TangoTango

I bought three of the Sunguards from Aircraft Spruce. Cheap, simple, effective. Passengers and myself can move them around and stick them wherever needed, and even double them up if desired. I store them in the seat backs in the envelopes they came in - it helps keep them clean and readily accessible.

The Windsock report read like AI gobbledygook to me.

My '93 has the compass on the post. There is a '98 Allegro on Controller with the compass on the post as well. I think only the long bodies got the compass on the glareshield.

You remove the compass before folding the glareshield, correct? Mine won't clear the side panels without removing the compass. Of course, I'm careful about doing too much bending on 30+ year old plastic...

This past summer I flew to HPN and kept the plane with Atlantic (even did the Hudson SFRA on the way up). I was happy with them, ramp was $20/night and Atlantic gave us a ride to the Metro-North station at White Plains. I was going to Manhattan, though... FRG is probably closer for Queens. Isn't @201er from NYC?

Agreed. After all, the Beechcraft guys routinely have to replace fuel bladders after similar periods of time. Is there even any truth to the claim of the factory ever putting out defective fuel tanks? I seem to recall some changes to how the sealant was applied during assembly in the early 2000s. Mine is original from 1993, and while I'm sure I am approaching the end of its reasonable service life, I certainly wouldn't call it "grossly improper workmanship at the factory production line".

When I shopped Avemco this year, they quoted per-person sublimits, not per-passenger. I was surprised by this, and wondered if a potential claimant on the ground might be more aggressive in pursuing restitution than someone who made the decision to get in the airplane...

As long as you start with a big one, you can remove pages until it's just right

That's not been my experience, but one of my bases is an FAA tower. I suspect wherever you're based will be friendliest, as they recognize your comings and goings and get used to working with you.

Thanks for the tip, I just bought their last one and am waiting on shipping. I'd never dealt with Preferred Airparts; they were nice folks and had a surprisingly broad inventory with prices I found comparable to the competition. Their $20 order minimum suckered me right in though

My plane has had Hubba Hubba Caps on the mains for years according to the 337, and at annual I noticed a definite difference in cleanliness inside the wheel hub between those and my nosewheel (which does not have a cover). They definitely help prevent wear inside our (very expensive) wheels. My caps are older and unpainted so they have yellowed - LANCECASPER's are newer and look very nice.

I wonder if the problem was congestion on the Garmin end of the pipe. If enough people are downloading chart updates at the same time, maybe it slows down until you try again at a less congested time? For what it's worth, I use the GP on Android and never have any trouble downloading chart updates. Maybe Garmin hosts those updates on a different server. I suppose it's also possible Garmin uses some kind of regional hosting solution for update data and some regions get more congested than others.

I just ran a full report valuation on my airplane, and I am unimpressed. The full report is emailed to you quickly, and the first page is the "Report Summary" which includes lots of incorrect performance specs (it wasn't smart enough to catch the 2900# gross weight on later J models, it quotes takeoff and landing distances that can't be attained at 2740# or 2900# on an isa day, and it states the M20J range is only 700nm) and an "executive brief" with lots of adjectives. It also includes a "Base Value", but there is no description of how they arrived at that number (are avionics and hours included in this? It doesn't appear so) The second page is the "Windsock Value Deep-Dive" with a note that it uses a separate model and "does not indicate exact results but should be used as a rough sense for explaining why the model breaks down the way it does". This has lots of inputs with numbers attached, but very little description of how they work. For instance, it added $4,189.47 for "Aircraft Capabilities" and $5,751.79 for "Aircraft History" (these are separate from avionics and airframe time), and it included a $0.66 adder for an engine 150 hours from TBO (I guess the model assumes TBO as the baseline and adds $0.66 for the last 150 hours?). There is no total line on page 2, but if you add the adders up mine came out over 10% higher than the estimate on page 1. Some of the statistics on later pages are interesting, but the whole thing has a little too much AI for me to trust. I'll keep using Jimmy Garrison's guide.

I've lost FIS-B updates for a bit while traversing one of these areas, and the weather data just got stale until I regained coverage. As stated above, it isn't the entirety of the NOTAM area, and it isn't every time. It's occasionally annoying, but so far it hasn't been so annoying that I've changed mission plans or paid for Starlink / XM.

100% agree. I've never regretted the purchase of a quality tool. In fact, I like to joke around the house "he who dies with the most tools wins." It's only kind of a joke.