Technique

Last week I was on the telephone with Tim Roehl, one of the founders of General Aviation Modifications, Inc., the folks who created the tuned fuel injectors called GAMIjectors. We were talking about a number of things, including Lycomings fairly new IO-390 engine that puts out 210 HP and is getting attenion in the aviation […]

Surfing the untracked wilderness of modern cable television, my scroll-around sometimes lands on something interesting. Lately, its been a show called Dangerous Flights, another of the Discovery Channels reality series. These sorts of programs are called reality TV and if reality were scripted, theyd be accurately named. Otherwise, like a patient drifting in and out […]

With all the literal and figurative bells and whistles in todays cockpits, something as mundane as losing communications with ATC is rare. One reason is the stuff we have in the panel these days is a couple of light years ahead of even two decades ago in reliability. But loss of communications-going no radio, or […]

Letter of the Week:Affordable Avionics Garmin’s comments are just silly. They don’t want to use open standards because then they would have to admit there are things that might be better than what they have. A bunch of years ago, some large computer manufacturer said, “Don’t get locked into open systems,” and that large computer […]

A few days ago, we emerged from a polar vortex that drifted south – a textbook example of what those things do from time to time. The associated cold managed to get the media into full cry and revived all of the how cold is it? jokes. Judging from Internet aviation forums, it also got […]

A New Zealand pilot and his passenger are nursing bruised egos after two strokes of bad luck became after-the-weather fodder for news programs all over the world. Peter Horn and his passenger were on a sightseeing flight in Horn’s Jabiru light single over Martin’s Bay, just north of Auckland, on Friday, when the engine quit. […]

In this week’s Cub Theatre installment, AVweb’s Paul Bertorelli provides a video examination of the runway turnback or the so-called “impossible turn.” Well, it’s not impossible at all, although it’s not necessarily easy. If you want to try it, you’ll need to practice it first. And think about making the turnback decision before you take […]

Accidents, like elections, have consequences. And as youve probably read, a consequence of one accident is that the ATP will soon rise to the level of unobtanium, so if you always wanted one, 2014 is the time to act. And better be quick about it. The accident, of course, is the Colgan Air crash in […]

Remember the movie, Wall-E, a Pixar animated tale whose subtext was that technology eventually evolved to be so all enveloping that humans were reduced to quivering mounds of fat conveyed in bins attached to a mechanical belt? If that future awaits us all, are airline pilots leading the way? In the midst of its investigation […]

It used to be self-fueling just referred to the aircraft owner who brought mogas to her airplane in five-gallon cans and upset the airport manager or FBO because of lost fuel sales. While thats still the case, over the last decade, its also come to mean putting avgas into your airplane from a self-service pump. […]