Maintenance

Many moons ago, as a Boy Scout in Montana, we told a story around the campfire about how to catch a raccoon: you’d anchor a clear bottle to the ground and put some crumpled tin foil inside. A passing raccoon (there’s always a raccoon passing by) would be transfixed by the glint of the foil […]

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 […]

Icon Aircraft has pushed back customer deliveries until at least 2017 and has announced a major revision of its controversial purchase agreement. In a conference call held with invited aviation media representatives, CEO Kirk Hawkins cited manufacturing difficulties as the reason for the delivery delays. “We have to slow down so we can go fast,” […]

The Cessna 182 series is one of the most popular and prolific all-purpose flying machines in the general aviation fleet. They are dependable, straightforward, and easy to fly. They are traded frequently on the market, and lots of people are looking to buy one at any given time. While the huge run-up in the cost […]

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 […]

Canadian authorities are investigating an incident that could potentially affect the airworthiness of thousands of Piper Cherokees. Manitoba flight instructor Tom Larkin was on short final with a student when the control column broke off in his hands. “Somewhere below 50 feet as I eased back on the control column to assist the student with […]

It has again become fashionable in some aviation circles to assert that if only we could return to ways and days of yore by getting rid of some or all of the Federal Aviation Regulations and those who enforce them, all would be well and general aviation would zoom into sunlit uplands and robust financial […]

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 […]

Environmental groups have filed suit (PDF) against the EPA to try and force the agency to set emissions limits for all aircraft. The suit was filed by Earthjustice (on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity) and Friends of the Earth on Thursday, saying the EPA has “delayed unreasonably” coming up with rules for aircraft […]

A half decade ago when diesel engines gained some traction as aircraft powerplants, the skeptics got quite a little whisper campaign going by noting that diesel engines could swing only wooden props. Their torque pulses and resonances were just too harsh for the fatigue limits of metal props. The naysayers forgot to mention—or perhaps didn’t […]