Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2017 i Plane & Pilot

“I’m beyond grateful that Ed has entrusted his great old Cessna to me. After all, what are we to airplanes if not caretakers? They’re more than machines to those of us who love aviation.” For the past few months, I’ve been looking for a good used plane, and I finally found the one I wanted, a 1964 Cessna 182G in good condition, with low total time, an engine and prop with lots of life, and a nice paint job. It needs avionics in the worst way, so my next couple of months will be focused on making that happen in new and interesting ways. The story of how I found my Skylane is worth a mention here. In the process of looking for a great used plane, I encountered several…

AIRBORNE WINDSPORTS PTY LTD EDGE X CLASSIC Rush City, Minnesota: 1 Fatal The student pilot was conducting a solo personal flight in the weight-shift-control aircraft. Video footage showed the airplane taking off, climbing to an estimated altitude of 300 to 400 feet, banking sharply left, descending, and then impacting terrain in a steep, nose-down attitude. The student did not have any solo endorsements on his student pilot certificate. The student had logged 14 hours in a different weight-shift-control aircraft but had never flown the accident aircraft type. The student’s flight instructor said that he did not feel the student was ready to fly solo and that he had not endorsed him for solo flight. He further stated that the student mismanaged takeoffs and landings and had the tendency to “leave…

After lifting off and establishing a positive rate of climb in the Cessna 340, I retracted the gear when I was out of usable runway, but the result wasn’t normal. As the gear went up, both airspeed indicators stopped working and dropped to zero. Uh, oh, that’s not normal. Pitching forward a little to guarantee sufficient airspeed in a climb without a functioning airspeed indicator to reference, the problem solving began. The old adage, “If you just did something and something stopped working, undo what you last did,” was forefront in my mind. After climbing, leveling off and allowing a little airspeed to build, I put the gear back down. The airspeed indication didn’t return. It was time for some more problem solving. A problem wasn’t entirely unexpected on this…

Here at Plane & Pilot, we have more than a purely editorial interest in Skylanes. Back in the late 1970s, when I was editor of Plane & Pilot, the magazine purchased a well-used Skylane as a project airplane and rebuilt it to better-than-new condition. The airplane we selected from the hundreds of used Skylanes in a year’s worth of Trade-A-Planes was a ragtag 1962 model 182E with no damage history, poor paint and an original interior. It had been sitting outside for most of its life, but our mechanic felt it had great potential as a fixer-upper. Our choice of the 182E was deliberate. The ’62 Skylane was the first to offer both the swept tail and the “modern,” notchback fuselage. From that very tired and heavily weathered starting point,…

“I’ve seen some bad cases of motion sickness, and in every one of them, the individual has been able to overcome it with time and practice.” Nausea isn’t the most alluring topic. Just the very word brings up bad memories. It’s not fun to regurgitate that icky feeling we’ve all experienced at one time or another. When we feel nauseated, we normally have a very good idea why we do—food poisoning, the flu or a whole host of other reasons. When we get nauseated from motion sickness, however, the cause can be a rather slippery and elusive thing. Symptoms can vary intemperately, and while people have theorized about its raison d’être, no one seems to really know why it happens or what causes it. There are a lucky few of…

It was a desolate and alien place, looking more like a photo from Mars than any place that could be on this Earth. The vista stretched for miles in every direction, a rock-strewn blanket of baking, undulating tan, brown and bone white scree. As desolate as this vista was, so, too, appeared the lives of the meager few who lived there in scattered small settlements in places about as far from 20th century technology as one could get. Mechanical things, made of metal and plastic of different colors, were rarely seen. There were no children’s toys from Toys “R” Us, no bicycles, no rubber balls, no erector sets. The children were too busy gathering water from the town well, herding goats, scavenging for tin, wire and scrap iron. The women…

You read the accident reports, hoping to learn something from someone else’s troubles. Often, I imagine, you’re left with a nagging sense that things just don’t add up. Why did the highly experienced pilot do that? Why didn’t the CFI grab the controls and take over? The answers might lie in a kind of stall from which few pilots are trained to recover—what I like to call the “mind stall.” I was a student pilot on one of my solo cross-country flights when the venerable Cessna 150’s little Continental engine that could became the engine that couldn’t. I was flying at about 7,500 feet MSL over the mountains between my home base in Santa Paula and the vast California Central Valley, but only about 500 feet AGL when the engine…

Here’s a look at original new prices and current used prices for select Skylanes in the last 60 years. Our source is the standard pricing guide of the industry, Aviation Week’s Aircraft Bluebook, Winter 2016/2017. New prices are for typically equipped aircraft. Used prices are approximate, and might not reflect a fast-changing market. T = Turbo AIRCRAFT BLUEBOOK,Winter, 2016-2017; Spring 2010. Jane’s All-The-World’s Aircraft, 1957, 1980 and 2014 Aviation Consumer Used Aircraft Guide 9th Edition Cessna 182S Pilot’s Operating Handbook, 1997…

Garmin inReach Explorer You can stay in touch no matter where you travel with the Garmin inReach Explorer ($449.99). Making use of the Iridium satellite constellation, it offers two-way text messaging, location sharing and interactive emergency assistance anywhere on the globe. The Explorer’s built-in GPS provides on-map guidance and allows you to create waypoints, mark locations and track your progress. It also has a feature that allows you to share your location online with friends, family and social media followers. In addition, the Explorer has a digital compass, barometric altimeter and accelerometer. It can be paired with compatible mobile devices. Its rechargeable lithium battery can last up to 100 hours in tracking mode. If the unit is in power-save mode, battery life can stretch to 30 days. In the event…

“For the passengers involved, these flights come at no cost and remove one of the biggest obstacles to their care—the cost of travel. For both passengers and pilots, the experience changes lives.” In an exciting reversal of trends, general aviation aircraft ownership in the U.S. is increasing. According to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, GA aircraft based in the United States rose from 199,000 in 2014 to approximately 204,000 in 2015, the first increase in private ownership since 2009. As more aircraft and pilots take to the skies, it’s important to note many of those GA pilots aren’t merely taking pleasure trips or scheduling for-profit charter flights. In fact, on any given day, dozens of GA pilots and aviation enthusiasts are providing compassion flights to help individuals and families coping…

“And there it was, the most uncanny silence I’ve ever not heard. The sky had a glycerin smoothness and cathedral quiet I’d never experienced before.” As I was about to climb into the front pit of the solid-silver, letter-opener, stiletto of a glider for my first soaring lesson, instructor Gus Briegleb reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver dollar. He placed it on the runway at El Mirage Airport, then turned to me and said, “Bill, when you’re done with this course, I guarantee you’ll be able to release from the towplane at 2,000 feet, make a pattern, touch down and stop with your landing wheel on this dollar, all without power.” Quite a promise, I thought, and not very likely. I nodded and climbed over the side…

“The airplane was fragmented, and had extensive fire damage. The landing gear was retracted. Physical damage was consistent with near-vertical impact.” The NTSB’s narrative report on the crash of a Cessna 421B Golden Eagle in Hammond, Louisiana, on October 14, 2015, in which the pilot and passenger were killed, repeats a deficiency we occasionally see in other reports from the agency. It lays out facts and provides a carefully worded probable cause for the accident, while failing to alert us to things investigators discovered that might help others recognize the potential for impending doom and do something about it before it’s too late. One can appreciate that the Safety Board prefers facts to hearsay. However, in this accident, there was some hearsay I think we all should hear. It just…