General Aviation News

Picture of the Day: Sometimes you just need a little more engine cooling

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Frequent contributor Hayman Tam sent us this picture for Picture of the Day, explaining: “Sometimes you just need a bit of extra engine cooling. This is the starboard engine of a Martin 404 Skyliner displayed at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson.

“Donated to the museum in 2000, the airplane was on its way to the museum from Montana when one cylinder on that engine failed and was thrown out through the cowling somewhere over northern Arizona,” he continued. “The plane made an emergency landing, then finished the flight with a replacement engine in place. The museum decided to display the Skyliner with the bad engine on it and a substitute cylinder poking out.” [Read more…]

It’s not the dollars, it’s the imagination

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For the past few months I’ve been shopping for a house. Not a particularly big house. Or an impressive one. Just a house that my family and I can move to where we’ll be dry when it rains, warm when it gets cold, and comfortable when the Florida sun beats down in August.

If I were to put my search into aeronautical terms, I’m looking for a good, used Cessna 172. A reasonable purchase price coupled with modest long-term maintenance costs is what I’m hoping for. Oh yes, and I want this mystery house to be no more than a few miles from the house I currently call home.

To me, none of this seems irrational, elitist, foolhardy or reckless. And I assume most Americans agree with me, since more than 60% of Americans own a home, or are making payments toward the purchase of a place they can call their own.

This caused a thought to pop into my head. Why do so many Americans own homes? Presumably because they see value in the proposition. [Read more…]

NC airport installs putting green

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Workers are putting the finishing touches on a new putting green at North Carolina’s Moore County Airport (KSOP), which serves the golf-crazy village of Pinehurst, N.C.

“Pinehurst is the golf capital of America,” said Dan Maples, the golf architect who designed the new putting green. “Go anywhere in the world and mention Pinehurst and people know about our village and the story of golf in America.”

The airport already features a large sign that faces the runway and states, “The Aviation Gateway to the Home of American Golf.” [Read more…]

Online Cessna Flight Training System now available to all flight schools

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The latest online edition of the King Schools Cessna Flight Training System is now available to all flight schools.

The online curriculum integrates flight and ground studies and ensures that pilots and their instructors know what they have completed, how they are doing, and what’s next, according to company officials. Each course includes video previews of each flying lesson and a home-study ground school and test preparation section.

Pilots also can download the free iPad app that will let them study, prepare for flight lessons, and view their progress, even when offline, company officials add. [Read more…]

Picture of the Day: Boggy Creek takeoff

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Roger Helton, CEO of SuperPetrel USA, sent in this photo, of one of the company’s LSAs preparing to take off from the Boggy Creek Canal in Florida.

Would you like to have your photo featured as Picture of the Day? You can submit it via this form.

All photos sent in for Picture of the Day are also considered for our new Page 4 photo feature in the print issue of General Aviation News, as well as A Year in Pictures in the December issues. [Read more…]

Hurricane Irma can’t stop SUN ’n FUN

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As the thousands of visitors walked around the SUN ’n FUN grounds this year, it must have been hard for them to imagine the devastation that Hurricane Irma brought to the airport just eight months ago.

The hurricane roared through Lakeland on Sept. 10, 2017, with sustained winds of 100 mph and gusts over 120 mph.

“The SUN ’n FUN property sits on the south side of the airport and the winds were from the northeast, so they came, unabated, across all the acres of property until it hit dead on into the heart of SUN ’n FUN,” recalls John “Lites” Leenhouts, SUN ’n FUN president.

What that meant was “huge foliage devastation,” he said. [Read more…]

Coming soon to FIS–B: Lightning, turbulence, icing and more

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By JOHN CROFT, FAA NextGen Outreach Writer/Editor

Pilots will soon have access to new weather data in their cockpits over the 978 megahertz (MHz) Universal Access Transceiver link.

In June, the FAA will begin broadcasting six new weather products: Lightning strikes, turbulence, icing forecasts, cloud tops, graphical Airmen’s Meteorological Information (AIRMET) and Center Weather Advisories.

The new weather information will complement the original 13 “baseline” weather products —including Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) mosaics, winds aloft and terminal forecasts — in the Flight Information Services-Broadcast (FIS-B) feed. [Read more…]

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