Aircraft Upgrades

The L-3 ESI-500 Genesis retrofit flight display has synthetic vision, can display GPS and ILS data, has an integral backup battery and has an AML-STC for retrofit in a wide variety of aircraft. In this video, Aviation Consumer magazine Editor Larry Anglisano takes a close look at the instrument with L-3’s Todd Scholten in a […]

I’ve covered this budding electric aviation thing just enough to understand this: The idea that an electric motor has so few moving parts that all you do is keep feeding it power and it will run smoothly forever is just wrong. The minimal parts count is right, but the simplicity isn’t. But it’s nice to […]

The first Ovation Ultra completed its first flight on Saturday, Mooney announced this week. Chief test pilot Mike Miles flew for about an hour after launching from Kerrville, Texas. The four-seat retractable-gear airplane is a fully FAA-conforming aircraft and will be the first FAA-certified copy of the design, the company said. Miles said performance and […]

Cub Crafters, well known for its high-performance Carbon Cub LSA, has rolled up a new Part 23 airplane called the XCub. Based on the Carbon Cub, which is itself an offshoot of Piper’s original Super Cub, the new aircraft is lighter and faster than previous entrants in the utility market and the company is calling […]

At one time in this country, government problem-solving consisted of throwing money at whatever obstacle seemed to be impeding progress. Sometimes it even worked. Of late, the philosophy has shifted to cutting taxes, driving deficits and acute budgetary paralysis. I’m not sure where the FAA’s decision—apparently—to help fund installation of ADS-B systems fits, exactly. As […]

Because of design, certification and insurance costs, the OEM industry is hobbled with a rather arcane system of pricing replacement parts. When it comes to interior plastic parts—like a window molding, hinge cover or a glove box overlay, for example—a couple of dollars’ worth of plastic becomes a $400 part simply because of its unique […]

To remain a general aviation participant in good standing—or hell, just a participant of any standing—requires a certain resilience, an almost alien capacity to slough off disaster and munch gleefully on catastrophe. Rolling with the punches comes to mind, but somehow just doesn’t do justice to the gloom that pervades the aviation economy. Now that […]

Wrapping up a marathon 10 days of travel this week, I was happy to get my mitts on and actually fly a real airplane. Not a drone operated from some air-conditioned trailer a half a world away or something powered by batteries that lack capacity or, more likely, something that exists only in a PowerPoint […]

Regardless of whether your aircraft is metal, composite, or tube and fabric, quite a few homebuilts these days use composite fairings. Nowhere is this more true than the engine cowl—it’s just not an easy shape to fabricate out of other materials. Unfortunately, for tightly-cowled installations, heat from proximity to exhaust pipes (or a turbo) can […]

If the increasingly strident messages from the FAA about ADS-B equipage have you feeling the slightest pangs of guilt that you haven’t written the check yet, take heart. The agency doesn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to get its own aircraft in compliance and it’s shopping around. As every aircraft owner […]