In a world of pulling mags at 500 hours and turbos that last 1000, fuel pumps are a breath of reliability fresh air. So reliable, in fact, that it’s much more common for a pilot to have an engine stoppage because the pilot does not know the aircraft’s fuel system or misuses the boost/aux pump […]
We’ve been actively tracking the work and customer offerings of Mike Busch’s Savvy Aviation (www.savvyaviation.com) as it, in our opinion, has endeavored to drag general aviation maintenance into the 21st Century. (Full disclosure: About 10 years ago, as part owners of a Cessna T210 we were a Savvy customer.) Savvy started life by offering sophisticated […]
Speed costs money. That’s why few airplanes coming out of the factory were optimized for speed—it costs staggering sums of money to certificate a production airplane and at some point, the engineers and bean counters threw up their hands and shouted, “That’s enough!” While the cruel realities of squared functions when it comes to speed […]
As we’ve watched aircraft and fuel prices skyrocket amid a “hard” insurance market, we’ve been wondering whether those variables are conspiring to push prospective pilots to work for a sport pilot rating rather than the private ticket and whether current pilots are downsizing to light sport aircraft and taking advantage of the more liberal sport […]
There it is. Right there on the ramp in front of you. You finally pulled it off. You’ve wanted a turboprop—no, that turboprop—ever since you saw one a few days after you soloed. Now, look at yourself. You just closed on the purchase of that Cessna 425. That one, with the incredibly cool four-bladed prop […]
For years, it seems that the most common disagreement between airport management and hangar tenants is what the tenant can store in his or her hangar. The answer depends on whether the airport is a public use airport that receives Federal Airport Improvement Program (AIP) grant money or a private airport (we’ll lump public use airports […]
We’re good pilots—by and large. Getting our certificates and ratings wasn’t easy. Face it, we sweat blood training to master the skills, knowledge and judgment needed to cause an inanimate object to rise into an often unforgiving sky and return to the planet not only safely, but with some degree of panache. In the process […]
Let’s see—we’ve got avgas in the tanks and air containing oxygen all around us. Somehow that air and avgas have to combine in a roughly 15 to 1 ratio—by weight—in the engine’s cylinders. Then they can do their suck, squeeze, bang and blow thing to make the prop go whirling around. Enter the humble carburetor, […]
Yes, we’ve heard all of the disparaging remarks: Magnetos have been around since there was dirt; they’re the trailing edge of technology and general aviation would proceed into broad, sunlit uplands if mags were to be consigned to the scrap heap and replaced with electronic ignition. Nevertheless, while we think that electronic ignition is great […]
Full disclosure—we have a bias when it comes to turbosuperchargers. We like them. A lot. After flying them for more than 45 years and using them to get to altitudes that allowed a safe flight when we could not have even launched in a normally aspirated machine, we think that they are well worth the […]
