Ownership

Picture this: You’re away from home base when your airplane develops a minor problem. You ask the local repair shop to fix it. After working on the problem for a few hours, the shop reports back that it will take much longer to fix than you anticipated, and cost a lot more than you were […]

Galaxy Quest is truly one of my favorite movies, a splendid yet warm-hearted send-up of every schlocky sci-fi series you’ve ever seen. In it, we learn that the crew’s motto — “Never give up, never surrender” — begins its bane but concludes its savior.Recently, this phrase has been threading through my gray matter like some […]

Sometimes I just can’t fathom what makes aircraft owners do some of the things they do. Particularly amazing to me are some of the mechanical problems that aircraft owners elect to live with rather than fix.Now I’m just as averse to spending money as the next guy (and probably more than most). In fact, I’ve […]

Like most single-engine aircraft owners, I find myself drooling over photos of the latest all-glass panel hardware, and even wondering if I’d be qualified to use it. For those of us who fly virtual airplanes based on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, there’s now an opportunity to find out: In conjunction with their 2005 sweepstakes, the […]

First, let’s establish the legalities here. Part 43, Appendix A of the FARs deals with preventative maintenance. Of the 30 or so listed preventative maintenance tasks, items 6 and 23 permit aircraft owners who possess at least a private pilot’s certificate or higher to change the oil and filter (or to service the oil screen) […]

More than a dozen single-engine airplanes converged on Ocracoke Island airport on the North Carolina Outer Banks for the long-awaited weekend fly-in. The October weather was extraordinarily delightful, the camaraderie was even better, and a great time was had by all. The only fly in the ointment was that a couple of participating airplanes developed […]

Like many pilots and aircraft owners, I’ve wondered why our engines are so damn expensive. I mean, on a horsepower-per-dollar basis, they’re way behind it. In a day when $30,000 does well to buy you a new 200-hp engine — for $150/hp — other forms of propulsion start to look pretty good. Heck, you can […]

Safety Recommendations Issued The NTSB says the fatal crash of a Cessna 208 Caravan in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada last October “calls into serious question the certification of the Cessna 208 for flight into known icing conditions.” A Jan. 17 letter from the board offers what may be the most scathing indictment yet of the popular […]

Batteries are the Rodney Dangerfields of aviation: They get no respect. We let them sit unused for weeks at a time and then expect them to crank our engine. We deep-discharge them by forgetting to turn off the master switch and then jump-start our airplane to go flying, subjecting the battery to a punishing rate […]

CS&A Aviation Insurance(This article originally appeared in Aviation Insurance & Risk Management, Fall 2005) In the aviation insurance business we see many companies and individuals consider the purchase of “corporate” aircraft. For purposes of this discussion, I am referring to seven- to 15-seat, cabin-class piston twins or large singles, turboprops, and jet aircraft like Piper […]