Tough as nails, able to get in and out of small unimproved runways or high mountain lakes, while carrying a ton of freight, ponderously slow and superbly stable, the Beaver led a renaissance in backcountry air service. It also set standards for safety and reliability in the far-flung wilderness of northern North America.

It spread those attributes around the world, achieving previously impossible results from the Sahara to Mount Everest and both poles. There were 1,167 built, and they remain coveted and useful platforms in myriad roles almost 80 years after the first was finished in 1947.

• READ MORE: WWII-Era ‘Philippine Mars’ Transport Seaplane Headed to Arizona Museum

CF-JOS (now C-FJOS) has toiled most of its life on British Columbia’s rugged West Coast, initially as a lifeline for loggers, miners, and anglers, and most recently, as one of dozens of Beavers providing scheduled floatplane passenger service for Harbour Air Seaplanes between Vancouver and Seattle and about a dozen coastal communities. 

C-FJOShas been written off twice and rebuilt (Beavers are often rebuilt from the data plate alone), has tens of thousands of hours and a million stories, including its own electrifying one. Now, at 68 years old, this seemingly vintage aircraft sits at the forefront of a massive technological renaissance in air travel. 

In 2019, Harbour Air fitted C-FJOS with a magniX electric motor, batteries, and control system, and it has since accumulated more than 78 flights. Based on the experience of the past four years with C-FJOS, Harbour Air has ordered 50 electric propulsion systems from magniX to convert its whole fleet of Beavers and will likely become the first airline to use electric power in scheduled passenger service, possibly by 2026.

In doing so, the chunky, awkward-looking, sheet-metal creation of another era will climb slowly past sleekly modern multicopters and other futuristic designs to serve the market the new aircraft were supposed to generate.

It’s a story of innovation tempered with practicality that is a common thread in the development of aviation as it takes on a future that demands a nimble and responsible industry.

The original Beaver was a fuel hog whose radial engine spewed so much oil in normal operation that de Havilland put an oil filler spout in the cockpit so the sump could be replenished in flight. That unrestrained use of petroleum products is receiving considerable scrutiny these days and the public, through its governments and regulators, want an aviation industry that can get it anywhere on earth in less than a day without beating up the planet.

• READ MORE: Elfly Adds Facilities at Torp Airport to Build Fjord-Hopping Electric Seaplane

It’s a tall order. It takes a lot of energy to hoist a few hundred people to 35,000 feet and move them thousands of miles. But progress is being made, and the goal of making aviation a net-zero-carbon creator by 2050 is considered doable.

Electric aviation is just part of that solution. Hybrid systems using hydrogen show promise, but it’s unlikely that hydrocarbon-fueled aircraft will become obsolete anytime soon. But with developments in the production of sustainable aviation fuels, much of it from agricultural waste and overcapacity, they can be made much better for the environment.

The quest for environmental stewardship in aviation has already paid dividends. The latest  aircraft engines are up to 30 percent more fuel efficient and have the side benefit of being much quieter than previous generations because noise is the sound of energy being wasted.

The environmental shift is also leading to a change in aircraft design philosophy, although it’s fair to say that most of the futuristic designs on the drawing boards are nothing new. 

The physics of flight are well understood, and the blended bodies and truss-braced wing concepts now being explored are the results of technology catching up to those seemingly radical designs.

In the longer term, there are concepts that seem right out of science fiction that are being seriously studied. One that stands out is using nuclear fusion to power aircraft.

• READ MORE: Connecticut Airport Keeping Seaplanes on the River

But if that sounds ridiculously far-fetched (and by the way the concept of nuclear-powered aircraft emerged in the late 1950s), imagine telling one of the folks at de Havilland in 1956 building CF-JOS that it would fly on electric power. 

The plane was built at the height of the Beaver’s popularity. Orders were pouring in from all over the world, and its many innovative and performance features for the time made it a state-of-the-art aircraft.

Creativity and big ideas have always driven aviation, and there’s no sign of that letting up. But what’s interesting and different about the industry is that when something is developed that just plain works, its life is practically endless through continuous improvement. Just ask a Harbour Air pilot, or the crew of a B-52, which is about the same age as a Beaver and is forecast to have a service life of 100 years.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: From Radial to Radical appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In an August 6 letter to Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury, Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) president Jason Ambrosi urged the manufacturer to reconsider its proposal to reduce cockpit crew from two to one from entering the commercial aviation environment.

• READ MORE: Airbus, Avincis to Explore Europewide Electric Air Taxi Operations

Ambrosi cited the recent CrowdStrike cybersecurity incident as an example of the risks associated with an overreliance on technology. Ambrosi stated that technology should complement human expertise and monitored airline operations rather than replace it.

“Technological advancements can and have enhanced aviation safety, but in order to maintain and enhance our current level of safety, technology alone will never replace the indispensable role of two pilots in the flight deck,” Ambrosi said in the letter.

In addition to ALPA, the letter garnered support signatures from leaders of the European Cockpit Association and the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, which represent tens of thousands of pilots around the world.

This article first appeared on AVweb.com.

The post Associations Urge Airbus to Reconsider Single-Pilot Cockpit Proposal appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Once a pilot adds an instrument rating, they’re legal to fly an ILS in blowing snow all the way to 200-foot minimums with an 1,800 RVR. But few of us would actually attempt such a demanding task with only our training and perhaps a bit of experience in actual conditions under our belt. I’ll call those folks “pilots with an instrument rating,” differentiating them from someone with more experience who would confidently undertake that operation. I’ll call that person an “instrument pilot.”

So, if your goal is to gain high levels of proficiency, experience, and comfort to ultimately grow from being a pilot with an instrument rating into an instrument pilot, how can you do that? I’m glad you asked because that’s just what we’re going to cover here.

Why Do It?

Why might you want to do this? It’s a lot of work, will take time, and generally involves nontrivial expense. What’s to be gained? Everybody’s answer will be somewhat different, but I can help you find yours.

Perhaps the most important question is, “Why did you get the instrument rating in the first place?” Maybe you did it to meet career aspirations. Or possibly you did it just to improve the utility of your basic private certificate, allowing you to go when the weather had been keeping you on the ground as a VFR pilot. 

In both of those cases, I’ll—perhaps argumentatively—encourage you to be the best pilot you can be. As a professional, your clients will certainly expect and deserve that. You should be able to competently complete any flight that’s both legal and safe for the aircraft. If you can’t, well, reread the previous sentence.

• READ MORE: How to Meet Instrument Rating Requirements

But what if it’s just you trying to go visit a friend? Don’t you deserve the same level of competence and confidence in the management of your flight and control of your airplane? It’s common during those personal flights to bring along a friend or family member. They deserve the same level of consideration as any paying passenger, so you owe it to yourself and your passengers to, again, be the best pilot you can be.

On top of all that, there’s a certain degree of pride involved. How would you feel after that ILS at the destination if your needles were bouncing from peg to peg, and you somehow managed to luck out enough to see the runway as the needles passed through the center? Compare that with the satisfaction, and yes, the pride, in sliding down the approach with needles that barely migrated off the center circle. Challenge yourself to always do better, and you’ll rarely find yourself performing poorly. But if you do, you’ll almost certainly know exactly why, and you’ll resolve to recognize the same situation next time and surely use that recognition and anticipation to perform better.

What’s the Difference?

I’ve talked about pilots with an instrument rating versus instrument pilots, but what’s the difference? Defining “instrument pilot” is a bit easier, so I’ll start there. Note that all this is a distinction of my own creation, so if you talk with others about it, you might get that thousand-mile stare until you explain.

An instrument pilot is one who has had enough training, enough experience, and most critically maintains enough proficiency that they can handle most anything that a given flight might be expected to throw at them. That doesn’t mean comfortably flying your Cessna 182 into an area of moderate icing. But it does mean that the pilot is both comfortable and competent to handle an inadvertent encounter with more significant weather than on the day of the check ride. 

• READ MORE: Instrument Rating Can Expand Your Travel Horizons

That weather might include ice, moderate turbulence, significant gusty crosswinds, and, yes, lower visibility and ceilings than forecast—possibly all at the same time. Naturally, these conditions will produce a greater concentration and focus on the job at hand by the pilot, but they shouldn’t bring so significant a ramping of anxiety that performance or judgment suffers.

On the other hand, a pilot with an instrument rating is a newbie. But by newbie I don’t mean that the instrument check ride was recent enough that legal currency hasn’t yet lapsed. I mean that the pilot doesn’t have much (or any) experience with a broad enough range of weather and atmospheric conditions to remain mostly calm and focused in handling that. This pilot likely still views anything worse than basic VMC as a reason to reexamine the go/no-go decision and might (or should) have personal minimums not much lower than 1,000-3.

Your Path Via the Right Seat 

Say you recently aced your instrument-rating check ride. Or perhaps you’ve long had the rating but never really had both the opportunity and confidence to “get your nose wet” much more than in benign conditions. Regardless of your starting point, how do you get to be a confident, competent instrument pilot? 

Like many things in aviation, the answer to that question is “it depends” and has multiple paths. 

Say your ultimate goal is employment as a pilot. It doesn’t matter whether you want to end up at the airlines, freight pilot, charter pilot, or even personal or corporate pilot. Work hard to build your experience to the point where you can get that first job beyond a CFI at the local flight school. 

Your short-term goal should be to fly in the right seat in a two-pilot operation, so possibly the entry-level freight or medical transport jobs might not be the best choice. 

Having that experienced captain next to you will serve multiple purposes. First, it will allow you to experience more varied conditions than you might feel comfortable tackling on your own, especially at first. Also, while your captains might not be CFIs, you’ll receive a lot of instruction. Many captains in this environment understand your need for experience and further education and happily provide it. Others might not want that role, leaving you to provide your own education through quiet observation.

• READ MORE: Instrument Rating: Why Are You Waiting?

Either way, flying with someone who’s both more experienced and has ultimate responsibility for the outcome of the flight is a wonderful way to learn. You should be as cautious and as methodical as you would be if you were solo, but ultimately it will be the captain who evaluates the conditions and assures the safe outcome. This allows you to learn the safe capabilities and limits of that operation in those conditions. You get to see what can be done and how to do it.

This route also will expose you to multiple captains, each with a different style. I remember vividly when I went through upgrade training at an airline, a member of management came into our class on the first day and asked us to reflect on our time in the right seat and try to identify the best captain we had flown with. After we considered that, he then asked us to think back over the same experiences and identify the worst captain we had flown with.

Everyone in the class had the same reaction. We were unable to identify a single-best captain. Instead, multiple captains were identified, each with some different traits that made us think of them. But everyone was instantly able to identify the single-worst captain with whom we had flown. 

As the class discussed, the manager then simply told us to determine the traits in the best captains that we wished to emulate and exactly what made that one person the worst captain and vow to never do any of those things we disliked.

If you’ve got your CFI or CFII, do as much advanced instruction as you can. Lacking a CFI, go around to all the pilots you can find and offer to fly with them as a safety pilot. Doing either of these won’t be as beneficial as flying with some 10,000-hour captain, but it’s still valuable experience to aid in your growth as an instrument pilot.

Learn from the Left Seat

But what if you don’t want to become a professional pilot and just want to be the best possible private pilot you can with the tools you have? There are a lot of paths you might choose, and I’ve got some recommendations that you can find your own variations along.

First, you must fly as often as possible. Every time you fly as pilot in command (PIC), fly IFR. I don’t mean 20-30 hours a year. I mean 10 hours or more a month, usually just about every week. This allows you to continue building on your experience rather than the ever-so-common two steps forward, one back. Even if the weather is “severe clear,” fly in the system to gain more experience and comfort within it. Rarely accept a visual approach at the destination. Fly an approach, even if it’s in VMC without a view-limiting device. If you can take a safety pilot, fly under the hood.

Don’t be afraid to tackle increasingly challenging weather conditions. Sure, if you just got your instrument ticket, you want to be very careful. But as you gradually gain more experience, put it to use. If you have a trip planned and the weather forecast stretches your comfort, that’s good. I often say that you can’t expand your comfort zone from within it. If the operation stretches your comfort more than you’re willing, find an instructor with plenty of experience and ask them to accompany you.

Watch for those marginal VMC and benign IMC days and go out to the airport and fly a few approaches on your own. As you do that more often, you’ll gain more comfort with those conditions.

I’m a strong believer in the value of simulators. I’m not going into a long discussion of sims, but here are a few basic points: If you can afford it, fly an approved sim, a Basic or Advanced Aviation Training Device (BATD/AATD). The difference to you at this point is largely irrelevant, so pick what’s available. Also, to the greatest extent possible, find something that simulates as closely as possible the aircraft you fly, both from an aerodynamic perspective as well as the panel. 

One of the lowest-cost approved simulators I know comes from Gleim Aviation. It’s a BATD that emulates a Cessna 172 SP with your choice of analog six-pack instruments or a Garmin G1000. If this is sufficiently close to what you fly, it’s an excellent choice for only $8,500.

If what you fly isn’t readily emulated with an approved simulator (which is common), you can build your own. My personal belief is that a sim that isn’t approved but closely emulates your aircraft is superior to an approved sim that isn’t close. That’s my thinking, but others disagree. 

My reasoning is simple. This is my example, but it applies broadly across the entire GA fleet. I fly a Cessna 340. Nobody makes an ATD for a C-340. The closest is usually a Beech Baron, but Precision Flight Controls can emulate a 414. Then, my airplane has full EFIS—there’s not a round dial on the panel. ATDs for any type might offer a G1000, but the retrofit stuff in my airplane is far different from a G1000. So to emulate my aircraft, I need to build the sim myself, and that won’t be approved for logging time. I’m OK with that. If I need to log some instrument time, I’ll go rent an approved sim for a few hours or get the time in my own airplane under the hood with a safety pilot a few times a year.

Once you’ve got access to a sim, fly it regularly, always in low-IMC. Fly approach after approach. Some weeks you’ll just fly approaches, repositioning yourself to the IAF and going in from there. Other weeks, practice with failures. On other sessions try doing a full flight from departure to destination. 

As you fly the sim more, add precipitation, ice, gusty winds, etc. In other words, build the severity of the weather until you can handle most anything. 

Then after completing one of these paths, you too will be an instrument pilot.

But There’s a Risk

Not long after I retired from 121 flying, I fell out of currency and needed the ol’ six-in-six to regain it. I hopped into an AATD and flew the requisite approaches, holds, etc., using raw data with no autopilot or flight director. The instructor was impressed. I was too, as I had never flown that sim before.

I figured it was all my experience as an instrument pilot. After all, that level of proficiency doesn’t leave you too quickly—or so I thought. Then a couple years later, repeat. Um, my performance was dismal, even with the flight director. What happened?

Well, instrument flight skills are highly perishable. If you’ve spent years comfortably flying as a proficient instrument pilot, well, reread that previous sentence. Once you no longer fly that often, you will lose those skills you worked so hard to gain. Trust me, it’s only through constant exercise that you can retain them.

So here’s my warning: Once you gain the competence and proficiency that you seek, you’ve got to continue working to maintain it. If you don’t keep flying at nearly that frequency, you risk reverting to just another pilot with an instrument rating. Although you might not have to start over to regain instrument-pilot status, you will have to work at it. You invested too much to get there in the first place, so don’t allow that proficiency to lapse.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: Instrument Rating vs. Instrument Pilot appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

According to the NTSB report, ADS-B data indicates the aircraft departed Trenton Mercer Airport (KTTN) in Trenton, New Jersey, around 7:40 a.m. and flew to Hartford Municipal Airport (KHXF) in Wisconsin before departing KHXF around 11:45 a.m.

• READ MORE: NTSB to Focus on ‘Four Corners’ of PC-12 in Fatal Crash Probe

ATC recordings and ADS-B data show the aircraft was on the Fisk arrival when the pilot was directed to make a wider turn to accommodate an L-29 and an L-39 that were landing in front of him. The pilot confirmed he had them “in sight” and initiated a left turn. He was subsequently cleared to land on the yellow dot on runway 36L and acknowledged the clearance.

The NTSB report noted that the aircraft crashed into a soybean field about 1.5 miles from the end of Runway 36L, catching fire and destroying the plane. It struck the ground on a heading of 060 degrees and came to rest in the same direction. The main wreckage included the fuselage, empennage, and wings, with flight controls intact. The wreckage has been recovered for further investigation.

Investigators found weather conditions at the time of the crash to be VMC with a visibility of 10 miles.

This article first appeared on AVweb.com.

The post NTSB Releases Prelim Report on Fatal Oshkosh Accident appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Luckily, there are a number of routes a new hopeful pilot can take to progress toward their long-term career goals.

Which job a new pilot takes can be an important decision. Pilots want work that will provide them with quality experience that will benefit their long-term goals.

Among the most important things to do to build the right qualifications is to build connections with others in the aviation industry. Whether in a flying or non-flying job, a brand-new pilot can pick positions that will bolster their qualifications and relationships for significant benefit.

Non-Flying Jobs for Student Pilots

New pilots at the very start of their careers—those just beginning to learn to fly—often choose to work in aviation on the side to fund their training.

Most notably, many work at FBOs at airports big and small to build connections with the crews passing through to pick up passengers or reposition planes. Getting face time with seasoned pilots and reputable charter companies can help budding pilots gain valuable insights and even get an edge that will improve their job prospects down the line.

• READ MORE: How to Become a Charter Pilot

Other student pilots choose to fuel planes or work on the ramp at big international airports, often for major airlines or contractors who manage large contracts. These jobs help new pilots get the feel of working for major airline operations. They can get a sense for how to get around big airports, witness airline schedules firsthand, and manage real-world delays along with the pilots upfront.

Many detail companies also hire student pilots. These new pilots will become comfortable caring for planes and gain new respect and appreciation for the aircraft they fly themselves. Other potential non-flying jobs include airport operations, aircraft maintenance, and airport customer service.

A Pilot’s First Flying Job

Once a pilot is fully qualified to fly for a living, the next question is which flying job will be the best transition from being a student to a professional pilot. A pilot must, once again, be able to gauge which jobs will serve their long-term career goals the best.

Pilots find their first job in a number of different ways. Some use the connections built in previous positions to their benefit, and others work for organizations that have already employed them. In addition, some pilots find creative ways to advertise services such as ferry flights, air tours, or aerial refueling.

• READ MORE: How to Land a Helicopter Pilot Job

Some pilots turn to services such as FindaPilot.com to find jobs. FindaPilot connects pilots looking for work with operators who need crewmembers to operate specific flights. Services such as this can be a great way for new pilots to connect with reputable operators and fly high-performance, complex aircraft to build high-quality time for their careers. Many pilots use services such as FindaPilot as launching pads to accelerate their careers into the next stage.

Flight Instructing

Many new pilots choose to become flight instructors for their first aviation job. Teaching new pilots can be an excellent way to build time quickly while also learning to work with a variety of personalities, students, and situations.

Different flight schools also give instructors the opportunity to operate in different environments. Part 61 schools often promote independent decision making without close guidance from company standard operating procedures, while Part 141 schools help instructors learn to operate in structured, airline-esque environments. Whichever direction new instructors choose, they are sure to gain valuable experience towards their long-term goals.

Instructing is a great way to learn from your own experience and to become intimately familiar with the knowledge and skills you are expected to know. New students keep instructors on their toes and ask intriguing questions that challenge instructors to study, grow, and expand their knowledge.

Banner Towing

Some new commercial pilots opt to become banner towing pilots. These pilots tow large advertisements behind them over beaches, malls, and other tourist attractions.

These jobs give pilots the opportunity to learn in congested airspace—multiple banner tow aircraft often fly in the same area—at low altitudes. This demands heightened situational awareness and attention that helps pilots learn to be aware of their surroundings and take prompt action to correct unusual situations.

• READ MORE: Congress Shells Out Millions to Aid Pilot Shortage

These jobs especially tend to operate with aircraft that require specialized training. Many, for example, use tailwheel airplanes that have unique operating characteristics as opposed to the now-more-popular tricycle gear airplanes. This additional experience gives banner tow pilots experience that helps them stand out from other applicants.

Banner tow pilots often fly for hours at a time multiple times per day, making banner towing a great way to build a lot of flight time quickly. Many new pilots thus use banner towing as a great way to gain the experience they need for airline or charter flying in a relatively short amount of time. This is particularly the case in markets that have flyable weather conditions year-round, such as in Florida or Arizona.

Charter Flying

Some pilots are lucky enough to become charter pilots early on in their careers. These jobs often involve operating as second in command of light jets, such as the Cessna Citation line.

These jobs are often, but not always, acquired through connections built earlier in their careers but can often come through online advertisements through social media channels or dedicated advertising agencies.

Charter jobs are especially valuable because they allow pilots time in multiengine turbine aircraft, the exact type of planes that pilots will be flying later on in their careers. The more experience pilots have flying these types of aircraft, the more attractive they’ll be later on with other operators.

Not all charter flying involves point-to-point hops in private jets or turbine aircraft, however. Some pilots start off as ferry pilots, when they get hired to fly an airplane one-way from point to point for maintenance, a system upgrade, or for delivery to a new owner.

This type of charter work can give pilots experience flying a wider array of aircraft to a wider range of destinations across the country. This variation is again valuable for pilots looking to work for operators that fly to more places or over longer distances at a time. Being able to handle a wider array of situations, aircraft, and geographic locations gives ferry pilots an edge over pilots used only to the same part of the country.

Survey Flying

Still other pilots choose to fly for aerial survey companies. These companies are enlisted to fly regular patterns over specified areas to take pictures, scout land, or check areas for damage. Some pilots patrol pipelines for damage as well.

Survey pilots often work side-by-side with photographers or IT specialists who operate imaging or mapping equipment on behalf of the client company. This provides pilots with the experience of operating a specific mission with certain parameters and constant distractions. This requires the pilot to divide their attention between flying the airplane and completing their task in a way that is both efficient and safe.

Though pilots, of course, train in division of attention throughout their training, flying survey provides a real-world way of dividing attention that cannot be simulated in a training environment.

There are plenty of ways pilots can build experience toward becoming professional aviators. Each job has strengths that will help pilots grow towards their long-term career goals, whether they be airline flying, corporate aviation, or contract work.

There is no one specific way to become a professional pilot—and it’s possible to be successful no matter which route is taken.

The post Best Jobs for New Pilots appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We—both FLYING and the industry as a whole—spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, determining if the aircraft is capable, and making honest evaluations of our own performance in considering how and when to conduct a flight. But once we identify the need to mitigate a risk, we sometimes have little space left over to describe the tools we can use.

Let’s try to fix that. 

The typical GA pilot is exposed to three broad areas of risk: weather, aircraft suitability, and pilot capability. When the proposed flight raises complications in these three basic areas, we should consider what we can do to bring the increased risk down to acceptable levels while still accomplishing the mission.

WEATHER

To me, weather is the factor posing the greatest risk to safely and reliably operating a personal aircraft. To properly manage it, we first have to understand it then evaluate the options we have. 

Weather is a “what-you-see-is -what-you-get” kind of thing. You can’t change it, but you usually can work your way around the worst of it.

1. Get a Thorough Preflight Briefing

I frequently see National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports in which there was no record of the accident pilot obtaining a weather briefing. The results include classic VFR-into-IMC controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents.

There really is no excuse for not obtaining a thorough preflight weather briefing of some sort. You can call Flight Service on the way to the airport. You can pull up anything you want on your phone before takeoff. The tablet you use in flight probably has the capability to download a complete briefing, including graphics, and organizing the results for you.

• READ MORE: Pilots Don’t Always Communicate Well When Describing Risk

“Thorough” is doing a lot of work here. What we need on a severe-clear daytime flight in search of a familiar $100 hamburger will be a lot less than a wintertime night flight near the Great Lakes. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a preflight briefing’s detail level should be based on the briefing itself.

2. Timing Is Everything

Another popular saying about weather is something along the lines of “if you don’t like this weather, just wait a bit and it will change.” This truism would seem to have been tailor-made for aviation since that’s pretty much exactly what happens: If you wait long enough, the weather will improve.

Often the weather is moving and—since you can’t do anything to change its trajectory—the smart thing to do is let it go by. If there’s a cold front approaching your departure airport, and you don’t want to fly through it, stay on the ground. It’ll soon pass overhead, and you can launch into clearing conditions.

Afternoon thunderstorms and early morning fog all move and evolve but perhaps not on our desired schedule. Tough—change your schedule. Leave a day ahead or later in the day. The point is to remain flexible in your scheduling to allow for poor weather.

3. Go Around the Problem

Some weather conditions don’t move quickly, or they occupy a wide area. The low ceilings and visibility sometimes associated with a warm front come to mind, as does the wintertime in-flight icing risk. But you have an airplane. Use it to fly around the problem areas.

This plan of action doesn’t work well, of course, if your departure or destination airports are socked in or covered with ice-laden clouds. But those conditions will change, eventually. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to get as close as you can to the weather problem and go the rest of the way the next morning.

• READ MORE: How Do I File a Pilot Weather Report Online?

I’ve often told a tale about a planned trip to Key West, Florida, in the winter that didn’t happen due to widespread IFR conditions. I didn’t have an instrument rating at the time, but I also didn’t think about it long enough to realize I could have gone around the conditions by abandoning a direct route. I would have had to stop for fuel anyway, but I was so focused on flying direct that it never occurred to me that I could go around the problem.

4. Change Your Altitude

A lot of weather problems can be addressed with altitude. Icing above 12,000 feet usually isn’t an issue at, say, 8,000, presuming terrain allows cruising that low. If it doesn’t, find a route around the icing at an altitude that resolves both the icing and terrain issues. If you can’t find one, wait.

A lot of weather and related risks can be mitigated by changing altitude. If there’s a deck of clouds you don’t want to fly in, there’s likely an altitude that will keep you out of it. By the same token, the jaunt across Lake Michigan to get to Oshkosh from the East Coast is a lot less risky at 10,000 feet than it is at 4,000. Headwinds often can be at least partially mitigated by changing altitude, presuming terrain allows.

AIRCRAFT

The old drag-racing sentiment—there’s no replacement for displacement—also rings true in personal aviation. I’m a strong advocate of using as much airplane for the task as you can afford.

As I’ve written (and been chastised for) in the past, my personal minimum for a traveling airplane on “real” cross-countries is 180 hp. In some areas of the U.S. and elsewhere, you can “get by” with less, but you also give up some flexibility and capability. In some areas, 180 hp might not be enough. And almost anything with less power takes too darn long. If the airplane isn’t right for the mission, wishing and hoping it’ll be OK won’t make it better.

But there’s more to choosing the weapons with which we do battle against the elements than just horsepower. What about avionics? Is the airplane’s installed equipment up to the proposed task? You’re not trying to make up for its equipment shortcomings by using portable devices, are you? Got current databases, right? Beyond avionics, what about filled TKS fluid tanks, or supplemental oxygen for climbing high and survival gear for the terrain and season? What about loading—will your at-gross 145 hp Skyhawk crap out at 8,000 feet in the summertime with all its seats filled? (Hint: Probably.)

5. You Can Never Have Too Much Fuel

Just as with getting a preflight briefing, I’ve always been one to maintain that there’s simply no excuse for running out of fuel. Yes, headwinds happen, and FBOs sometimes close at inconvenient times. Deal with it.

Ensuring there’s adequate fuel is one of the responsibilities you accepted when you went for your private check ride. That responsibility doesn’t change when you overfly the last fuel stop before your destination because it will take too long.

You have a number of options: Land short of your destination if headwinds are stronger than forecast. Stop halfway, take a break to help fight fatigue and stretch your legs before tackling the last portion of the flight. Choose a different airplane, one with greater range or better fuel economy.

6. Faster Is Better

If 180 hp is the minimum for cross-countries, it’s implied that more horsepower is better. The same is true when it comes to cruising speed. And not just because you arrive quicker.

Greater speed means you can accept a spirit-deadening headwind and complete relatively short trips without a fuel stop. It means you can cover a lot of territory—and see a lot of weather—in just three or four hours. Most importantly, it means you can fly around, outrun, or outmaneuver more easily the kind of weather that would otherwise keep you on the ground or holed up short of your destination when flying a slower airplane.

• READ MORE: The Ins and Outs of Pilot Weather Reports

One rule of thumb often overlooked when choosing among piston-powered, single-engine airplanes of the same basic configuration is that it can take the same amount of fuel to get from point A to point B no matter what you’re flying.

7. Higher Is Better

 As a reader recently pointed out, flying cross-countries at relatively low altitudes in a single doesn’t make much sense. Flying high in that same single affords you much more time to find a place to land or resolve the problem when an engine acts up. There’s less traffic, and you’ll burn less fuel in cruise once you get there. If that’s not enough, there are other reasons to get as high as you can.

One of them is for a smoother ride in clearer, cooler air. In the summer, it might take a while to climb on top of the haze layer, but the benefits are worth it, especially since doing so allows you to more easily see the way cumulonimbus clouds are arranged and plan your route around them. At lower altitudes, haze and other reductions to visibility can mean stumbling into a situation you don’t want and can’t handle. Climbing to maximize a tailwind’s benefits can also push you beyond poor weather more quickly than if you have to slog through it down low.

The only two downsides of using a higher cruising altitude is the possible need for supplemental oxygen and the greater amount of time it will take to get down in a hurry if you need to.

PILOT

After we mitigate the risks imposed by poor weather and resolve mechanical or equipment issues with the airplane, what’s left falls into a big bucket labeled “pilot related.” That means you.

8. How Are You Feeling?

Launching on a four-hour flight after a full day at the office isn’t the smartest thing I’ve done. 

Especially when getting eight full hours of sleep and launching at zero-dark-thirty to make it on time to a distant appointment is an option. The truth is we often fly when we’re less than 100 percent. The challenge is to ensure the 10 or 20 percent of human performance we might be lacking won’t be needed on a given flight.

9. Are Your Skills Up to the Task? 

Tackling low IFR at your destination, busy terminal airspace, a complicated departure procedure, or an in-flight emergency without the necessary skills is a recipe for disaster.

While we probably have learned how to do all that at one point or another, it’s likely to have been a while since we practiced some of the skills needed to pull it all off. Yet we can be confronted with all that and more almost any day.

Get frequent training in these and other areas.

10. Imagination Is the Limit

The last item on this list isn’t as objective as the others. Instead, it’s a challenge for you to think outside the box a lot of our training puts us in.

Some proposed flights simply can’t be accomplished on the day or time chosen, with the airplane you have and the condition in which you find yourself. It’s the wise pilot who accepts this reality and lives to fly another day. 

That same wisdom also tells us that some flexibility and compromise, along with a little imagination (and plenty of fuel) might allow us to complete the mission anyway, no matter what the aviation gods throw at us.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: Top 10 Tips for Mitigating Risk in the Air appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The terrain is unremittingly flat, the roads checkerboard at right angles, and farming is what matters. Irrigation ditches and muddy tracks entering and then tapering off on the county roads are too numerous to notice, and the vastness in the crop rows and vault of open sky keeps human activity properly scaled inside nature’s expanse.

But it is California. The land work is mainly agribusiness, row crops defer to orchards of nut and fruit trees, and corn is something that happens elsewhere. Those majestic peaks suggest things aren’t the same everywhere while State Route 99 rumbles and roars its endless nose-to-tail hustle of tractor-trailers and passenger cars traversing the world’s fifth-largest economy.

A couple miles from that highway an industrial park sprawls before giving way to the main business of California’s central valley. And there, sandwiched between a multiacre pallet manufacturer and pump specialists, an unremarkable cluster of single-story metal buildings and open yards make up the Ly-Con Aircraft Engines huddle.

• READ MORE: GE Aerospace on the Hunt for Engineering Talent

One is tempted to say “campus” to describe this jumble of buildings, yards, shipping containers, and open-air pallet racking stacked with tired aviation hardware, but the connotation is too collegiate. Likewise, “village” is too visually congenial and hamlet dismissive of the overpowering mechanical nature of the place. But if the correct label is elusive, there’s no doubt exceptional general aviation engines emerge from here.

‘Tunnell’ Vision

Central to the Ly-Con story is founder Ken Tunnell, a native of the next big farming town down the road, Porterville. Just 23 years old and starting to settle from a rambunctious youth along with a three-year stint in the Marine Corps, Ken had already been working in a five-man aviation engine shop when in March 1980 he thought he could do better by opening his own place.

His dad borrowed against his modest retirement to purchase a few basic machine tools in exchange for a stake in the business, and married-with-a-mortgage friend Bruce Bennet came on board three months later when Ken was sufficiently established to afford employee insurance. Ken recalls Bruce as a great engine guy, but he left Ly-Con after a couple of years to pursue his own interests.

In the beginning Ken says Ly-Con was like everyone else in that it would take new parts out of the box and start assembling engines. But as the engine count grew, Ken realized new parts weren’t always perfect—or even correct—and customer comebacks didn’t make them happy or make money.

And so the Ly-Con obsession with measuring, verifying, and accurate machining began. This now 44-year fascination with improvement through better processes and tools has been Ly-Con’s hallmark and the main generator of its worldwide reputation for dependable, powerful engines.

It’s likely the dogged zeitgeist of the place has been set by its geography. Visalia and Porterville are successful, somewhat isolated farming towns. Getting up in the morning and getting to work is native to the area, as is the resolve to use the best tools at hand and to get better ones tomorrow. Ken and his 36 employees are all salt of the earth, typically self-taught but ready to work and willing to try something new or learn from others. Their methods are empirical, and if there’s not a single engineering diploma hanging on the office walls—or a pilot’s certificate in anyone’s wallet—there are a hundred signed photos from pleased customers showing off every sort of flat-engined airplane winging via Ly-Con power.

• READ MORE: Boeing to Open New Engineering Facility at Embry-Riddle

A textbook definition of a mom-and-pop store, Ly-Con remains Ken Tunnell’s fiefdom, with just wife Darla (accounting) and brother Bryan (racing shop) also involved. There’s the efficiency of a benevolent dictatorship in the arrangement but also the bottleneck of everything going across Ken’s paper-covered desk. As the business has grown, so have the responsibilities, including the impedimenta associated with FAA Repair Station status and doing business in the Golden State. Ken and Darla have been at the shop seven days a week forever, and if there is a complaint from the field, it’s that Ly-Con is a slow shop, a place where engines languish and getting Ken on the phone is tough to do.

It’s tough because there is so much to attend to, and once you get Ken on the line, he tends to stay there until things are fully settled. He isn’t one to cut corners, and projects can pile up. He says most of the caterwauling is from customers hoping to speed up things, but dawdling on the payment continuum or from pilgrims thinking engine shops keep rebuilt engines on the shelf waiting to go. With an average turnaround time of eight months, the reality is Ly-Con’s delivery schedule compares well with the year or years now common from the OEMs.

Early On

Today, Ly-Con is noted as a horizontally opposed specialist with a strong sideline on performance engines, but those are learned behaviors.

“When we first started, we did [Pratt & Whitney] 1340s and 985s due to crop dusting around the valley,” recalls Ken. “But it was 250 man hours to do a radial and 40 hours to do a flat motor, and you made about the same money. So we started leaning toward flat engines and away from radials. But we did some [Warner] Scarabs and Franklins before they all faded away.”

One niche picked up via Bob Penland was helicopter engines.

“He taught us the VO (helicopter) engines,” Ken says. “Penland in Long Beach was the helo king in those days. We still do 435s, 540s, and all that stuff…We still build ’em for helos all around the world—Germany, Canada, New Zealand. People are scared of ’em, but if you do a good job, they’re a really durable engine.” He adds with a grin, “Unless you don’t have a prop governor and overspeed ’em!”

• READ MORE: Transport Canada Awards Pratt & Whitney Engine Type Certification

In the early years Ly-Con was just one of many engine shops in the valley, so capitalizing growth in the company was difficult. Characteristically unafraid to try something different, Ken saw an opportunity when Rocky Harrow, another local machinist, ran into trouble. With the bank ready to repossess Rocky’s shop, Ken paid off the debt then moved Rocky and his entire operation, including a lathe, mill, and pantograph, into Ly-Con.

“We brought him into the shop to do machining, reground lifters, connecting rods, that sort of stuff,” Ken says. “And so I spent some of my time hustling machine shop stuff. We made helical gears for a printing press company. I got the right wire and spray welding on the gears so Rocky could go portable to fix those gears when they dropped a screw in them or something.”

Eventually Rocky left, but by then Ly-Con was established in the aviation engine scene, with good contacts and a growing customer base.

“We were on the [Visalia] airport for nine years,” says Ken, noting he made the painfully disruptive move to the company’s present industrial park location a couple of miles away in 1989.

He says he was encouraged to relocate due to a 60 percent rise in rent in just two years, along with a court order kicking them out after he disputed the rent increases.

“We almost went out of business because of the move,” he says. “We were just five people and 3,000 square feet, but it took [electrical utility] Edison a long time to put in three-phase power [and there was no money coming in the meantime.]”

Ken came to see the move off-airport as a plus.

“It was a lot cooler being on the airport, but you can’t own anything at the airport, the city owns it,” he says. “Here you can build equity in the real estate, so it was a blessing getting off the airport.”

Enter Performance

Earning competence with stock rebuilds marked Ly-Con’s start, so when Ken hooked up with Southern California speed guru Steve Mehalick, the company was ready to add performance. The pivot was John Harmon—just down the road in Bakersfield—building the first two Van’s RV-3-based Rockets.

The first used a stock Lycoming, but backer Jim Ewing wanted more horse pressure in his Rocket engine that Ly-Con was building. So Steve taught Ly-Con about porting, high compression, and other power-building tips he’d learned working with Dan Gurney, JE Pistons, Jim Fueling, and others in the extensive Southern California speed scene. Ken credits Steve’s knowledge and industry contacts with quickly pushing Ly-Con to the front ranks of performance aircraft engine builders, and it was a tough loss when Steve medically retired far too early 20 years ago.

Ly-Con’s other performance pioneer was Sean Tucker.

“We did his stuff for 43 years,” says Ken. “He was a crop duster in Salinas…He used to hock his house to get parts to do his engines.”

Sean didn’t have to hock his house forever, and Ly-Con rose up the performance ladder with his outstanding career. Other major aerobatic acts gravitated to Ly-Con’s thumping, lightweight parallel-valve AEIO-540 engines, including Jim LeRoy, Skip Stewart, and about three-quarters of the Red Bull Air Racing field until they went to spec engines from Thunderbolt to limit costs and performance.

Improving performance is catnip to Ken. He can come across as aw-shucks, but that’s just his native impishness papering over a deep competitive streak.

“I just like to have the best stuff,” he says. His attraction to the latest tools also means satisfaction in turning out no-excuse stock engines plus winning races and being the big dog on the pro airshow scene. He really doesn’t like second place.

No doubt the most visible of Ly-Con’s power habit has been air racing, with the Formula 1, Biplane, and Sport pits at Reno, Nevada, presenting an almost embarrassing array of Ly-Con stickers. Like the early Red Bull series, Ly-Con’s penetration of Formula 1 was typically more than half the field, and it was something similar in the hot-rodded Biplane class.

The Biplane efforts have been capped so far by overwhelming Ly-Con power (think almost 400 hp from a naturally aspirated IO-360) in Phantom pushing lap speeds over 260 mph. In the major-league Sport Gold division, Ly-Con provided the 580-cubic-inch foundations for class dominator Jeff LaVelle’s 410 mph Glasair III along with numerous other competitors.

All of these engines bend the status quo when it comes to power, but the 900-plus hp under LaVelle’s cowling truly stretches the imagination regarding what’s possible with the same cases and crankshafts the rest of us fly behind.

For sure, Ly-Con’s push to performance has paid dividends for all its customers. It was broken counterweight ears on the hardcore tumbling aerobatic engines that led to the cryogenic solution Ly-Con now offers. If a daily driver customer balks at the thought of 10:1 compression pistons, Ly-Con can authoritatively speak to what happens not only at 10:1 compression, but 11:1, 12:1, even 14:1 because it has built and run numerous engines at all of those power levels. Or 5.5:1 compression for turbo fans.

The same goes for about every sort of power trick imaginable because Ly-Con has firsthand experience developing those engines, along with the customer feedback plus tearing down and eyeballing the results.

In the Shop

Today Ly-Con’s 36 employees work on a 3.2-acre lot holding four buildings, two dyno cells, one vertical test stand, and several yards full of shipping containers and pallet racking containing the company’s extensive core engine collection. There are approximately 26,000 square feet under roof and 7,000 square feet of working shop space. You’ll have difficulty finding an unoccupied horizontal surface large enough to set down your coffee cup.

Collectively, the facilities support an FAA Repair Station, including engine and engine accessory overhaul. The FAA sees Ly-Con as two entities, one repairing and building certified engines, which makes up about 70 percent of the overall business, plus the experimental engine work making up the remaining 30 percent.

The certified and experimental work pass through the same workstations—that is, there is no separate building or shop dedicated to either class of engines—but the parts, processes, and paperwork are carefully segregated to ensure compliance.

Organizationally there is the business office, teardown, cleaning, inspection, painting and coating, welding, porting, cryogenic, case, accessory, assembly, dyno and shipping shops or stations.

The parts department is its own business—Kendra Air Parts Inc.—but located with the rest of Ly-Con. There’s a room dedicated to Ly-Con’s proprietary line of NFS pistons too.

You could also say manufacturing is a Ly-Con subset as it makes its own adjustable oil pressure regulators and dabbles with custom valve covers and other miscellaneous parts, but this work slots in among the regular jobs. The same might be said about the more experimental work, such as flow testing cylinder heads or trying new coatings, but again those workstations are shared with the mainstream certified efforts.

The Machine Age

Consistently adding new machining and testing capabilities means Ly-Con reached the usual level of in-house capabilities long ago.

Those few specialized machining steps—crank grinding and machining engine cases are good examples—are or were farmed out to specialists just like every other engine builder. With the basics covered, Ly-Con eventually moved into unusual capabilities rarely offered by an aircraft engine builder, mainly driven by its need to step up its experimental engines as the aerobatic and racing customers asked for more power or ran into longevity issues.

One of the first of these was a wet flow bench for flowing carburetors and fuel injection parts but also key to developing cylinder head ports. By adding on to a commercially available automotive performance flow bench designed to move just air, the fuel bench does the same task but while flowing air and solvent. The combination fuel and flow benches have been educational as carburetors, injection, and cylinder heads got tuned up for racing, as well as serving as a great calibration tool for verifying performance of stock parts for certified applications. Originally built with analog instruments, the fuel bench was later upgraded to digital data acquisition and remains in daily use.

A fundamental part of engine building is improving the ring seal between the cylinder walls and piston rings. This has always been a sloppy thing in big-bore, air-cooled airplane engines—it’s the nature of these beasts—but Ken Tunnell has always been improving ring seal both to increase engine power and reduce oil consumption, along with speeding engine break-in and thus avoid oil-slurping during the engine’s entire lifespan. Key to this is precision in honing the cylinder bores along with experimenting with piston ring material. 

Building so many racing and aerobatic engines gives Ken the opportunity to continuously try different ring/bore combinations, and making some rather large investments in the latest cylinder hones has allowed improving the cylinder finish and chokes. For decades a Sunnen CV-616 hone has been swirling out the cylinders at Ly-Con, but after reaching the limits of that machine on the latest experimental jugs, a new Rottler automated hone was added. That’s a six-figure investment, but Ken needed it for the increased precision, plus, as an automated machine, it will speed cylinder production throughout Ly-Con’s workflow.

Sixteen years ago when Ly-Con wanted to improve crankcase parting-line sealing by replacing the stock sewing thread method with a rubber O-ring set in a machined groove, it needed the hugely increased precision and speed of an automated milling machine for this complex tool path. That meant funding the purchase of a 20 hp CNC machining center, a first in aviation engine rebuilding. Of course, the five-axis Haas Automation CNC mill has since improved or supported all sorts of tasks previously done manually or not at all.

Another unique Ly-Con capability is cryogenic heat treating. This is the use of liquid nitrogen to chill parts to minus-305 degrees Fahrenheit then heating them to 300 F before bringing them back to room temperature. It normalizes the crystalline structure of metal (and other materials) and has proven a godsend in strengthening crankshafts in high-power engines. With “cryo” proving useful throughout an engine, Ken bought out an entire cryo facility and set it up inside Ly-Con. It’s proven popular with performance customers and suggests the way to greater longevity on stock builds as well.

Another big plus are the two engine dynos.

These have been upgraded over the years with good data acquisition systems offering major benefits. First, customers have objective data on how their engine runs, the engines are delivered leak-free and fully vetted as to function along with being well along the critical break-in period. Furthermore, the dynos prove whatever was done in the shop.

Especially for the experimental engines, the dynos close an essential feedback loop on what works or doesn’t when improving engine builds. Having just brought both dynos to identical specification and data capabilities has sped workflow as it’s no longer necessary to wait for one or the other dyno to open up for a specific testing need.

Increasingly coming on line at Ly-Con is a small shop dedicated to servicing engine cases. This is unique for an engine builder because, as long as anyone can remember, case align boring has been the private domain of Nixon on the West Coast and, especially, Divco, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But now Ly-Con has purchased its own align boring machine, along with a smaller CNC center and repurposed mills for various supporting tasks, allowing full servicing of engine crankcases for its in-house needs (no one in Visalia is out to corner the market on case rebuilding). This case shop is still new and developing its working protocols, but it’s primarily designed to give Ly-Con more control over this critical aspect of engine building and hopefully a small gain in profit margin eventually.

The latest gizmo is a laser welder in the welding shop. Barely unpacked during our visit, the welder promises to allow heretofore impossible aluminum repairs, but that’s something still theoretical. Like many of the ideas Ly-Con has brought to fruition as FAA-approved processes, laser welding is something the Visalia team will practice with on scrap parts, and if those work, it will move to dyno testing, followed by use on experimental engines run by trusted customers willing to try something new.

Applying for a process approval for certified engines remains well in the future, assuming it even works and makes business sense. If it doesn’t, it won’t be the first time what sounded like a great idea didn’t pan out.

Basics First

While Ly-Con is well known for its innovation and performance successes, sometimes Ken Tunnell laments the shop is perceived as something out of left field, a place for wild experimental engines, when the reality is its livelihood is dependable daily driver overhauls, inspections, IRANs, prop strikes, and all the other work found in the certified world. It’s understandable as racing garners much publicity—and hardly any income considering the work and sponsorships involved—while the certified overhauls are the true work but take place in relative obscurity.

In reality the performance and certified work is complementary. Racing has improved the breed, the lessons learned around the pylons or in front of the airshow crowds inevitably finding good employment in the certified world. Ultimately building great performance engines—and daily drivers—is all about making the flat parts really flat and the round parts really round. There are no secrets, just a will to best understand the engine’s needs and a near slavish adherence to eliminating oversights through constant checking.

In the end that’s really what goes on at Ly-Con.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: Ly-Con Still Going Strong appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

More than anything else, it was my subscription to FLYING Magazine, beginning with the January 1955 issue, that created a thirst for additional knowledge and achievement. I was not alone. A lot of builders and dreamers were entering the private aviation industry in that era, helping transform it from a time of tube-and-rag taildraggers to sleek transportation aircraft.

In the mid-20th century, America was uniquely positioned for the creation of a modern noncommercial aviation system. There was a need for airplanes that could transport families and business people across the vast distances of North America, we had an airport of some sort in nearly every community, and our personal freedom and finances encouraged the utility of light aircraft. The inefficient war-surplus airplanes and vintage taildraggers leftover from the 1940s no longer sufficed. We were ready for easier-to-fly, purpose-built airplanes.

And experienced, visionary heads of aircraft companies were ready to provide them. As with the automotive industry, we had the Big Three—Beechcraft, Cessna, and Piper—plus eager-to-compete smaller companies like Aero Commander, Bellanca, Champion, Maule, and Mooney. As the 1960s arrived, new models and improved veteran designs showed up in the marketplace. Likewise, a new term, avionics, was coined, referring to a fresh crop of highly capable radios for our instrument panels, thanks to transistors and compact power supplies that shrank space requirements. 

• READ MORE: FLYING Magazine Announces 2025 Ultimate FLYING Giveaway

Powerplants also underwent development. Fuel injection and lightweight turbochargers were added to piston engines, small turbojets encouraged the concept of business jets, and new medium-horsepower turboprops filled the gap between 300 hp opposed recips and burly radials. By 1970, GA shoppers were able to buy anything from aerobatic two-seaters to pressurized, cabin-class twins. Available business aircraft ranged from turboprop executive airplanes to fanjet-powered corporate barges. Airports and airspace routings had been improved to accommodate GA’s growth. This laissez-faire ’60s atmosphere kept the industry’s engineering departments working overtime.

The declared goal during the frenetic ’60s and ’70s was to create “gap fillers.” Every company wanted to provide an airplane to suit every need and keep customers loyal to its brand. Piper had a fleet of Cherokee derivatives, from the 2+2 Cherokee 140, the everyday 180 and beefy 235, and the stretched Cherokee Six, leading to retractable Arrows and Lances, and even twin-engine Senecas and Seminoles. Piper’s earlier high-performance Comanche line was retained through 1972 in single and twin versions, with normal and turbocharged engines. And the company also offered heavier twins in various piston-engine Navajo and turboprop Cheyenne models, all while still building the venerable Aztec twin—not to mention the agricultural Pawnee airplanes and an occasional Super Cub.

Beech Aircraft also tried to fill every gap in the market with a Beechcraft. It expanded its line  downward from the three Bonanza models with a lighter Musketeer series, offered in trainer, cruiser, and retractable variants, and it even fielded a light-twin Duchess, all the while offering Baron twins in as many as five styles, plus the sexy Duke and cabin-class Queen Airs. Meanwhile, Beech’s King Air turboprop line grew longer and more capable, even leading into commuter-airliner variations. To round out its offerings, Beech acquired upscale business jets from Hawker and Mitsubishi. 

Cessna, meanwhile, outdid everyone, developing model after model to plug any sales leak in its line. At one time in the ’70s, I counted 22 singles and 13 twins among its offerings, in addition to the burgeoning Citation business jet lineup. Whatever you needed, from two-place trainer to pressurized single, from push-pull “safe twin” to back-door executive twin, agricultural airplanes and bushplanes, Cessna had them all. There seemed to be no end to the swelling Cessna tide, which amounted to 50 percent of the industry’s unit output during the boom times.

At the same time, little Mooney expanded its basic M20 retractable into longer and more powerful models, Rockwell developed single-engine and ag planes to supplement its piston and turboprop twin-engine line, Bellanca/Champion offered a half-dozen two-seat tailwheel airplanes to compliment its Viking retractables, Grumman was making two- and four-seat airplanes plus a twin-engine model, and Maule tweaked and stretched every possible variation from its tailwheel utility aircraft. 

Present Day Flying

Today, we are still enjoying the fruits of these developments in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Refurbished examples of the golden age general aviation airplanes sell for many multiples of their original sticker price, while the limited-production, new single-engine airplanes are astronomically unaffordable. The promised introduction of “light sport” airplanes that would provide economical new aircraft hasn’t worked out. They are priced at about twice the expected figure and often don’t have sufficient payload to accommodate two adults plus full fuel. 

A serious implosion in light airplane production took place during the mid-’80s, closing many production lines and shrinking the supply of available models. This was due to an oversupply of airplanes during economic malaise, coupled with the growth of rapacious product liability lawsuits and concurrent manufacturer insurance costs. Most of GA’s growth shifted into big-ticket aircraft such as turbine-powered business airplanes, utility and owner-flown, single-engine turboprops, and fast-glass, piston-engine singles.

As the new millennium arrived, Cirrus Design brought not only a new sleek composite-construction personal airplane but a fresh approach to marketing it. With its integral emergency parachute, side-stick control, video-screen, GPS-based avionics and automotive interior styling, the Cirrus SR series appealed to a new generation of entrants to GA. The company quickly filled a void abandoned by the traditional airplane companies that had been acquired by corporate conglomerates that were more interested in selling big-ticket business aircraft than entry-level models. 

• READ MORE: GA, Private Aviation Dodge Worst of Cyber Outage Impact

The real revolution now stems from the utility gained by effortless navigation provided by GPS data flowing into advanced computing capability, so that panel-mounted displays can not only show current position but flight plan routing, all linked to advanced autopilot technology taking care of most cross-country piloting chores. With uplinked, in-cockpit weather integrated into tablet-based “electronic flight bags” or the avionics suite, there’s no longer any excuse for pressing on into unflyable conditions lurking over the horizon. 

Retrofitting this advanced technology into legacy aircraft is simply a matter of allocating enough money to make the airplane useful. The ADS-B mandate of 2020 has given more flexibility to ATC handling of any size of aircraft—at the cost of privacy and freedom. Yes, we deal with a multitude of airspace rules and restrictions, but we had to negotiate many of those same encroachments in the late 20th century, and with less computing power in the cockpit back then to help us avoid them. 

Airport infrastructure has shifted away from providing accommodations for all comers to building for the biggest user, leaving light general aviation to occupy the corners of the ramp or a remote edge of the airport. Stand-alone, family-operated FBOs have been replaced by chains of opulent palaces catering to the jet set. We can expect to pay for what used to be free services, because our minuscule fuel business is no longer important enough to be willingly subsidized by the big iron customers. 

Expectations are greater in the 21st century—in all aspects of life, not just GA. New entrants to flying expect seamless air conditioning, push-button actuations, plush accommodations, and high levels of service, compared with their more-tolerant parents and grandparents. If passengers can’t have Wi-Fi on board, they don’t want to ride with us. Privileges have their price, reflected in million-dollar sticker prices on new limited-production piston singles and multiple millions for personal turboprops. 

At least we still have options, even though we may have more money tied up in our instrument panel than a first-class traveling airplane cost back in the late 1900s. We’ve lost many airports to housing and industrial developments, but many remain, still giving access to communities via general aviation, providing transportation and utility possible in no other way. 

Flying’s Future

The future, from my jaded perspective, will be different, perhaps not to the tastes of my generation but still suitable and rewarding to those who’ll be doing most of the GA flying.

Accommodations might have to be made for the hyper-promoted electric urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles, manned and unmanned, in various stages of development for a market that may or may not exist. If airspace, bases, and routes have to be carved out for these anticipated thousands of mass-transit conveyances, we may see some disruption of traditional air traffic.

• READ MORE: Hangar Shortage Spurs 2 GA Pilots to Launch Development Project

The big unknown is the impact of governmental and public policy interference on a limited-participation activity like general aviation. Regardless of the facts, the loudest voices get the most attention at law-making levels, and well-meaning but shortsighted regulation can wind up stifling the freedom of flight enjoyed by private citizens. We must continue to support our GA membership organizations, and these associations must link arms with other interests, such as business aviation, helicopter operators, agricultural aviation, flight training, avionics shops, and FBOs, to ward off possible restrictions and bad laws stemming from class-envy and special-interest rhetoric targeting the industry.

I remain eternally optimistic about aviation, because I’ve always observed humankind’s innate desire to fly. From the days of the earliest prehistoric human watching soaring birds, there’s always been something urging us to look skyward, yearning to share the perspective of height. People will always want to fly, and once having tasted the freedom of personal wings, it is difficult to give it up. It behooves us to share flight with as many of our friends and acquaintances as possible, building a coalition to preserve what we’ve been given. 

A love of flying, like all passions, has to be given away if it is to be continuously circulated back to the conferrer.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: The State of U.S. General Aviation appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

According to the insurance provider, airlines will contribute approximately 35 percent of the premiums, while general aviation is expected to account for 47 percent. Allianz says the surge in premiums comes as 2024 air traffic is anticipated to reach a record high—growing by 10.4 percent year over year, predominantly driven by the Asia-Pacific and North American regions.

The report highlights that most of the value in aviation insurance claims comes from collisions, crashes, and issues with defective products which together account for 85 percent of total claims. Contributing factors to rising premiums include an increase in aircraft repair costs due to higher labor rates, increased prices for aircraft parts, and inflation.

The report also mentions the transition to next-generation aircraft continues to impact claims, especially with engine disassembly and repair costs. Additionally, a growing shortage of aircraft mechanics and less experienced technicians could influence future claims, potentially leading to higher repair costs and increased risk, according to Allianz.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AVweb.

The post New Report Projects Aviation Insurance Premiums Will Reach 20-Year High appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Imagine being past the hard part and turning your nearly finished airplane over to McCormick and his well-trained staff to put the cherry red on your sundae. Finally, it’s time to fly—and turn some heads.

What started as a desire to offer more elaborate schemes has since become Evoke Aviation and Evoke Aircraft Design, the graphic design portion of the business. Evoke’s portfolio includes more than 50 EAA AirVenture award-winning homebuilts, such as Steve Thorne’s (“Flight Chops” on YouTube) Van’s RV-14.

“I would say our customers are people who want to be able to show off a little bit of their personality,” McCormick said.

• READ MORE: Why Are So Many Airplanes Painted White?

When meeting the Evoke team at AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, I was greeted by youthful faces and tattooed limbs. These folks looked like me, and I was excited to learn about additional career opportunities in aviation. There are more obvious routes, such as becoming a mechanic or delving into engineering or marketing, but graphic design was something I’d never really thought about, let alone aircraft painting.

“It’s very cool to be able to not only design the airplane, but work in a facility on-site where that design is then put on the airplane, and you can have input as it’s all being created and basically coming to life,” McCormick said. “I think it’s a very cool niche for the designers to get into.”

The Prep

McCormick was able to establish the foundation for what would become his own design company and paint shop—located at Northeast Alabama Regional Airport (KGAD)—by aiming to fill a need and taking every necessary step to do so. He’s always been entrepreneurial. He started a DJ business in high school that he worked all throughout college, where he studied auto collision repair. He knew that focus would be a gateway to custom painting.

After graduating with a technical certificate, he landed a job at International Jets, an aircraft paint facility in Gadsden. He fell in love with airplanes and worked to fine-tune his skill during a time when paint schemes weren’t all that exciting.

“I always knew that I could do better,” he said. “I was always so frustrated by what I was painting, and I just knew I could create better designs. And so that’s where the idea started.”

Around 2011, work sent McCormick to Nigeria for a year to manage a project. During his downtime he created a business plan for his own design company, Plane Schemer, which was rebranded to Evoke Aircraft Design in 2021 to better align with his paint shop, Evoke Aviation. Upon his return, he launched a website and put together enough money for a booth at the Sun ’n Fun Aerospace Expo in Lakeland, Florida. He didn’t have a lot of designs to show, but was able to persuade a few people to work with him. Shortly after, he was able to quit his day job of painting airplanes and focus on building his own brand.

• READ MORE: Giving Your Airplane a Face-Lift and Tummy Tuck

A few years later, International Jets went out of business, and McCormick acquired its hangar, allowing him to offer not only schemes but paint jobs as well. Now with complete control over the quality of the finished product, he could focus on taking Evoke paint jobs to the next level by using the highest quality materials and procedures.

“The majority of our labor hours goes into the body work and the prep and getting it ready for paint, and actually the paint is one of the easiest parts,” he said. “So 65 percent of the budget goes into the actual prepping of the airplane, and then the rest of it goes into the paint and the finish work and the reassembly.”

The Primer

McCormick manages 20 employees across both businesses—five designers and the rest paint-and-body-work technicians. He said he hires people who take pride in their work and want to do better for themselves. That positive company culture has attracted capable employees who produce quality work, and McCormick feels this is what has allowed his business to grow so quickly.

As with every aviation business, hiring and retention has proven difficult at times, so Evoke does a lot of recruiting to combat those challenges. This is the main reason its employee average age is low. Additionally, McCormick believes it’s easier to hire and train from scratch, rather than try to retrain experienced designers and technicians.

“We can teach exactly the way we want everything done from the very beginning, and there’s no bad habits to get rid of,” he said.

Sammy Davis, one of McCormick’s first employees, now serves as Evoke’s senior designer. Davis set out to study graphic design in college but switched her major from art to business after her first year.

She was originally hired to help from a business standpoint as she not only majored in it but had interned at a software and systems engineering company, where she absorbed a lot of valuable information that would help make Evoke scalable for the future. Davis went to Sun ’n Fun with McCormick for his big debut and got to ride in an Aero L-39 Albatros.

“That was my first-ever plane ride, and I was like, ‘OK, I would like to be a part of this, please,’” said Davis, noting the Lakeland trip served as her introduction to aviation and she is now the only pilot on the Evoke staff.

Due to an increase in sales and McCormick being pulled in different directions, Davis decided to learn scheme design. She said she watched McCormick and asked a lot of questions.

“You have to be patient and a little bit hardheaded,” she said.

Davis pointed out that repetition was key, and eventually she got the green light to start working with clients. She’s been at it for seven years, but said a lot has changed in that time.

“Schemes back then were not as elaborate as they are now for the most part because the trend hadn’t quite kicked off yet,” she said. “So back then it was just like, OK, well here’s a really simple prompt, maybe a two-tone. Someone wants a white base and like a red bottom with a stripe in the middle. OK, well that’s easy enough. You do that and then you send it off to them, you do your edits, and then you try a top view. OK, well now you try the wings, and you would think something shaped as a rectangle wouldn’t be as challenging as it is, but there’s a lot of curves and 3D forms to think about.”

Customers initiate the design process by filling out a survey that covers preferred styles, colors, and paint finishes. They are also asked to send in reference photos of what they like. In addition, it’s helpful if designers know at what stage their customer is at in their build and what their mission is—do they want to win an award, or are they looking for something more practical? The designers work with their clients, whether it be over the phone, through Zoom calls, or in person, to finalize the scheme. This can take weeks, months, or years, and sometimes upward of 50 renderings to complete.

At any given time, designers can host a Zoom meeting with their client to talk through design changes. Both Davis and McCormick called this a fun activity because clients are impressed by how quickly Evoke’s designers can make changes—since they know all the shortcuts—and it’s exciting for the customer to see them carve out their airplane’s final form. Customers can also invite friends and family to join. Screen sharing also saves Evoke a lot of phone calls.

“You can cut down so much time,” Davis said. “You can cut down weeks of back-and-forth by doing a Zoom session, honestly. Because they can see their ideas in real time, and they can visualize it, and they can also ask technical questions that they might not think of when they’re dialing a response back.”

Evoke also reduced the number of checkup phone calls it receives by developing an online portal for customers to track lead times.

“Once you initiate a design with us, you get on the paint schedule, you get a Signature Series number assigned to you, and then as the airplanes are completed, we have an online portal that you sign into,” McCormick said. “It has your number, where you’re at in line, what your current wait time and estimated drop-off date is, and then you can also see the planes that are in progress, and you see the planes as they’re being finished. So it’s like this interactive system that you have access to once you get on the schedule.”

The Paint

Dakota Jennings, another one of McCormick’s first hires, works as a paint technician, having gotten his start studying auto collision repair, just like McCormick. Jennings was able to perfect his craft under McCormick’s tutelage, working through unfamiliar tasks diligently until he got it right.

“He showed me how he does it, and then he let me do it,” Jennings said. “He never wanted to do it for me. And once I get it, I’ve always got it,”

Jennings enjoys everything about his job, from hand-striping lines to creating his own colors for fades. Like many of the other team members, he fell in love with aviation and was excited to tell his college peers he works on airplanes.

“It was like my calling to be in the aviation industry,” he said. “I really could be doing something else, but I really enjoy being here and being…I guess you could call it an artist.”

When asked what makes a good aircraft painter, McCormick said it’s all about a strong skill set rather than just having the right tools.

“I believe that to paint to the quality that we’re doing is a 100 percent skill,” he said. “At Oshkosh I do a seminar and I tell exactly how we do every single step of our paint process. There’s no secrets. There’s nothing proprietary about the way we do things. We just do everything to a degree and with the skill set that is almost impossible to replicate without having the team of people we’ve been able to build and put together here.”

The Finished Product

Your airplane is painted. Now how do you maintain it?

Evoke has created a line of cleaning products, called the Signature Shine Series, that allows customers to take a little bit of luxury with them when they leave the facility. McCormick worked with one of his clients who owns a company that specializes in product development, manufacturing, and packaging to create the line of supplies for Evoke.

“It’s not meant to be a really big sector of our business, but it is very cool when we’re finished with an airplane to be able to continue our involvement in their paint job,” he said.

At AirVenture, Evoke brings a team to detail airplanes all week, so if your homebuilt was painted by Evoke and you fly it to Oshkosh, you’ll get the royal treatment.

Now that McCormick has built his empire, he works seven days a week to maintain it.

“Not to micromanage, but just to manage to a degree where we’re never compromising our quality,” he said. “That quality, attention to detail, and pride in what we do is the biggest reason our product has grown to become so popular.”

He’s proud to be quite involved in every aspect of the company. So how does he continue to improve?

“I think I’m intuitive, but I also try to learn from people who have done it before,” McCormick said. “It never hurts to pick up a book about business management and [study] how to communicate more effectively as a leader. It’s worth going through books, even if there’s one sentence or phrase in that entire book that becomes valuable, and it’s something you can implement in your day to day, and just stacking those skills and learning to communicate better and to be a more effective leader.”

For more information on Evoke Aviation, call 256-490-1541 or visit www.evokeaviation.com and www.evokeaircraftdesign.com.

This feature first appeared in the Summer 2024 Ultimate Issue print edition.

The post Ultimate Issue: Specializing in Works of Art appeared first on FLYING Magazine.