardware mods. These may come in the way of service bulletins, software bulletins and service letters. At the least, you may not be taking advantage of a system or its interface to its fullest, but more serious is doing nothing, potentially leaving you vulnerable to an inflight failure. That’s what FAA ADs are for, of course, but they (sometimes, not always) don’t always occur until something crashes or comes close to crashing.

Priced at $5330, the KI300 has a backup battery for powering the display for up to one hour, has speed and altitude tapes (which can be turned off) and can be installed as the primary (or backup) attitude indicator as long as the airspeed and altimeter indicators are retained. The initial STC includes the Piper PA46 series, but the company said a wide variety of approvals will follow within weeks. I found the instrument to have a decent display, plus it has a stone-simple feature set.

When I started flying in 1994, there certainly wasn’t the need for accessory power in the cabin. These days it’s an entirely different story and the number of portable devices I carry grows by the month. Who thought you would have to charge your sunglasses? That’s why the market is being bombarded with panel USB charging ports. These are generally FAA-certified devices that mount either on the instrument panel or in interior components, and connect with the aircraft’s electrical bus for voltage.

Of course the dense market doesn’t make an already difficult buying decision any easier. So to help sort it out, in this article we’ll offer an around-the-bases look at the most popular new avionics configurations-from entry-level (for basic aircraft) to higher-budget (for go-places higher-end machines). The idea is to arm you with enough knowledge to talk the talk with your avionics shop when they make suggestions for a package. It’s also time for our ADS-B buyer’s guide, and it follows this article. Let’s begin with an ADS-B wrap-up.