wombat

Finally got my GAD43e upgrade completed. No additional wires needed in my case. One hiccup in that on the GAD43e configuration page on the G500, the installer initially selected "King KAS 297" for the type, but it had to be set to the "King KAS297B". When I flew home I couldn't get it to work, then after about 30 minutes of digging online I figured out the KAS297B seemed to be necessary. So I flew back over and the installer was able to update that and now it works. I love the level-off at altitude, it's super smooth. And as I age (in 25 to 35 years!) I expect that will prevent me from overshooting an altitude. I wasn't sure how it would handle the altitude hold after level-off at a preselected altitude, but it does actually turn on the altitude hold mode on the autopilot. For operation, wen you select an altitude or vertical speed on the G500, it notifies you to hold the button to select altitude capture or V/S set and capture. When you do press and hold the vertical speed, it will set the vertical speed to your current, and then you twist the knob to adjust it. Really looking forward to selecting an altitude at a waypoint, looking at the vertical speed required on the GTN750, setting that in the G500 and watching it fly me there. It's not actually a vertical nav system like if I had the GFC500 autopilot, but it's still pretty great!!

I replaced my door seal a year or so ago and for removing the existing adhesive I used Peerco 321 adhesive remover. It was effective but slow and quite stinky. Put a layer on, wait 10 minutes, scrub/scrape/brush it off and get a little more adhesive. Then do it again. Eventually it'll all come off. The peerco material is more like a mucus than a fluid, so it was not sprayable.

Today coming back from Portland (Troutdale) I was about 202 knots then I increased power and got up to 213 knots. at 11,500' MSL

Engine: TSIO520NB (Rocket STC) ROP only so far, it tends to miss once every 10 to 30 seconds if I run LOP. Just need to spend some time investigating which cylinder is overly lean and adjusting it. I run at one of the following: 31" MP, 2,300 RPM @ 18.5 GPH (72%) 32" MP, 2,400 RPM @ 19.8 GPH. (76%) 33" MP, 2,400 RPM @ 21 GPH (78%) (Very rare) If I'm in a hurry or there are headwinds, I use the higher power settings. Otherwise the lower ones.

I don't know if there is a difference between 'electronic phased array antenna' and 'electronically-steered beam' or 'steerable antenna' but in my mind these are all basically the same thing. https://www.starlink.com/na/support/article/07621adc-9a6f-8f94-6f27-361a78cce37d says "Both Starlinks are electronic phased array antennas, meaning they can track the signal from satellites overhead without the need to physically move." https://portal.powertec.com.au/equipment/it-networking/network-devices/starlink-mini-dish-rev1#:~:text=Like its predecessors%2C Starlink Mini,ethernet reduces the weather rating). says "Starlink Mini is a satellite transceiver which uses digital beamformers and an Electronic Steerable Antenna to track and maintain connectivity with LEO satellites"

I'm agreeing with you here, but adding more emphasis. It's not just 'suspicious', it's an outright falsehood. You can't 'generate' or 'create' cold using energy the way you can make heat. All you can do is concentrate heat somewhere else. There is no way to provide power to something in an enclosed environment and have it cool the whole environment. You either move heat to somewhere else, or you generate heat.

The problem is that there were so many spam posts it made it annoying to find the real posts. There isn't anything in the spam posts for us to click on, they are not trying to scam us. They are trying to scam the AI, so when you ask Siri to call Ethiad Airlines to change your seat, it calls their scam number and not the real one.

I just got my first ever bill from vector... From landing at Santa Monica in September 2018 in a 182 I used to own. $16.44 (Plus $0.51 credit card fee) Paid

@Z W If your planned VFR flight is no longer viable, call ATC on the radio and get a clearance or land and do some actual flight planning. Don't stare inside the cockpit for 5 minutes while you play around on your iPhone. And quibbling about how much time it takes is not a good argument. Look outside. I have gotten clearances in the air many many times, it's really easy and fast. If you have to switch over to flight service... Well, switching frequencies isn't a big deal. And getting radar imagery from some random website or app over the internet to use to fly through storms? Personally, I would be extremely uncomfortable with this. Talk to ATC to find a route or turn around.

@PBonesA more critical phase of flight is short final. Let's say I want to fly VFR from KPHP to KTTD... It's 890 miles, which is near the edge of the range of my plane. According to the current weather reports, that leaves me with 11.5 gallons. When you factor in reserve fuel (18 GPH, * 30 minutes = 9 gallons). If I run one tank dry, I will have 11.5 gallons in one tank and 0 in the other. Minus 1 gallon unusable fuel. No problem, even if winds are a little worse than forecast. If I don't run one tank dry, I'll have about 6 gallons per side and risk running out on final is a real risk. Particularly if you had slightly higher headwinds than planned.

I've got a Starlink Mini. I've used it in flight. My opinion.... Meh. Not worth it for me as a pilot. If you are wanting to provide in-flight entertainment for passengers, it's amazing. For thunderstorm dodging weather info? Are you freaking crazy? Do you really want to explain to the NTSB and FAA that's what your plan was after you've had an in-flight emergency or incident or accident? Filing flight plans? Either do it on the ground or talk on the radio to ATC. If you are filing a flight plan that means you are VMC, so you need to be looking outside for other traffic. This sounds like a a bad idea that some marketing shill that isn't a pilot might put in an advertisement, like "Creating your grocery list on the laptop while you drive to the grocery store." If you are just looking for personal entertainment and staying in communication with people in flight but you are just ashamed to say that's what you want it for, well... I don't know what to tell you. Long XCs with an autopilot are kind of boring. Listen to music that is already downloaded or an audiobook or a podcast or whatever.

You missed out. On several of the topic pages there were dozens if not hundreds of messages supposedly giving you the phone number to call to change your airline ticket or something like that. They are trying to get all of the various AI summaries to redirect people to their scam phone number instead of the real one. Example article about this sort of thing: https://www.zdnet.com/article/scammers-are-sneaking-into-googles-ai-summaries-to-steal-from-you-how-to-spot-them/

This is not a reasonable argument. Sudden and unexpected fuel selector failure is not a significant risk and you are not significantly increasing safety by your methods. By the time you've run the tank dry, you've probably already operated that system 5 or more times during that flight. There are way more fuel starvation accidents where the pilot neglected to switch fuel due to high workload prior to landing than there are fuel starvation accidents where the selector failed in flight. In each and every one of the former, having run the other tank dry would have saved the situation. If any of the latter have occurred at all, only a subset of those (where there was not an airport suitable for landing withing gliding range) would have caused a problem. I have an airplane to be useful and the range is part of what makes it useful. If I were to cut that range in half or less, that would make it much less useful. Now there are some of us who only fly for pure pleasure to get up in the air. In that case, yeah, sure, never go below 75% fuel. But that's not what I do and the additional safety of never needing to switch fuel tanks in flight is probably lower than the increased accident rate due to increased number of landings anyway.

Regarding the water, my concern is that over time atmospheric (dissolved) water might condense inside the tank and become liquid. That liquid could then freeze when I'm at altitude. Or it could experience deposition (frost) directly. It could do that in one of the lines and block it. It could do that in a valve, preventing it from operating correctly. In either case, my oxygen is no longer usable even though a test on the ground might have demonstrated it working. Or it could be working at altitude and then the build-up of ice increases and it just stops working as I'm flying along. Some possible solutions: If I am filling a portable tank, chill the tank (to condense the water), hold it upside down, and vent some oxygen. If there is liquid water, that should drain it. Although if the water concentration is just right, it won't ever be liquid. Just like carb ice, it might just directly form frost where the pressure gets low at the valve or in the line after the valve. For the permanently mounted tank... Umm.... I don't know how to get water out of that. Better to not get any in, but I'm not sure how to go about that.

Before this thread is too old... Let's talk about oxygen concentrators. Do they introduce anything that could be hazardous as an aviator? The documentation I can find says they are not actually oxygen concentrators, they are nitrogen excluders, using zeolite to concentrate and exclude nitrogen. This means the concentration of other elements is much higher than normal. Below is a chart that shows this for 90% O2 and a 'perfect' concentrator that removes 100% of the nitrogen. From reading https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646629/ they say that argon starts to be a problem at concentrations of 33%, so I think this is not a hazard. I'm going to assume the other elements/molecules are equally nonhazardous at these increases in concentration. I have not done any thinking about water yet but as a pure concentration of normal atmospheric elements, I don't think it's hazardous. Gas concentrations with an oxygen concentrator: Normal Atmosphere 90% O2 concentration "Perfect" oxygen concentrator Nitrogen 78.07388% 5.75902% 0.00000% Oxygen 20.94836% 90.03845% 95.54066% Argon 0.93393% 4.01412% 4.25943% Carbon dioxide[6] 0.04120% 0.17707% 0.18789% Neon 0.00182% 0.00782% 0.00830% Helium 0.00052% 0.00225% 0.00239% Methane[7] 0.00018% 0.00077% 0.00082% Krypton 0.00011% 0.00049% 0.00052%

I've had my Mooney and my 182 in my 50' X 50' hangar for quite a while. No problem at all, other than the fact that I also have a car and a 12 X 20 room in the corner. And two couches. And 4 tables. And a snowplow.

One screw, I think. I had some problems at one point and slid the Xi out and the old one back in. Then later I swapped them again. It was that easy. The configuration of both was correct, so there wasn't much to do for that. I never flew with the old one back in, just testing some stuff.

Last year I bought a whole new GTN-750 Xi plus an install kit for maybe $17k. Had the avionics guy at the shop swap them during annual, he charged me $1,500 I think. I now have a whole GTN-750 plus install kit to put in the other plane.

@EricJ I expect the FAA is only considering those that do show up on sectionals, but is considering all of those. I think those totally count: I keep my airplane at one of them. I tend to stop at those kinds of airports when I can on cross countries. Not sure why you consider those airports 'wack' but to me those are just regular everyday airports. Sure, I've stopped at plenty of airports that do have FAA funded infrastructure. And I'm pretty jealous of those. Giant new fuel farms. Pristine runways and ramps from the best cement. On the other hand, all of that stuff takes ongoing maintenance which the FAA won't pay for as far as I know.

@Pinecone We don't pay $100/month hangars. We pay $200/month bare land. (lease plus mandatory insurance) and it's more like $250/month once you add property tax on top, since we pay property tax on the building. Hangars at my airport are either 40X40 or 50X50. So to be generous, let's take the 50X50 as an example... We are spending $2,000/year to rent 2,500 square feet of bare land. That's $35,000 per acre per year for land rental. With no services. No water, no sewer, no power, no internet. I paid to get sewer and power and internet to my hangar, it wasn't provided to me. And the city won't let me bring water out unless I pay for it to be brought out to everybody, at the city's standards, which is a 8" main line, at $2.5M. So that's not going to happen. I've got land I'd *LOVE* to rent for $35,000 per acre. I agree that these rental prices are nuts! We likely have one or two hangars with no aviation use going on inside. I've received complaints about this in the short time I've been an airport manager. My position on this is that as long as anyone who wants a hangar can get one, I don't care. And anybody can walk to the Twisp town hall or email them a lease request, and get a hangar lot just as good as anybody else's. So I'm not planning on doing any hangar inspections. Back to the bigger topic: Airports generally have to be part of the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS) to receive federal funding. That list can be found here: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/airports/planning_capacity/npias/current/ARP-NPIAS-2025-2029-Appendix-A.pdf Out of 20,032 airports in the United States, 3,287 are NPIAS airports. That's 16.4% of the airports that can receive federal funds. I'm just guessing here, but I'll guess that those 16.4% of the airports are very much the larger airports. And almost all of them have fuel, and FBOs, and probably every one of the 520 towered airports in the US is part of NPIAS. So a little podunk airport with no fuel, no tower, no FBO has no funding source at the national level. So if you consider a class D airport with a part-time tower to be podunk, you'd probably think that every airport has federal money. But the majority of airports do not get federal funds. But its not true by the numbers I can find.

@Pinecone At our airport, a new hangar land lease is about $1,250 or $1,300 a year (I don't know what they are after the last rate increase) and you are required to also get insurance of about $1,000 a year. At Omak (24NM away) the hangar lots are $325/year At Okanogan (21NM away) they are $300/year At Chelan (30NM away) they are $525/year So at Twisp, it's at least $1,750/year more expensive than those three places. Which isn't a huge deal in terms of aviation costs really. But out here in the boonies, considering it's 3X the price of nearby airports, people are a little bothered. The last time a hangar was built here was 2014 I think. I think our rates are too high. At the very least they should waive 1 to 5 years of lease or discount it to encourage new tenants. We've got room for way more than 100 new hangars, but there is no motivation to build. As long as there are empty lots, I think we should encourage new buildings that can be used as hangars even if they are being used for something else at the moment. Get some artists in. Some industrial. ANYTHING.

Do medical helicopters ever land in Podunk, WA? Yes. They sure do. And an actual helipad at our airport is on the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) https://wsdot.wa.gov/business-wsdot/support-local-programs/delivering-your-project/statewide-transportation-improvement-program-stip How about occasional jet traffic? We get both here in Podunk, AL. At 2701' runway length, with a 5,000' runway less than 5 miles away? All the jets land at S52 instead of 2S0. How about firefighting? That nearby airport with a much better runway.... Local companies flying in executives, consultants, parts? These all have local impact. Well, I've been meaning to buy a company to be CEO of, but until then... Chad is the closest thing we have to a CEO coming in and out. And he's focused on his 912IS powered carbon cub and is selling his SR22T. But with no landing fees, no services, no fuel, it's not like he's spending any more money here. There is very little business in the valley, it's just tourism, old broke farmers, and remote workers. How about firefighting? Aren't you in wildfire country? Unfortunately while we are in fire country, one of the first smokejumper bases in the world was that same airport 5 miles away.. https://www.nifc.gov/about-us/our-partners/blm/great-basin-smokejumpers/history (S52 == Winthrop, WA) Tankers, aerial commanders, helicopters, smoke jumpers, etc. The same smokejumper base, 5 miles away... Do you have maintenance, avionics, fuel sales on the field? This is local payroll, which impacts the local economy; they also contribute to the local share of payroll taxes and sales taxes. Unfortunately, no. We only have 30 hangars, and with fuel (sigh) only 5 miles away as it is now, even if we did, it would not likely make a profit. We're not really on the way to anywhere either. No services. But these don't show up on audits of airport income, but they are real economic impact to the area. The state performs an economic impact study periodically: https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/aviation/aviation-plans-studies/aviation-planning/aviation-economic-impact-study and their assessment of the airport is that it provides about $750/year (Not in thousands or millions) to the local municipality. What we do have that I think is underrepresented is the several people like myself that live in the valley only because the airport is here. I buy 90% of my groceries and 80% of my misc. tools, parts, etc in the local municipality but I only moved here because the airport (and the airport car) was here in 2018 when I bought. Our town's budget is available online: https://cms5.revize.com/revize/twispwa/2025 Final Budget.pdf While there is stuff on the budget for the airport, they don't show the airport's income. They have a very aggressive capital improvement plan for airport stuff, but I don't see any of that actually happening with funding from the town. @PeteMc Yeah, there is a relatively nearby airport (Mansfield, WA) that is getting sold/leased/shut-down because they just don't have the money to maintain it. I don't want my airport to be in the same position.

I am the airport manager for a podunk low traffic CTAF field.... I'm not paid at all although we do have money problems. Between snow plowing, mowing, water, power, administrative overhead (town clerk, public works director, etc) as well as repairs and replacement hardware such as sprinkler heads, irrigation pumps and windsocks we spend about 1.5X to 2X what we bring in from hangar land leases. This doesn't include asphalt maintenance or replacement, which hasn't had any town money in over 15 years. And maybe didn't get any back then either, I wasn't here then. We get some grants from the state but the grants typically require a 5% match and the town won't pay anything so the local pilots cover that percentage. We don't have any federal money and never have. I use my own personal string trimmer for all of the spots the lawn mowers don't get, and I replace all of the sprinklers that break, and replace the windsocks when they are too old. And the parts of the airport that are not irrigated grass, I use my own personal lawn mower to mow. We're trying to make it work, but it's a hard sell for the city to spend tax money on the airport when most people get effectively zero value out of it.

I'm a CFI and do this with licensed pilots that I'm providing instruction to regularly. They manipulate the controls, we both log PIC.

I've looked at them. They only gain me about 50 knots on my Rocket, and effectively no useful load gain. What I've been using as my target is 100 KTAS airspeed increase and 400# more useful load with full fuel. The TBM 850 will get me those things. The maintenance costs of the TBM (According to Avex, for one specific example I've been looking at, for the next 5 years) should be about 2X my Rocket's maintenance. They don't include any engine overhaul reserve though. And the fuel burn is about 2.5X, but it's jet A instead of AVGAS.