GARMIN AUTOLAND FOR THE REST OF US Almost a year and half after Garmin’s Autoland announcement, the industry is still buzzing over this magic automation that lands the aircraft when the pilot can’t. Initially type certified in Piper’s M600 turboprop, Cirrus earned approval for the system (called Safe Return) in its Vision Jet, as did […]
I’ve been around enough maintenance hangars over the years to see plenty of disasters waiting to happen—and ones that already have—but might have been avoided if pilots knew what was going on under the cowling. That’s why I took an interest in Airplane Engines: A Pilot-Friendly Manual from Pilot Workshops. If you’re familiar with the […]
And headsets, eyeglasses and ear-based pulse oximeters. In the photo below, Scott Ashton from Aerox and I are wearing all six. We forgot our hats, otherwise they would be in the mess. And wearing that mess is not easy to pull off with precision. I’ve done a handful of flight demos and product evaluations while […]
I’d say the trip is off to a bad start when you pull the cover off the airplane and slide into the cabin only to find holes in the panel and a bunch of empty mounting racks in the radio stack. After a few seconds the sickening reality sinks in: Somebody lifted your high-priced avionics. […]
Whether it’s cars, motorcycles or airplanes, enough dough can make anything like-new again. But if you have classic cars in your hangar (and I know a lot of you do—keep the pics coming, I love old stuff) you know that a restored ‘59 Vette won’t be a practical daily traveler. But classic airplanes can be, […]
We recently showed a piece of B-roll that shows a later-model Garmin Perspective+ equipped Cirrus on a night visual approach with a windshield full of red-over-red VASI and an approaching dark tree line underneath. There are a bunch of things going on in that six-second clip worth talking about, besides its muddy image quality that […]
Whether it’s traveling or kicking around home base I get asked that a lot lately. And it’s often from longtime airplane owners tired of shelling out retirement bucks to feed an old Bonanza or Cessna 180, especially for avionics upgrades, plus buyers are still recovering from the ADS-B buy-in. Non-TSO (but STC’d) gear has lowered […]
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.
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.
These are often first-time vendors invited to set up shop in the AirVenture Innovations Showcase building at Oshkosh. I like spending time there because it’s a good place to shoot. The lighting is good, it’s relatively cool and it’s the launching ground for products that are a little different than the ones around Boeing Plaza. Some make only one appearance at the show, but others have enough momentum to come back for more. That was the case with Opener Aero, which was the attention getter last year with its BlackFly ultralight.
You’ve got the airplane partly configured for landing on a long final and the tower hasn’t yet cleared you to land, but says to continue at best speed. To make the airplane go faster, you retract the landing gear and clean up the flaps. Then you’re instructed to do a present-position 360 because the sequencing just isn’t working out and a Falcon is beating you to the runway. Halfway through your circle, the tower clears you to land, you tuck in on final, put in some flaps and come over the numbers kind of hot. Something definitely isn’t right in last two seconds of the flare because the tires aren’t touching. -But then the propellers do, and so does the belly. At least you’ve stopped at the first taxiway so they can get your broken piece of metal off the runway quickly so the ramp gawkers can see it hanging off the wrecker. A sickening experience, yes, and a bad ending to an otherwise good business trip with the airplane. But isn’t that what insurance is for?
You can skirt the airspace, of course, but for many that won’t be practical. For these operators the FAA has a new “statement of policy for authorizations to operators of aircraft that are not equipped with ADS-B Out equipment.” More on that in a minute. I can see the panic building, even with new products that make for easier compliance. As an example a reader recently asked for my advice for fitting avionics in his recently purchased Archer. Since the airplane needed an IFR GPS, a transponder and an ADS-B Out upgrade to satisfy the mandate (six months away, as I type), we concluded that Garmin’s new GTX375 is a logical choice. As we reported in the May 2019 issue of Aviation Consumer, this latest all-in-one navigator makes sense for federated panels because it works with a good variety of third-party accessories. In this Archer, the 375 can drive the existing King HSI, it can connect to the existing autopilot, plus it has a built-in 1090ES ADS-B transponder to replace the King KT76A, and most important-it satisfies the mandate. Although hardly a slap and go, the installation won’t require lots of radio stack rejiggering because it’s nearly the same height as the King KLN-series GPS that it will replace. Doing some back-of-the-napkin math, also figuring some other work that needed to be done, I sent him to a few well-respected avionics shops for proposals to compare with my notes. He came back with bad news: None of the shops could touch the installation for at least six months or more.
