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While number four for takeoff on a 95-degree day, windows and doors open to catch any puff of moving air, every pilot ever minted has wished for air conditioning. With installed units starting at over $4500 and eating up at least 50 pounds of useful load, most owners are willing to sweat a bit and […]

Every pilot who’s ever packed an airplane for a trip has experienced the desire for more—more room, more useful load, more seats, more. . . As a family grows, the four-seater isn’t enough—the baggage kids seem to need grows exponentially with age. Part 135 operators want a small freighter that is rugged and can get […]

Flying an airplane involves multiple concepts from physics: Bernoulli’s principle, centrifugal force, Newton’s law of gravity, to name a few. There’s one more natural law, though, that isn’t in the science textbooks: the faster you’re trying to get somewhere, the more likely you’re going to get unexpectedly delayed. Today’s a perfect example of that. You […]

A frequent reader question we receive is: Why does my engine seem to lack the power it once had? We can’t tell you exactly what’s wrong, but we can get you pointed in the right direction, and that begins with a systematic approach. We can also tell you that one of the most common and […]

The stats are in, the tallies tallied and the totals have been summed up: Loss-of-control tops the list of general aviation accident causes. Recent studies by industry and government point to loss-of-control (LOC) accidents in all their variations are the leading cause of GA accidents, both fatal and otherwise. According to the U.S. Government Accountability […]

The Socata TB20/21 Trinidad is a stylish and spacious airplane with good performance characteristics and a surprisingly low accident rate. It may not be the fastest airplane to sport a big Lycoming, but on pure style points, it has no equal. When the so-called Caribbean line from Aerospatiale first appeared at the Paris Air Show […]

The good news for buyers who can’t afford the eye-popping price of a brand-new Cirrus is the healthy supply of used ones for sale. For as little as $100,000, you might score a first-generation G1 SR22. That’s no chump change, and to be sure, an early SR22 might seem stark compared to the current G5 […]

The great book Fate is the Hunter by Ernest K. Gann well describes the grip of fear that most have observed in our fellow pilots and perhaps in ourselves. Fear is of course a primordial, natural, and quite healthy reaction to unknown and threatening situations. Flying perfectly describes such a situation—an obvious venture away from […]

Every year it’s the same same questions. “You’re going back?” “Why?” “Haven’t you seen everything?” “Isn’t it just the same airplanes over and over?” I sometimes can’t help but wonder if the questioners believe that I’m living out the definition of insanity when it comes to Oshkosh; doing the same thing over and over, expecting […]

The takeoff might better have been described as a launch. With the new 150-HP Lycoming engine in my 700-pound RV-3, it was off in no more than half the 650-foot runway length and climbing aggressively at my normal 80-mph climb speed. At an altitude of perhaps 150 feet, the engine quit abruptly (whammy #2). The […]