Technical Aviation in Something Directory

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Piper Seneca, Piper’s venerable Seneca is what we think of as a full-circle airplane. Would-be twin owners often consider it as their first choice, but then shop around for a Baron, or a Skymaster or maybe an Aztec. They then come full circle back to the Seneca for several good reasons, the leading one being that as twins go, the Seneca is eminently practical. It does nothing exceedingly well—it’s not fast, nor a joy to fly nor will it turn heads on the ramp—but it does a lot well enough. MapComm Shootout: GNS 480 Excels, The all-in-one GPS color mapcomm has become such an avionics standard that a used airplane without at least a Garmin GNS 430 hardly gets a second look. And for any owners planning an upgrade in this market, you’ll likely be sending money to Garmin anyway, for it owns all three mapcomm megaboxes, the GNS 430/530 and the GNS 480, which it acquired when it bought UPSAT in 2003. So which is best for a given airplane? There’s no easy answer, but in this article, we’ll summarize the major features of each. Each product does so much that we can’t detail all of the operations. For this review, we’ll hit the high notes only. Cracked Crankcases: Repair or Replace? Doctors learn that a certain bedside manner is helpful when conveying bad news to a patient. Airplane mechanics—at least the ones we know—don’t necessarily feel the same obligation, thus when catastrophe looms large during an annual inspection, you might hear, “Hey, we found a crack in your case, you’re hosed.” The medical analogy is apt, for a cracked case is the equivalent of plugged arteries; surgery isn’t just an option, it’s a must. In most cases, a cracked case will ground the airplane and an overhaul will follow. No matter how much time is on the engine, splitting the case to fix a crack and reassembling it makes little sense. A full overhaul or reman is the way to go. Passive Headsets: Clark, Telex are Tops, With the exception of GPS, hardly any segment of the GA gadget and accessories market lacks for competition. That’s especially true of headsets, where there are dozens of models to pick from in both active and passive noise reduction designs. There are so many, in fact, that it’s impractical to test them all. So for this article, we picked seven popular passive headsets and wrung them out, both in the audio laboratory and in an impartial, focus-group aircraft test. Interestingly, our lab findings and inflight results diverged dramatically on some of the headsets. It turns out that just because a headset has good lab numbers doesn’t mean it’s a go-to model in the airplane. Comfort and perceived audio quality can and should rule the decision. A Noise Reduction Rating Is Nice, But Its Not Everything, Following our report on active noise reduction headsets in the May issues, the e-mails trickled in. With all those expensive lab tests, why the heck didn’t you guys publish good numbers on noise reduction values? a couple of readers asked. After all, manufacturers do this. We’ll concede the point, but it’s not as simple as that. Top 10 Aircraft Safety Investments, In the days before even modest sedans had six airbags, vehicle sniffing radar and kiddie seats that could double as nuclear containment devices, car guy Lee Iacocca once famously said safety doesn’t sell, style does. Four decades later, in the airplane realm, safety apparently does sell, given the success of Cirrus with its full-airplane parachute system.

 

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