Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i Plane & Pilot

The first business aircraft, dating back more than 70 years now, were piston-powered personal machines, including the Cessna 195, with its throwback seven-cylinder radial engine and Art Deco design. The National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) Convention in Las Vegas is fast approaching—“fast” being the operative term in all things related to the activity. While business aviation has been dominated by turbine-powered equipment for decades now, that wasn’t always the case. The first business aircraft, dating back more than 70 years now, were piston-powered personal machines, including the Cessna 195, with its throwback seven-cylinder radial engine and Art Deco design. Recently named by this title as one of the 10 Most Beautiful GA Planes ever, the 195 has a special place in business aviation history. As devotees of the 195 might…

Garmin D2 Charlie Pilot Watch Since it introduced the first model five years ago, the Garmin D2 (for “Direct To”) has been a popular item for the company, and every year or two it comes out with a new model that’s slimmer, better looking and more feature-rich. This year’s D2 watch is up to Charlie (the Bravo was the second iteration, because the D2 name wouldn’t make sense anymore as the “D3,” right?). Anyway, D2 Charlie has a remarkable new feature: radar. No, there’s not a radar pod you wear on your head to get the weather; the watch interfaces with your smartphone or as a member of Garmin’s connected cockpit, communicating with a number of compatible devices to get METARS, TAFS, NexRad radar and much more. There’s also, as…

 With few exceptions, pilots look back at the past year of AirVenture Oshkosh as being a very special event. There’s certainly nothing wrong with all of us pilots having a good time at the world’s biggest fly-in. But our recent memories, however fond, probably don’t help us put this year’s event in an historical perspective. I’m as guilty as the next pilot of this very thing, and because I flew my very own plane into the show for the first time ever this year, I’m pretty biased. Still, from any objective standard, the 2017 edition of AirVenture stands out as a special one. For starters, the weather was great. And the event set records for attendees and exhibitors. Those very same businesses were almost…

When I first saw the news that ForeFlight was coming out with a $199 USB thumb-drive-sized ADS-B device I was curious...but not sold. While I liked the idea, I wanted to see how it worked. So I decided to give it the ultimate test drive, taking it into the hornet’s nest that is the Ripon Arrival into KOSH. I got the little Scout unit the day before I left for AirVenture in my 182. I had ForeFlight already loaded on my large-display iPhone 7 Plus, and the phone made the WiFi connection right off the bat. Scout is tiny, only the size of a largish USB thumb drive, and you can position it anywhere you’d like using the cute little suction cups that come with the unit. I put it…

Nobody really wants to think about what happens when their plane goes down, but, as pilots, it’s our job to plan for every eventuality. According to the most recent data available from the NTSB, only about 19 percent of general aviation accidents are fatal. That gives you roughly a four in five chance of surviving a crash. Not too bad, right? But what happens if you go down in a remote area with no one around to help? Even if a pilot is able to communicate their location when they’re in trouble, finding a downed aircraft in a wilderness area can be a needle-in-a-haystack undertaking. Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELTs), while certainly better than nothing, don’t have the best record for helping search and rescue personnel locate crash survivors. Thankfully, as…

Here are the winners of the 2017 Plane & Pilot Plane of the Year, but before announcing the winners, a few words about what this is and how it happened. Once upon a time, it was easier to assemble of field of contenders, what with the slow rate of new airplane introduction we’ve seen these last couple of decades. We hope that will change, given the smart relaxation of certification rules. Now, gauging any aviation achievement by reference to one particular year is hard. For starters, there are numerous milestones in a plane’s journey from concept to certificated article. Some planes, like the HondaJet, take decades to come to market, and often the year its certificated in is more of a regulatory milestone than anything else. With this in mind,…

“While a cardiac event that led to the crash may have been a most likely scenario, it was not established by the autopsy as being a fact.” The reports prepared by the NTSB on light sport and experimental category accidents usually don’t consume a significant amount of the agency’s resources. The airplanes are too light and carry too little fuel to cause mass destruction and, when there are fatalities, the number of deceased almost invariably is limited to one or two. It’s my observation that the Safety Board tends not to use too much manpower, paper or bytes on its computers when dealing with these accidents. Perhaps not too coincidentally, they tend to attract comparatively little attention both in the aviation community and news media. Recently, however, the reports on…

Like many of you, I took my initial flight training in extremely basic airplanes—read, “cheap.” The first was a re-engined, 85 hp Piper J-3 Cub on skis, but the second was even more basic, if that’s possible. It was, in fact, several steps below a Cessna 150. That airplane was a Champion Tri-Traveler, one of the first planes Champion Aircraft built after it acquired Aeronca in 1956. The Tri-Traveler was essentially an Aeronca Champ fitted with a nosegear and a 90 hp engine. That was quite a few years ago, when nosewheels were still something of a novelty for general aviation. The Tri-Traveler proved that Champion Aircraft didn’t know quite what to do with them. I wasn’t wild about the Tri-Traveler, but it was the cheapest thing on the flight…

The commercial pilot departed in the light sport, amphibious airplane during daytime visual meteorological conditions to perform a new employee familiarization flight with the passenger, who the company had recently hired. A witness, who was in a boat on a lake, reported seeing the accident airplane flying about 30 to 50 feet over the water at what appeared to be between 30 to 40 mph. The witness added that, as the airplane passed by his position and entered a nearby cove, which was surrounded by rising terrain on either side and at its end, he heard the engine “rev up and accelerate hard” as the airplane approached the right side of the canyon “in what appeared to be an effort to climb out of ” the canyon. Subsequently, the airplane…

Whether your ground school was a set of video lessons or an instructor with a chalkboard, certainly at some point in every pilot’s training, the “Aviate, Navigate, Communicate” adage reared its head. I can still hear the old instructors drumming the message home. “Fly the plane and make sure that you’re not about to hit a mountain or a tower,” they’d preach. “You can pick up the microphone and worry about the controllers later.” It’s a great idea when you’re training to fly alone. The world of multi-crew aircraft, however, comes with its own set of communication challenges. Captains and first officers can’t read minds; and then there’s the flight deck door. In addition to being intrusion-resistant, it can also hamper messages relayed between the cabin and the flight deck.…

In addition to the now-standard 406 MHz emergency band, all PLBs have a low-power beacon that transmits on 121.5 MHz, the same frequency band used by older-model ELTs. While the 121.5 MHz signal works well for PLBsthe 406 MHz signal gets rescuers to the right area and the 121.5 MHz beacon helps them home in on the source of the signal—it hasn’t proven to be an effective method for locating downed aircraft by itself. According to NOAA-SARSAT data, 121.5 MHz ELTs have a 97 percent false alarm rate and only activate properly in about 12 percent of airplane crashes. Not good odds for getting help. New-model ELTs operate on 406 MHz, which has the advantage of providing global coverage—unlike 121.5 MHz ELTs, which need an aircraft or station in signal…

When I landed at Valparaiso, Indiana, KVPZ, my traditional fuel stop en route to Oshkosh (the FBO gives fuel discounts to #OSH-bound airplanes, too), I started chatting with a friendly elderly man. I mentioned something about his wife, and he said, “No! I’ve never gotten married because I didn’t want to lose my freedom to fly!” Then he looked at the horizon and said, “When I take off from the grass strip on my farm at sunset, I’m really at peace, and I wouldn’t want to lose that.” My mind raced. Would I be as avid a flier today if I had not been encouraged by my family? Maybe not. Some wives forbid their husbands to fly a small airplane, much less ever fly with them. I’m enough of a…