Exploring

With the announcement of Roswell, New Mexico, as the new home of the National Air Races, it seems a good time to give an update on the go-fast crowd.

One of the big motivators to amateur aircraft builders is simply dreaming about the adventures that their personal aircraft will allow them to accomplish.

There isn’t a pilot alive who doesn’t know what a checklist is. There are, however, pilots no longer with us who failed to use one.

Publisher Dennis Shattuck took a flier on a growing segment of aviation back when magazines littered newsstands across the country and well before we...

Never one to revel in the practical, recently I found myself expounding to a colleague on why the general aviation world moves at 2700 rpm.

A major part of any Experimental kit will be hundreds of products that the kit supplier didn’t manufacture or fabricate but simply sourced from the open market to supply with their custom kit components.

I was chopping firewood under a dead ash tree, whiffing deep, ax-head-shaped divots into my lawn, when I remembered the time, once upon a takeoff, that a living oak tree nearly got the best of me.

Forget about all those sharp corners, the quantity of fuel aboard and the fire extinguisher you threw in the baggage compartment without tying it down. It is always important to at least consider the fact that the most dangerous thing to have in the cockpit when things go wrong is the owner of the airplane.

Because few new products get announced at Sun ’n Fun, there’s often a dead zone between April and the big intros at AirVenture in July. But that doesn’t mean it’s total dullsville. A couple of new bits have caught my eye recently.

By now, the Apple iPad has established itself as a strong utility player in many aircraft, most often running as a so-called electronic flight bag (EFB) to display moving maps, charts, weather and traffic. But Falken Avionics’ Flight View system has a different take on putting Apple’s tablet to use—as a primary instrument.