Aircraft Upgrades

Sporty’s grabbed attention late last year when they offered training at $99 an hour in refurbished Cessna 172s at their flight school in Batavia, Ohio, and now the company is taking orders for fully refurbed airplanes at a price of $132,900. “After December’s announcement of the 172LITE, my inbox and voicemail were flooded with inquiries […]

Beringer Aero brings its motorcycle racing brake technology to aircraft with a complete line of lightweight wheels and brakes, including an anti-skid device. In this video, Aviation Consumer editor Larry Anglisano takes a look at the product line with Claire Beringer at the 2015 U.S. Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring, Florida. view on YouTube

During its 85 years of building aircraft engines, Lycoming has seen vast changes in the market. Today, it has to survive building a fraction of the engines it once produced. In this video, AVweb’s Paul Bertorelli gives a detailed video tour of the plant and explains how the company has reinvented itself with modernization. view […]

Nextant Aerospace has completed the first test flight of its remanufactured G90XT design, the company recently announced. The project, which launched about a year ago, matches a refurbished King Air C90A with the new H75 engine by GE. The airplane also features a Garmin G1000 cockpit, electronic engine controls, new dual-zone air conditioning and many […]

At Sebring’s Sport Aviation Expo, Elaine Kauh prepared this video report on AOPA’s Cessna 152 Reimagined project. She spoke with the association’s Jamie Beckett. view on YouTube

Van’s Aircraft comes to the 2015 Sport Aviation Expo with the RV-12 S-LSA equipped with Garmin’s G3X Touch avionics and integrated action camera. In this video, AVweb’s Larry Anglisano, along with Chris Thelan from Van’s Aircraft, took the system flying for a closer look. view on YouTube

Unless you operate your aircraft in a warm climate, we think fixed engine heaters are essential accessories. Even if you store the aircraft in a heated hangar, there could be times when you’re faced with an engine-stressing cold start. Not all systems are alike and the one you choose might depend on climate. We took […]

Airbus has introduced a long-range (4,000-nm) version of its A321neo single-aisle airliner as it squares off against Boeing in the lucrative low end of the airliner market. The neo is Airbus’s next-generation version of the A320 series, which goes head to head with Boeing’s 737 MAX, which currently has a projected range of up to […]

Not surprisingly, as the rate of price increases for new airplanes left the rate of inflation in the dust, the business of giving new life to aging airplanes became a growth industry. The last 20 years has shown that there is a demand for general aviation airplanes, however, that demand has also been shown to […]

ForeFlight has added a synthetic vision upgrade to their popular iPad-based flight-planning software, the company recently announced. The upgrade provides a three-dimensional view of terrain and airport features, and dims or brightens to simulate daylight and night conditions. The Stratus ADS-B receiver is not required to run the feature, the company says, but with Stratus […]