Aircraft Upgrades

The Experimental Aircraft Association’s Kermit Weeks Hangar is just down the road from the EAA AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. While the museum is the public face of EAA, the Weeks Hangar is where the action is. In the most basic sense, it’s a maintenance and restoration facility. But that’s a bit like calling the […]

Now that BendixKing’s KSN770 retrofit navigator is certified and shipping, it’s a worthy alternative to models from Garmin and Avidyne — while priced thousands less. But many buyers are unfamiliar with the KSN770’s multi-function capabilities, its feature set, and its flight-planning capabilities. Aviation Consumer magazine editor Larry Anglisano put the KSN770 — and the company’s […]

A couple of months ago, aviation journalists were getting calls from a Japanese survey company with some questions about the aircraft engine market. Over the course of an hour, they asked about market demand, certification requirements and what buyers might expect of a new aircraft engine. The marketeers described themselves as working for a company […]

Textron Aviation has confirmed that all its U.S. sales are being handled by factory representatives. That would appear to be the end of the extensive dealer network that sold Cessna aircraft for decades. Nikki Riemen, Textron’s media and public relations manager for the piston and defense division, said the company is “focused on developing and […]

In a market rich with tablet and smartphone navigation apps, Garmin has announced a new, purpose-built portable GPS navigator, the aera 660. It’s the company’s first dedicated aviation portable since the aera 796 appeared in 2011. Following the trend in smartphones, the aera 660 has a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen and more interface capability than any […]

The staff at Aviation Consumer magazine is conducting an avionics equipment and brand satisfaction survey. They want to know about your experience with recent major avionics upgrades, including ADS-B equipment. The results will appear in an upcoming issue of Aviation Consumer magazine. Click here to take the survey.

Virgin Galactic will roll out a replacement SpaceShipTwo suborbital space plane on Friday and while it will look the same as the one that crashed in 2014 there are some important internal differences. According to the Verge, the company says the new vehicle has more automation and failsafe systems designed to prevent the kind of […]

With the exception of tiny squiggles up and down, the general aviation fatal accident rate remains stubbornly at about 1.0/100,000 hours. That’s down a little from a decade ago, when it was 1.28 and down a lot from the early to mid-1970s, when it was more than 2.0. In GA, we tend to resist the […]

What to make of Mooney’s new M20V Acclaim Ultra? It’s at once more than I ever expected and less than I might have wished. Then again, in this business, the survivors learn that the orbits of expectation rarely intersect with those of reality and we all know about wishes, horses and beggars. But give the […]

Apparently responding to buyer complaints about complex ADS-B Out solutions that require expensive WAAS upgrades,Garmin International has announced two all-in-one transponders that will allow owners who don’t have WAAS GPS receivers to upgrade to ADS-B Out as simply as possible. One version of the new product combines both In and Out in a single box, […]