May 2006

This safe, easy-to-fly plane keeps getting better

If you haven’t yet flown a Tiger, you’ve missed out on one of general aviation’s real treats. As far as I’m concerned, the world has become a better place since the Tiger was reintroduced a few years ago.

More and more information outlets are available for pilots

Weather happens, and the vast majority of us mere mortals will probably never understand it. WX (as it’s rarely abbreviated) is almost universally regarded as the subject pilots understand least and fear most. For most aviators, it’s flying’s great question mark. Some people may have a perfect understanding of Bernoulli’s principle, but still consider weather a mystery.

This is an angle you should know more about

It’s a pristine, fair-weather day, so you can’t resist the urge to hit the sky for some pattern work. After a few rounds, your circuits begin to get a bit messy, which you attribute to a slowly escalating wind. It’s time to call it quits. On base to final, the darned wind is blowing even harder than before, causing you to overshoot. You crank over toward the runway and pull back. But to your surprise, the plane quickly rolls more than you expected and now you’re looking at the runway, but it’s upside-down. You’ve just become a stall/spin statistic.

IFR flight planning, electronic charts and moving map all in one package

In the fall of 2004, I closed a review of Jeppesen’s JeppView/FliteDeck 3 with a complaint about the lack of serious flight-planning functions in Jeppesen’s flagship electronic charting products. A Jeppesen representative responded: “At some point, we hope to offer a single solution.” He must have been serious because that single solution now exists.

Escorted adventures make big intercontinental fights available to everyone

Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to inform you that in this river, there are no cocodrilos,” our guide smiled as he related the information to us. Just hearing the word made our adventure more exciting. Cocodrilos (a.k.a. crocodiles)—I said it over and over again, letting the syllables twist back and forth between the tip of my tongue and the roof of my mouth. “KO KO DREE YOSE,” I repeated, trying to perfect that Spanish rolling “r” that eludes most gringos. “There are, however, many jaguars,” the guide added.