The Savvy Aviator

This is a bit embarrassing, but I might as well come clean: Up until a few years ago, I was still flying my Cessna T310R with only the primitive engine instrumentation installed by the factory in 1979. Shame on me!I’d long since upgraded my avionics stack with conspicuous quantities of glass, including a Garmin GNS-530 […]

This will be the column that allows devotees of liquid-cooled engines to rock back in their Aerons, place palms on paunch and proclaim, “Aren’t we the smart ones?!” With some design care, a liquid-cooling system for aircraft can be simple to execute and remarkably insensitive to variations brought by series production or less-than-surgical ongoing maintenance. […]

Finding the right airplane to buy is hard work. Who among us hasn’t spent hours looking through the pages of Trade-A-Plane trying to find that perfect candidate — one with low time, a fresh overhaul, new paint and interior, great avionics, and a bargain price?Dream on!Common sense says you’re unlikely to find an airplane like […]

Metal possesses lots of properties that we find very useful in building airplanes. It’s strong, hard, and tough. It’s easy to form, work and machine. It’s fireproof and can stand up to high temperatures. All in all, metal is neat stuff.But metal isn’t unique in having these properties. Metal is strong, but ordinary cotton fiber […]

No aircraft is considered airworthy by the FAA until the weight of its paperwork exceeds its maximum certificated takeoff weight (or so goes the old joke). We in aviation are always complaining about the amount of paperwork that the FAA, in its infinite wisdom, makes us do. Any aircraft owner who has gone through the […]

I pulled my Cessna T310R out of the hangar, and performed the usual pre-flight walk-around. I climbed into the left seat, watched my two passengers take their seats and fasten their seat belts, and checked that the cabin door was properly secured. Pre-start checklist: flight controls free and correct, switches and dimmers off, circuit breakers […]

As is the case with most of us here in the Pilot’s Lounge at the virtual airport, my involvement with state aeronautics commissions had, for years, been limited to paying a small annual fee and receiving a nice book that gave information on all of the public-use airports in the state, as well as an […]

Not long ago, I was chatting about piston aircraft engines with a group of aircraft owners when the longtime owner of a Cessna P210 asked me the following question:“What are the relative pros and cons of oil filter inspection vs. laboratory oil analysis? Do you recommend one over the other or do you recommend both?”The […]

There’s an old joke among aircraft mechanics that “the most dangerous thing in aviation is an aircraft owner with a screwdriver.” (Or a wrench, or a toolbox, or a Swiss army knife …)For many mechanics, this is no laughing matter. I’ve been writing for many years (on these pages and elsewhere) advocating owner involvement and […]

I have a soft spot in my heart for the year 1979, because it was the year that Cessna built the T310R that I’ve owned and flown for the past 18 years. Actually, 1979 was a very good year for general aviation. Manufacturers like Beech, Cessna, Mooney and Piper were assembling craft at a furious […]