Ownership

The aircraft magneto is a cursed thing. Its technology seemingly dates to the discovery of fire, every engine needs at leasttwo and on a dark and stormy night over the Appalachians, the last thing you want to thinkabout is how many fragile moving parts are whirling around inside a mag at the speed ofheat. But […]

Thetime had finally come to replace the engines on my 1979 Piper Aerostar. N6069N’s leftengine had gone past its 1800-hour published TBO, and the right one was rapidlyapproaching that number. Both engines were running as well as they ever did, and AVwebeditor Mike Busch kept advising me to keep flying until the engines started showing […]

This is a five-part series on Active Noise Reduction in General Aviation. It came about because hundreds and hundreds of you have been asking good questions about ANR technology and its advantages in airplanes. This series is intended to provide G.A. pilots with a fairly technical and thorough understanding of this technology and the important […]

NOTE: Dr. Jim Yates provided substantial contributions to this section of ANR 101. Dr. Yates is Professor and chair, S.P.A. of John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, and principal of Audiology Associates Hawaii. Previous sections of this series have discussed active noise cancellation and the technical issues associated specifically with general aviation […]

In this section, we’ll be looking at the comfort and human-factors issues associated with ANR headsets. The ergonomics of the human head demand a wide range of adjustments to deliver comfort over hours of use. Optimizing the physical headset for pilot use Active pilots have been searching for ways to improve the physical aspects of […]

Looking at actual cockpit noise profiles, and how well aviation headsets cope with it In Section 2 of this series, you learned how engineers measure effectiveness of active noise canceling systems in the laboratory. But since we don’t fly in the lab, our emphasis will now shift to studying the actual noise spectrums in various […]

Understanding and comparing cancellation specifications Section 1 of this series dealt with the variables and complexity involved in canceling the repetitive and random aspects of airplane noise. It explained that although the basic elements of all active noise reduction systems are pretty much the same, the details of how they are designed and implemented has […]

A good place to start is with one of the most-asked questions that we receive from pilots: Don’t all active headsets work the same way…or do the same thing? The answer is a simple “yes”…and a much more detailed “no.” It’s yes because the principles of additive cancellation with out-of-phase sound is several decades old […]

NOTE: Air Chart Systems atlases, NOS IFR charts and plates, NOS Sectionals, WACs, Terminal Area Charts and other chart products may be purchased online. I‘ve got a confession to make. I’ve flown at least a hundred transcontinental trips during the past thirty years and, more often than not, I’ve flown them with outdated charts. There…I […]

Airplane appraisals are a dimea dozen, right? There are all kinds of methods of evaluating airplanes from appraisalsoftware you can purchase, to “blue books” that supposedly give you the latestprices, to the old throw-the-dart routine. Some of those systems are useful inestablishing a range of value when a buyer is trying to decide if an […]