Ownership

This year could be “a pivotal year to recover market growth” for jet sales, said Ernie Edwards, president of Embraer Executive Jets, at a news conference at EAA AirVenture on Wednesday. “There were record corporate profits in the first quarter 2012 in the U.S.,” he said. Buyers still seem reluctant to spend, he said, but […]

Fresh off the announcement that Cessna will offer a Skylane with an SMA diesel engine, SMA said Tuesday that Lycoming will support the engine in the field with parts and services. SMA’s CEO Thierry Hurtes said in an interview with AVweb that the chief lesson SMA learned from marketing its original SR305 10 years ago […]

In a letter to members of the Malibu-Mirage Owners and Pilots Association, the group’s president, Jonathan Sisk, said this week that the FAA’s just-made-public 100LL replacement plan deserves a critical eye. Although he says it represents progress, he believes it’s too narrowly focused on just one path. “I also recommend that Clean 100 members not […]

Original, Exclusive Videos from AVweb | Reader-Submitted & Viral Videos For 60 years, Airtex has been providing quality aircraft interiors that owners can install themselves. AVweb recently visited the Airtex factory in Fallsington, Pennsylvania to have a look. view on YouTube Don’t see a video screen? Try disabling ad blockers and refreshing this page. If […]

Premature cylinder problems are epidemic. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear or read about an aircraft owner having to pull one or several cylinders at annual due to poor compression with leakage past the exhaust valve. More often than not, the afflicted airplane is powered by a fuel-injected TCM engine. The cause […]

Lately, my maintenance management company SAMM has been receiving an increas-ing number of requests to oversee pre-buy examinations on aircraft ranging from Skylanes to Cirruses to Bonanzas to Golden Eagles. Now, I’ve been an aircraft owner for more than 40 years, but in all that time I’ve only bought three airplanes. One of those was […]

This article originally appeared in Light Plane Maintenance, Sep. 2007. Spark plugs. Those pricey little fire-starters screwed into each cylinder can tell you much about the health of your engine and perhaps about your operating technique. Like anything else, learning to remove, read and reinstall spark plugs takes some knowledge and practice, but it’s something […]

Recently, my aircraft management company SAMMwas managing the annual inspection of a client’s piston-powered, single-engine airplane at a well-known maintenance facility in Texas. The inspection found very little wrong with the airplane, and it looked like the annual would be completed quickly and inexpensively. Then, quite unexpectedly, the IA responsible for the annual went to […]

This article originally appeared in Aviation Consumer magazine, Nov. 2007. Let’s say you need a part for your airplane — not a maintenance item like a Brackett foam filter or a spin-on oil filter, but something more exotic, say an elevator trim tab or a new wingtip. The immediate impulse is to order it new […]

This article originally appeared in Kitplanes, April 2008. Those of you who attended that big airshow in the state of Wisconsin a year ago might have noticed a curious juxtaposition. If you had started a soft-serve ice cream before dropping by the Van’s Aircraft booth to see the RV-12 prototype, you probably would not be […]