toto

The only downside to the Aera vs the D3 is depending on ship's power for AHRS. If you lose your panel, the Aera is powered, but you've lost your backup attitude reference.

I'm sort of morbidly curious why on earth someone flew a plane seven years out of annual. Ferry flight for maintenance that didn't result in a signature?

Dynon email promo from today. The D3 in particular seems like a nice follow-up to the popularish D2 Pocket Panel. (And for about the same price as a used D2 commands on eBay these days.) ‌ Dynon Oshkosh AirVenture 2018 News Introducing the D3 Pocket Panel and DRX Portable Dual Band ADS-B Traffic and Weather Receiver. We are exited to tell you about two new products in the Dynon Portable line. If you'll be at Oshkosh next week, we'll be demonstrating both the DRX and D3 at our booth in Hangar D. We are also offering daily forums at our outdoor tent location (booth 496), which is located between hangars D and B. Forum times and descriptions are at the bottom of this email. Hope to see you there! PORTABLE TOUCHSCREEN EFIS WITH SYNTHETIC VISION Meet the latest edition of Dynon’s popular portable EFIS line - the D3 Pocket Panel. Featuring improved brightness, a new intuitive touchscreen interface, new synthetic vision display, and an even lower price point, the D3 is the most advanced portable safety device Dynon has ever made. Both of the included cockpit mounting options require no tools, allowing the D3 to be deployed in any aircraft without regulatory approval. The D3’s list price is $995, but at introduction pilots may find it available as low as $879 from authorized Dynon dealers. MORE INFORMATION Portable Dual Band ADS-B Traffic and Weather Receiver Pair this small and portable dual band ADS-B receiver with your favorite mobile app for superior in-flight situational awareness. Get the full traffic picture with ADS-B traffic reception on both 978 MHz (UAT) and 1090 MHz frequencies, and receive free text and graphical weather from the FAA’s network of ADS-B ground stations in the US. With superior battery life, the Dynon DRX can last all weekend on a single charge. As usual, the DRX carries on the Dynon tradition of bringing affordable, high quality avionics to all pilots. It’s list price is only $395, but pilots may find it at dealers as low as $349. The DRX is available July 2018. MORE INFORMATION

I'll go with the great minds thing, but I laughed out loud when I saw your post right after I hit "submit"

Slightly off-topic, but I'll just mention that ATC can be pretty accommodating even without an RNAV-equipped ac. I had one of the original Garmin GPS-100 units (VFR only, before approach certified GPS was even a thing). I had the GPS-100 and/or a handheld GPS, and would routinely file IFR with an airway routing and a note in the comments section that said "GPS on board." I filed /A, so the equipment code accurately reflected installed equipment. Once airborne, I would ask for a "vector direct to destination," and would almost always get it. They would often reply with "say heading to destination" and then give me a vector for whatever heading I said. This was never once questioned by handoff controllers, even on a hundreds-of-miles-long vector. I was equipped to fly airways if necessary to a VOR/LOC/ILS on the other end. I was always careful to track progress on the VOR receiver while flying my assigned heading, with the GPS as a remarkably accurate supplement. But I basically flew a vector to the destination. Anyway, don't discount the value of the rating even with limited equipment. Keep your personal minimums conservative, always have an out, and don't be afraid to ask ATC for something. They can be quite helpful

One of the nice things about many Android-based tablets is the ability to expand storage with an SD card. Most of the EFB apps will allow you to put all downloads on the SD card, saving internal storage for the system. This can help to future-proof the tablet, and keep acquisition cost low. (Apple charges like $200 for $10 worth of flash memory, but with an Android tablet you can just buy the SD card for ten bucks online.)

Interesting, thanks!

The AOPA course is free - I suspect they are all free. It's definitely mature - most of this stuff was published 2003ish, though they do tweak the content from time to time. I really have no idea why the annual requirement or the standalone course. Seems like it would be better if they just synced with the biannual instructor certificate renewal. My sense is that they're primarily concerned with US flight schools understanding requirements for training foreign pilots.

I have a recurring Google calendar event set up, and they email me when it's due. Every year I go, "what the heck is that? ..... Oh, right, the TSA thing..."

I really like that AOPA is trying to tackle this issue - by shining light on it, if nothing else. You can report price gouging on their online form if you're so inclined. I had reason to fly into Addison recently (had an event within 5 miles of the airport), but decided against it - eight bucks for 100LL and suddenly a $40 Uber ride from McKinney sounded cheap. Sounds like Denton is getting proud of their ramp, but $4.26 for SS still isn't bad (assuming they waive fees with fuel purchase). As long as Addison can charge whatever they want, there's no real incentive for the farther-out airports to discount.

Interesting, thanks @Yetti. I assume that the Stratux folks have already worked out auto-start, but the Android snippets suggest that it's possible to do this with a configuration change that doesn't require rooting. Probably harder to do with an iDevice.

I wouldn't recommend this approach. You'll have a lot of work to do learning how to fly the procedures, and that can be demanding even in simulated instrument conditions. Adding real weather into the mix will just slow down your learning. Get the IR ticket, then (very) slowly start tackling real weather. Set your personal minimums very conservatively at first. Try flying for extended periods in IMC, but with lots of "outs" - think 3000' ceilings and 1000' thick OVC layers with VMC above. Ask for a block and just fly around in IMC, gaining confidence as you go. The real weather is out there, and it's not all that much fun. You'll have plenty of time to experience it after you've got your IR.

Piper had an automatic gear extension system available as an option on late-70's Arrows. The system was widely disliked, I guess because there was a perception that the gear extension could come at the worst possible time. (Adding a bunch of drag when you're trying to eke out a marginal climb.) It was possible to disable the system with a little lock switch on the center console near the flap handle. I've seen Arrows that have a "disable auto-extend" on the custom pre-takeoff checklist. Anyway, it always seemed like cheap insurance to me, and the system seems to work as advertised. But it only lasted a couple of years in the market before Piper removed it completely. I don't remember whether the Piper system was based purely on airspeed, but it certainly didn't include a radar altimeter. If you made the same system today, you could probably incorporate GPS position and lower the gear only if you're within some threshold distance from a published runway.

Saw a write-up on this in the last Aviation Consumer (there's also a write-up in a recent IFR magazine article that's available for free online). Seems pretty interesting, though I don't have a Bluetooth headset and it sounds like Bluetooth is at least a good idea, if not exactly required. Any PIREPS on MiraCheck? Or anything similar out there? ETA: The thing I'm really interested in with MiraCheck is the audio checklists with verbal responses. I've always thought that electronic checklists were gimmicky and not better than their paper/plastic counterparts. But the voice capability is intriguing.

I certainly wouldn't want a tablet to be the *only* source of this data. My tablet typically has a third copy of approach plates. It's a handy reference, but not critical. (I usually have a paper copy of the most likely approaches.)

Right, my concern is having this available in an emergency - where workload is high, and any required setup steps draw attention away from flying the plane. It's interesting to hear how people use these apps. I basically use a tablet for flight planning and approach plates, and it doesn't leave my flight bag on a VFR flight. I like having a semi-permanently mounted (e.g., in an Airgizmos dock) device in the cockpit that's always powered up and always showing something relevant in the event that I need it. Something that's battery powered and doesn't depend on any outside nav source. Historically for me that has always been a dedicated aviation gadget. I've seen more and more people over the last five years or so using a general-purpose tablet in the same semi-permanent context, and they seem really happy with that setup. Using a $200-800 tablet certainly sounds more cost-effective than a dedicated device that's twice as expensive and does 1/10th as much, but there are obviously some tradeoffs. The "start an aviation app when powered up" thing is my first mental hurdle, but there's also a lot of other tablet silliness that I've never seen in a dedicated device. Apps crashing randomly, shutting down because it gets too hot, touchscreen UIs that weren't really designed for turbulence, etc. But it sounds like the benefits outweigh the consequences for most.

Well, that's my whole concern. If I'm using a tablet for navigation or attitude reference, I'm in trouble. And the way I'm thinking about this is: "that which can happen - will." With the dedicated device, you've got a lot of information at your disposal even if your series of mistakes included missing a checklist item. If there's a way to auto-start the aviation app, every time the device is powered on, then you could mitigate the effects of at least that one mistake.

Curious what solutions people have come up with for this... I've owned a variety of dedicated aviation handheld devices, including panel-mounted G* devices like a 696 and an Aera. I've also used a number of different mobile apps on iOS and Android. The mobile apps are getting advanced enough that their functionality may well eclipse the dedicated devices (at least arguably), but the thing I can't get around is that you're using a general-purpose device for a very specialized purpose. So if I have, say, an iPad mounted in the cockpit, but I forget to open an aviation app, it's a terrible emergency backup. In the worst-case scenario where I'm IMC and the entire panel disappeared, I'd have to unlock the thing, navigate to the app, open it, wait for initialization, etc. All while bouncing around in the soup. But the dedicated device would have powered up with the master switch, and even if I didn't touch it at all, it's got satellites locked, synced with an ADS-B in source, and displayed a very helpful moving map (maybe even with some synthetic vision or an AHRS-based attitude reference). That's pretty helpful stuff. For those who strongly prefer a general-purpose iOS or Android device as a backup heading/attitude/nav reference, how do you make sure you've got it when you need it? Does the app init sequence just become a mandatory checklist item? Or is there a nice way of forcing an aviation app to launch at device startup, so it's always locked and loaded?

He'd still have to buy the radio stack. A 750 and a second nav/com would be at least $20k plus installation. (A 750+650 combo would be more like 30k plus install.)

This has been widely discussed before, but I've always found Mike Busch's description of reman engines interesting: Now, when TCM or Lycoming builds up a factory rebuilt engine (colloquially but incorrectly referred to as a "factory reman"), it pulls some "anonymous" case halves from one pile, an "anonymous" crankshaft from another pile, and so forth. When the engine is completely assembled, it gets a new data plate, a new serial number, and a new logbook. The logbook starts out at zero time-in-service. Why zero? Because there's no other reasonable figure to put in the logbook. The case halves are certainly not zero-time, but there's no record of how much time they've accrued. The crankshaft may not be new, but there's no record of how much time is on the crank, either. And so on. In short, the "zero-time" logbook that comes with a factory rebuilt engine in no way implies that the engine is "newer" or "better" than a field overhaul. All it implies is that the reused components in the engine are of unknown heritage...nobody knows how long they were in service prior to the time then were cleaned up, inspected, and reused in your engine! https://www.avweb.com/news/maint/182849-1.html

I haven't done an accelerated course myself, but I know pilots who have had very good experiences with GATTS in Manhattan, Kansas. GATTS has a 3-day CPL course.

I've been holding my breath for the Dynon product (SkyView HDX), but honestly at this point I just love seeing competition in the non-TSO MFD/PFD space. BK is a bigger name than Dynon in the certified market (albeit one with seriously deteriorated credibility), and inches us a bit closer to the G3X certified announcement that I keep daydreaming about.

Yep. I was taught this maneuver during primary training, and my instructor demonstrated it a couple of times as a way to descend out of inadvertent IMC. (The demonstration was in a Cessna 150.) I've never heard the term "benign spiral." Afaik this is meant to be a non-turning maneuver.

There's a guy running for mayor who intends to reopen Meigs Field. I don't follow Chicago politics, and I have no clue what his chances are, but it's interesting that someone thinks it's a good idea.

Thanks for posting this. Well worth a watch. I noticed that there is also a long-form version of this video with a full pilot interview. Pretty great stuff.