Exploring

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. 

Since we live on an airpark, have a large hangar of our own and my fiancé works for an airplane-kit company, many friends have...

Humans are amazingly adaptable but sometimes we lack imagination. Here’s one example.

Like some sort of verbal restricted area, certain subjects are such tropes in aviation scribbling that I steer around them like they were cumulonimbus....

I bucked the first rivet on my Van’s RV-10 project in October 2007. Barrett Precision Engines built my engine from a core, a decision...

We are seeing more talk of people rebuilding cores found in barns or the back of hangars.