Maintenance

In many ways, watching Cirrus Design Corp. evolve into the two-model company it is today felt similar to watching a child mature from adolescence into adulthood. From its roots in the experimental community, Cirrus evolved from a niche airplane-kit maker into an advanced manufacturing firm. From serious airplanes for people with money and building ambitions, […]

Diamond’s New Star, the DA40: More than a Katana AllGrown Up Is it safe? That’s generally a good question to ask before any flight in the first of anything: The newer the program, the more daring the design, the more important the question. But rolling the prototype DA40 from base to final at the Plant […]

Immediately after Air France’s Concorde crash, graphic photographs and video of the disaster were broadcast to millions of television viewers. So-called industry experts appeared on various networks soon after and speculated about the cause of the crash. One pundit, who has authored a book on aging aircraft, raised the specter of the inherent danger to […]

HAMMER: Originally employed as a weapon of war, the hammer is used as a kind of divining rod to locate expensive parts not far from the object we are trying to hit. ELECTRIC DRILL: Normally used for spinning rivets in their holes until you die of old age, but it also works well for drilling […]

Over the years, my flying in the Florida has included introductions to dozens of ultralight and light experimental-amateur built designs … and the odd encounter with alligators. Now, imagine yourself in a big, open-cabin experimental airplane, cruising languidly about 500 feet above a mirror-still, algae-green lake outside Sebring, Fla., one known for yielding some awesome […]

Whither The Piston Twin? One of the categories conspicuously missing from the raft of revived production aircraft in recent years is the piston-powered twin-engine airplane. Sure, New Piper is selling Seminoles and Senecas to flight schools and charter operators, while Raytheon still offers the Baron 58 series, but only in a normally aspirated, non-pressurized version. […]

Did ya’ hear about the school board for a midwestern state that approached theend of the 1990s by “de-emphasizing” evolution in science classes? Thereally wanted to roll time back to before George of the Jungle came to Kansas —but not so far back that they couldn’t keep the Tin Woodsman, the Scarecrow,Dorothy — and her […]

This was a trip I had been anticipating eagerly allyear. I’d been invited to give a seminar at the CaymanIslands’ International Aviation Week gathering, and would be flying myT310R from its west coast base to Key West Florida, then joining up with The Cayman Caravan to fly over the top of Cubaand into Grand Cayman. […]

Somany pilots forget, or never knew, that the earliest heavier-than-air birdspretty much all flew beak-first. But check out any photo of the Wrights’earliest machines and some built by their followers … the canard. Strange thatthe canard never really became an industry standard, long ago overshadowed by”backward-built” airplanes, those with the tail surface in back, inone […]

Myadventure started when my soon-to-be-husband and I began searching for a WilgaPZL-80. We figured finding one of the ungainly-looking Polish birds in thecondition we wanted and a price we thought fair would be a relatively easything. Six months later, after a thorough search of the U.S., Canada, and muchof Eastern Europe, we had revised our […]