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.

“You’ve got the coolest job in the world,” a customer would exclaim.

I’d smile.

To quote Ernest Hemingway, “What a pretty thought.”

“I don’t know how you do it. I’d last two weeks.” I heard that too, accompanied by sympathetic eyes.

What was my job? What “it” did I do?

I provided airframe and engine assembly, operation, and maintenance support to aircraft homebuilders, pilots, owners, and mechanics via phone and email. I supported those who claimed to have never tightened a bolt and actual rocket scientists, those who loved every moment of their project and those who seemed to endure under duress from the first. Those who ran their engine without a prop while making carburetor adjustments to try to lower cylinder head temperatures, and engineers prone to overthinking.

Sometimes they were one and the same. Subsets in each category included those with a can-do spirit, those with a can’t-do spirit, those wanting to learn, those wanting to complain, those who embraced challenges, and those who shouldn’t be in aviation at all.

There were those who abused me and those who brought me a cold six-pack from various Californian microbrews every EAA AirVenture. They all called me “Tech Guy.” Except one, who called me an “ass—-” and demanded I be fired.

Monday Morning, the Phone Rings…

Caller: “I sent you an email three days ago. I still don’t have an answer.”

Me: “I see it arrived Friday at 4:37 p.m.. That was 45 work minutes ago. How can I help you?”

Caller: “I have N12345.”

Me: “I don’t know what that is.”

Caller: “It’s the green Onyx.”

Me: (Ah, the green one.) “OK, how can I help you?”

Caller: “The Piston Banger engine makes a…”

Me: “I’m sorry, we don’t support Piston Banger engines. You’ll need to contact them.”

Caller: “But that’s what’s on the Onyx I just bought.”

Me: “That may be—by the way, it’s pronounced One-X—but we can’t help with that. Piston Banger probably can.”

Caller: “Do you have a phone number or anything for them?”

Me: “Hang on, let me Google that for you.” (I emphasize Google.)

The call winds down with, “How are things there?”

“Great! I have to let you go, I have another call to take.”

The coolest job in the world, indeed.

After a call like that, it’s hard to imagine why I’d want to do anything else. I stare at the phone. “Please,” I think, “let the next one be about low oil pressure.” But it’s not.

After a lengthy monologue on how hard I am to get a hold of, it’s mostly about the weather until the caller gets sidetracked and queries me on a bolt substitution. I dispense the local weather conditions—both current and forecast—and address their question.

While doing so I think of a friend, a professional musician who plies his trade in Nashville, Tennessee, recording studios and on stages around the world and my heart sinks. Thank goodness I never had guitar lessons or I might be slogging through life like him. The call ends with, “How are things there?”

“They’re great. I need to let you go. Someone else is calling.”

The third call begins, “You’re hard to get a hold of…” On the way to their question, they ask how the weather is and regale me with stories of flying cargo over the Himalayan Mountains.

Where Do Tech Guys Come From?

Support personnel in a field as unique as homebuilding don’t come from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and aren’t found through local staffing agencies.

Hands-on experience with a specific airframe and a lack of other employment options is the primary career path. That, and the belief working for a kit aircraft company is the coolest job in the world.

We come from garages, basements, unused bedrooms, and leaky T-hangars. We build our résumés one part at a time, one mistake at a time. Our graduation is our first fight. Our internship is flying off the flight test hours and successfully sorting the bugs.

From that pool of candidates, a company needs a person interested in both the job and moving to the factory’s location (have you seen where some kit companies are located?). A person capable of troubleshooting (without touching) and communicating the corrective action—maybe to someone who doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of the aircraft they’re building. A person capable of dealing with…people. Angry people. Worried people. People whose dream, financial investment, and literal life may hinge on what is said and how it is said.

They must do this while building and guarding a company’s reputation and, sometimes, advocating for a customer by arguing against a company’s policy.

But, no pressure.

Supporting the Product or the Customer?

Strictly speaking, my job was less about supporting customers than it was supporting products.

To support a customer is to open the door to infinite questions. It’s a door I’d step through, though seldom farther than the threshold.

“What kind of paint is on the factory airplanes?” I could answer that. “What kind of paint should I use?” I couldn’t answer that. “How do I wire the AeroVee?”  I could answer that—it’s a Sonex product. “How do I wire the intercom to my radio?” It wasn’t my place to say. I didn’t support third-party products and hoped other companies weren’t advising Sonex builders on aileron rigging.

It may surprise you, after a two-decade career, how little of my knowledge would transfer to another kit company. The expertise to effectively support a particular product comes from knowing the product. I could look at the plans of any airplane kit and see where slot A engaged tab B, but so can every builder, if only they would. I could advise on bolt length substitutions, removing bad rivets, bending parts and CG calculations, but you shouldn’t need factory support for that—that’s general homebuilding knowledge.

What Is a Company’s Support Obligation?

A kit company expects customers will bring a level of mechanical ability, resourcefulness, and desire to learn to their project.

For some, knowledge and skills acquisition begin when the kit is delivered. For others, it has been accumulating since childhood, as they absorbed the pages of KITPLANES and other homebuilding magazines, and their personal copy of the Aviation Maintenance Technician Handbook. (Please tell me I wasn’t the only eighth-grader with a tattered copy of that classic.)

What support should you expect? If pressed, I’d say a company owes you support to assemble and use the parts and products it provided in the manner it intended. If a hole needs to be drilled, it owes you the location of the hole and its size. The company does not owe you an explanation on why that hole is there or how to drill it. It doesn’t owe you an electrical schematic if it provides nothing that needs wiring. It doesn’t owe you advice on fitting alternate brakes, supplemental fuel, or increasing the size of the panel. And it certainly doesn’t owe you a way to salvage parts you’ve damaged beyond airworthiness.

The role of Tech Guy gets muddled when a project becomes a flying airplane. The factory didn’t deliver a finished airplane. Thousands of individual decisions go into turning a pallet of parts into an airplane, each unknown to the factory.

Here’s one example: Sonex recommends a specific Sensenich propeller for each airframe/engine combination it supports. Propellers from other manufacturers may share the same pitch and diameter specification, but in execution it varies.

One customer, who fitted a propeller from an alternate manufacturer, couldn’t get their airplane out of ground effect. In time, I persuaded them to borrow the recommended prop from another Sonex. That solved the problem. If I hadn’t pursued that, or if the builder had ignored my advice, they would have remained ground bound, chasing the wrong fixes, and Sonex could have taken heat within the builder community for the poor performance. “Those AeroVee engines are crap.” “Toss the AeroInjector and fit a Brand-X carb.” “You need a Rotax.” I saw it more often than I can count.

In the end, it’s your airplane and your problem. That’s blunt, and more than a bit true. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a phrase to be tossed about by Tech Guy so they can go to lunch early, but the help you seek may not be help they can provide.

Imagine taking a British sports car that someone stuffed with a Ford 302 to a Ford dealer when it doesn’t start. The dealer would turn you away faster than you can yank the positive battery cable off  to stop an electrical fire. (My personal best is 3.2 seconds.) The car’s factory-provided manual was rendered useless by someone with a vision and the desire to tinker. Maybe the modifications were documented, but probably not. You’ll have to trace wires—all of them white, none of them labeled.

I just described homebuilt airplanes. Tech Guy may try to help—I did, if I could—by providing common sense diagnostics: “Did you hit the starter with a hammer? That worked on my girlfriend’s Pinto.”

Supporting a product that is delivered as a collection of parts—or only as plans—to be interpreted into an airplane by a cross section of the general population is different from supporting a GA aircraft that is factory-assembled and maintained in strict compliance with its type certificate. When you embrace homebuilding, you have to embrace that you have a one-of-kind airplane whose problems, ultimately, are yours. Even small modifications can render factory support of kit aircraft difficult.

As a Tech Guy, when things didn’t add up, I had to coax modifications into the light. “Is it wired exactly per the schematic,” I’d both ask and emphasize.

“Yes, but…”

You’d be surprised how many shades of meaning “exactly” has.

Support By Committee

A customer’s email to me: “I try and help [on the builder forum] but rarely do any good. They come looking for help and then argue and tell you you’re full of crap. I’ve got to hand it to you guys. You do a darned good job of doing the almost impossible.”

As a product matures, the population of builders with opinions does as well. More builder modifications—“improvements,” in builder-speak—creep in. In time the number of people giving advice grows into a chorus of individuals singing different songs and singing them loudly. I increasingly received questions prefaced by “so-and-so says…”

Multiply that by thousands of builders and you see where the need to support the product, as designed, becomes critical. I saw dangerous modifications implemented and copied. When I’d point them out, it was common to be told, “That’s why it’s called experimental.”

Fair enough, but the outcome of some experiments can be foretold. Many builders put blind trust in the often-anonymous posts on builder forums. Think about this: The same ignorance and knee-jerk answers you see in online groups for topics you know very well (for instance, split-window Corvettes or how to bake cinnamon bread) exist in the online communities for topics you may know little about, including homebuilt airplane groups. While you may not have the knowledge to recognize them, Tech Guy does.

‘I Know You Have to Watch What You Say’

That whispered statement was sometimes invoked to solicit the “honest” answer to a question. My answers were informed by the engineering and testing that had proven the product, by my firsthand experience, and by the knowledge I accumulated from others’ experiences. They were never influenced by attorneys (the only attorney I spoke to was a customer. That’s who called me an “ass—-” and demanded I be fired) or the need to toe a company line. They were in a builder’s best interest, and sometimes not in the company’s financial interest, whether a builder believed it or not. Builders shouldn’t want it any other way.

Even after I’d warned of a dangerous condition, some forged ahead, as was their right in the Experimental/ Amateur-Built (E-AB) category.

A few times I urged pilots to ground an airplane until a problem was resolved. Not everyone listened. At least one will never read this. It was common for the FAA or National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to contact Sonex as part of an accident investigation. It wasn’t the factory it was investigating, it was the specific airplane’s history.

Sometimes the path between a customer’s last email and the accident was direct and only days old—“My engine seems starved for fuel.”

The Support Relationship

Your relationship with Tech Guy can last years or decades. For everyone’s sake, it should be a “we’re in this together” relationship.

Treating factory support as an adversary is not in your interest. I advanced my retirement a week because one more week of employment wasn’t worth the sarcastic, blame-laden emails I was getting from one particular builder. In contrast, within weeks of retiring I embarked on a road trip that included overnight stays at the homes of four of my best friends. Each entered my life when they needed the help of Sonex Tech Guy. Today, those friendships, and many more, transcend aviation.

By the time I retired I had supported thousands of souls who got 650 airplanes flying and another 2,100 airframes underway. I supported 1,000 AeroVee engine deliveries and a host of accessories.

In November 2023 Van’s Aircraft website stated that 11,278 RVs had been completed and an average of 1.5 were hatching each day. I estimate its full-time builder support staff to be three to four folks. I put the number of Tech Guys in the kitplane industry at one per 3,700 registered E-AB aircraft, or one per 9,000 kits/plans delivered.

At the same time, there are an unlimited number of questions any builder can ask, and secondhand sales reset the counter. The farther a kit or finished aircraft travels from its original owner/builder, the less familiarity each new owner, and Tech Guy, has with what they’ve purchased.

With that lengthy preface, I offer these suggestions to streamline the support experience for all involved. Before contacting Tech Guy, run this checklist:

• Is this a question for the product’s manufacturer? I answered a lot of generic building questions and some unrelated to the products I supported. I even served as Siri from time to time: “Kerry, what is Aircraft Spruce’s phone number?” “Kerry, what is the best fire extinguisher for a Sonex?”
• Have you utilized the manufacturer’s printed and online resources? In other words, don’t be lazy. “I’m sure the answer is in the plans, but they are in my basement and I’m in my hangar.”
• Are you the person that should make the call? A friend calling on behalf of an owner often couldn’t answer my follow-up questions, and I knew my answers got muddled in their delivery.
• Have you prepared for the call? Have the construction documentation available as well as pen and paper for notes. Referencing parts with the manufacturers’ nomenclature is more precise than calling something “that bracket thing that’s riveted to a channel.”
• Are you asking the company to comment on what another builder said or did? Don’t.
• Don’t call, email. The answer you want may not be immediately at hand. I often had to dig into a problem and I preferred giving accurate answers to fast ones. Coincidentally, many times someone would have gotten an answer faster if they had emailed rather than waited for business hours to call. I routinely answered emails during nonbusiness hours.
• Would you write a letter (and include an SASE) or pay long-distance charges to ask the question if it were 1980? Email, cell phones and free long-distance calling have made it easy for some to stop thinking for themselves. Don’t burden Tech Guy with your laziness.
• Don’t argue the answer. You can take it or leave it, but don’t argue about it. You should, however, challenge an answer that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes my answers were off base because I misinterpreted a question.
• Support those who support you. A customer who purchased engine parts elsewhere, to save money, called when they didn’t fit to compare the manufacturer’s numbers on his box to what we sold. He went on to complain that people used to get a price from him and then order online, for less. (You can’t make this stuff up.) If you value or use factory support, order your parts from them.
• Use an app to get the factory’s weather conditions, and assume things are going well for them.

One final thought: My job was to support a person’s hobby. I stood in an odd crossroad—under observation by those who paid me and often wanted me to do other things, things that looked more like making money, while those I supported wanted to share their experiences with me. I enjoyed hangar flying—it was relationship building—but Tech Guys only have time for a touch-and-go or two.

I Was You. Few Were Me.

Before I was Tech Guy, I was a guy building an airplane in a garage. I knew what it was like to want an answer when it seemed I may have ruined critical parts.

As a Tech Guy I was acutely aware of my impact on a customer’s success. When the workday ended, unresolved issues went home with me. They ran with me, showered with me, ate with me, watched TV with me, vacationed with me, and celebrated holidays with me. Many slept with me.

I knew someone’s lifetime dream could hinge on my answer. I knew the company’s reputation was earned, confirmed, or diminished with each answer I gave. For better or worse—and years of nightly aviation nightmares, which subsided after I retired, would indicate for worse—I took on a builder’s problems as if they were my own. Tech Guy was my world. It is a world few in homebuilt aviation occupy. It’s a world few would want to occupy.

“You’ve got the coolest job in the world.”

What a pretty thought.

Help Yourself

Many of the questions I was asked and answered never needed to be asked of me or anyone in a tech support role. Homebuilding encompasses a wide range of skills and knowledge that each builder must acquire on their own.

To use an analogy, paint manufacturers aren’t expected to teach their customers how to scrape paint, hold a paintbrush, or climb a ladder.

The good news is learning the basic knowledge, often framed as “best practices,” pays dividends in speeding your project along and building your confidence. A kit’s manufacturer, however, should always be your first stop for design-specific questions.

Here are a few tried-and-true resources builders should avail themselves to:

• AC 43.13-1B, Acceptable Methods, Techniques and Practices—Aircraft Inspection and Repair
• FAA-H-8083-30A, Aviation Maintenance Technician Handbook
• Aviation Mechanic Handbook
• Homebuilding publications, such as KITPLANES magazine
• The FAA, for licensing and registration questions
• Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and its vast homebuilder resources, including local chapters and technical counselors.
• The four-volume collection of Tony Bingelis’ homebuilder reference manuals
• Fellow homebuilders
• Skill-building classes at local schools
• Aircraft-specific builder workshops
• Skill-building seminars offered at fly-ins or through EAA

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

The post Ultimate Issue: Welcome to My ‘Tech Guy’ World appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It’s no secret that pilots of complex and high-end aircraft have been dealing with the trend of higher rates and even non renewed policies, especially older pilots and those with limited experience in type. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sunset your flying career once you reach 70—the point in life where underwriters consider you a “senior” pilot. Moreover, with a savvy approach, some compromises and hard training requirements, insurance can be available for younger and green pilots stepping into tailwheels and turbines.

Plus, insurance pros unanimously say to find an insurer you’re happy with and stick with them for the long term because loyalty matters. At the same time, show the underwriter you’re doing everything possible in the name of safety, and that includes sourcing quality flight training and on a regular basis.

Here’s a general insurance guide, with tips and advice from those who write the policies and pay out the claims.

Old Plane, Older Pilot

Making matters worse is that companies are putting limits on insured value. Just because you have $350,000-plus invested in your refurbished piston single typically valued at $125,000 doesn’t always mean you’ll be able to insure it for its full upgraded value without solid proof it has all the upgrades. These days, with avionics, paint, and engine upgrades, it’s easy to get upside down from an insurance standpoint.

Marci Veronie from Avemco Aviation Insurance said the company writes policies based on what it calls “stated” proof of equipage.

“If you can prove to me you have it in what you want covered, and we can agree, that’s what we’ll write the policy for,” said Veronie, noting that clients send photos, videos, and equipment specs that are cross-checked against the company’s reference guides.

• READ MORE: Aircraft Insurance Market Has Stabilized—Somewhat

Essentially, do your best to prove what you think the aircraft is worth. If you sold the aircraft tomorrow, what would you get for it?

The other issue is maintainability. The parts availability issues for some older airplanes are trickling down to the insurance market, which means you’ll be paying more out of pocket for repairs.

In the insurance world this is called a component parts schedule, which means insurers will only pay out a percent of the loss of a flap or wing or tail section, as some examples. It’s a snag for uncommon experimentals and certified aging aircraft alike.

Scott Smith from Iowa-based Scott “Sky” Smith Insurance said that these days it’s not just the age of the pilot but the age of the aircraft that concerns insurers.  Some companies have stopped insuring Cessna piston twins older than 30 years—a major chunk of the fleet. Others have walked away from turbine conversions.

There are a few underwriters who say claims can sit in limbo for many months because of parts shortages. For others, where it’s impossible to source parts, the aircraft becomes a loss, the insurer pays it out and unloads it to the highest salvage bidder. Part of the reason for rate increases is the increasing cost of replacement parts. Think about that before buying something rare, exotic, or classic.

It has taken a while for the underwriting world to sync up with the huge jump in value of used aircraft, though prices do seem to be stabilizing. Still, while an older Skyhawk might sell for big money, that doesn’t mean an insurer will write a policy with limits that match the value. Good insurers will routinely ask what improvements were made to the aircraft, including the big ones like avionics upgrades. Plan on providing proof of equipage (make sure all equipment is registered with the manufacturer) and keep tight engine logs.

Speaking of engine time, one FAA inspector advises that insurers deny claims if the aircraft’s engine is beyond TBO and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report cites engine failure as a probable cause of the crash. We call that nonsense. Engine TBO is not a requirement in Part 91 ops, but instead a suggestion from the manufacturer.

Who Is This Guy?

Part of the problem that’s frustrating for aging pilots is the stereotype. Not all senior pilots are hobbling around with a cane and short of breath, because in general, aviators tend to keep themselves in reasonably decent shape.

Insurance pros agree that for an underwriter sitting at a desk in Big City USA, it is difficult to evaluate an aging pilot’s risk. As one insurer put it: “How do you know if you are writing [for] the 60-year-old 80-year-old, or the 80-year-old 60-year-old?” The companies really don’t because people age at different rates. Some lag behind their chronological age, and some are way ahead of it. Some are fit enough to compete in endurance events, while others can’t walk a mile without falling over.

Some also argue that with age comes more sound aeronautical judgment, and for career aviators, lots of real-world experience. That may be true, but is it canceled out with declining situational awareness and reaction time? The low-hanging fruit is accident history. Almost every company did tell us that they experienced a slightly higher accident rate among the senior pilot customers. As a result, a 77-year-old pilot with two gear-up landings in the last three years, or who ran one tank dry and made an off-field landing with 40 gallons in the other tank, is probably not a good bet when it comes to risk.

• READ MORE: Airplane Insurance Trend Could Be Bad for Us All

Two areas of human thinking that researchers say suffer the most and the soonest from aging are working memory and reaction time. Working memory is defined in different ways, but we use it here to mean the part of transient memory used to temporarily store and manipulate information, such as reading back an approach clearance or running a checklist from memory. Underwriters have relied upon medical certification to give them some reassurance about the physical fitness of their clients and in some cases require additional FAA medical exams because it’s more data that they can put in the pilot’s files. The annual FAA medical including electrocardiogram (EKG) has been a favorite for years.

Another clue that underwriters look at is how much time a pilot has in the same type of airplane in which they are looking to be insured. Some aging pilots can easily tackle the challenge of a different airplane with lots of new features and complex systems, but many cannot. One underwriter said that while his company insures many older pilots, it tends to avoid older pilots who were making transitions, especially large ones—such as from a piston to a turbine. The required learning of new systems may be a challenge—and insurers know it.

What Scares Them?

Insurance underwriters consistently tell us that assessing the risk factor is easy simply because they have years of data, proving that pilots continue to bend aircraft the same way they always have, despite huge leaps in tech with layers of automated backstop.

We concur. Over at sister publication The Aviation Consumer magazine, we’ve been studying monthly NTSB accident reports for more than 50 years and come up with the same stats, again and again. Whether it’s runway loss of control (RLOC), continued VFR into IMC, loss of control in IMC, botched instrument approaches, low/reckless flying—the list is long—crash patterns are predictable, especially for taildraggers.

For prospective tailwheel owners and current owners 70 or older, the hard market means doing some homework before applying for insurance or renewing an existing policy.

Mike Pratt, an aviation insurance broker with Foundation Risk Partners, a large brokerage with offices in 14 states (he’s been a tailwheel owner and pilot for years) had some good advice. According to Pratt, a high number of claims because of careless prangs and the lack of pilot training are what is driving the insurance market for tailwheel airplanes above and beyond the hard market. There are only about a dozen insurance companies that write for aviation and not all will insure tailwheel airplanes, so it’s up to the owner to put their best foot forward when seeking insurance.

What are red flags to underwriters? In the tailwheel world, it’s little airplanes with very high hull values. That means that if you haven’t yet obtained a tailwheel endorsement, don’t buy a brand-new Husky, Scout, Maule, or XCub, to name a few, and expect to get insurance with one simple phone call. If you can get it at all, it could cost at least $15,000 for the first year.

Moreover, get time in the type of airplane you intend to buy—even if it’s only five hours—before you apply for insurance. Putting down a zero in the time type box in the insurance application means that some of the companies will not even look at you. Also, plan on completing as much dual instruction as the insurer requires in your new airplane before you fly it solo. It’s amazing that some owners don’t want to part with a couple thousand dollars for training after spending a couple hundred thousand for the airplane.

Pratt said he sees pilots become cheap about training way too often and believes it’s one of the most foolish things they can do. Truth is insurance companies have had their financial faces rubbed in the value of training for years. They know it keeps claims down. Plus, do you want to deal with having to repair your new bird when quality training might have avoided it altogether?

If you are 70 or older and have been able to get insurance for your tailwheel airplane, don’t rock the boat. Do not change insurers. Don’t get huffy in response to a big premium increase—the odds are that no one else will insure you, and the insurance company that has been loyal to you may drop you. We hear from senior pilots on a regular basis faced with nonrenewals, regardless of their claim histories. The bottom line with taildraggers is get an insurance quote before making a deal on one, while accepting that at some age, if you want insurance, you’ll have to switch to a nosewheel airplane.

Underwriters also look at what kind of airplane their older customer is flying and the amount of liability coverage they carry. Bear in mind that the insurer has in effect promised to pay for the airplane, and the limit of liability, if things go really badly—as it certainly sometimes does. Underwriters treat this as very real money. So, the older pilot in a Cessna 172 insured for $90,000 who carries $1 million of liability coverage limited to $100,000 per passenger causes an underwriter much less concern than the older pilot flying a Piper M600, as one example, worth $4 million and toting liability limits of $5 million.

Last, senior pilots flying retracts and twins seem to be attention-getting for many underwriters, even though the available evidence is confusing and even contradictory. Many of the studies based on accident analysis include only NTSB-reportable occurrences, which are only a fraction of all aircraft insurance claims. And how do we tell whether a gear-up landing is just an “oops’’ or was caused by age-related factors? Plenty of youngsters have committed the $60,000 slide, and plenty of younger pilots do some pretty stupid things.

Training, Currency, Medical Certification

This includes earning a new rating or two, which underwriters see as a good thing. So is the client who goes out for additional recurrent training on their own. Currency can be a good gauge for risk because the pilot who is flying 100 hours a year, getting periodic training and proficiency checks, plus maybe doing an FAA WINGS phase, should look good to an underwriter concerned about that aging pilot keeping his head in the game.

On the other hand, insurers have said that the mere issuance of a medical certificate does not provide the underwriter with much information about either gradual deterioration of a pilot’s skills, nor does it provide much ability to predict sudden medical incapacitation—as rare as it may actually be. So it’s easy to wonder how belt-and-suspender safety backstops (including Garmin’s Emergency Autoland and other autopilot-based equipment) will affect the insurance underwriting landscape. From what we can tell, it helps sell airplanes to aging pilots.

Avemco offers sizable discounts for pilots who go the extra mile in the knowledge- and skill-building department.

Seaplanes, Turbines, Experimentals

Unanimously, insurance pros admit that rates for these aircraft can be extremely high, and some might not be insurable at any cost. Avemco said it can help ease the pain if the floats are taken off and wheels installed during the offseason, if you operate in northern climates. Yes, skis are the same as wheels in the eyes of Avemco and most insurance companies, so they won’t alter the cost.

Got a fresh seaplane rating in your wallet? Resist going out and buying a high-performance model like a Cessna 206 or big-engine Maule on amphibs. Instead, consider something you can insure yourself for any physical damage. Maybe something pretty simple, such as a Luscombe or even a Cub on floats, until you get some time in your logbook.

Building an airplane from a kit? The advice is to stick with ones with large fleet sizes. Almost every underwriter recognizes models from Van’s, Sonex, and Zenith as being good choices. Replacement parts are a big concern for underwriters, and so is complexity, so it might be best to build a fixed-gear airplane (with a tricycle configuration) and avoid rare or one-off kits. Unless you have serious amounts of turbine time in your logbook, an experimental turbine will have your underwriter laughing.

Speaking of turbines, they’re certainly doable, but be realistic. As one underwriter put it, “the owner-flown jet and turboprop market is where all the hand-to-hand fighting is. Liability limits are being cut in half, premiums are doubling, and it’s sort of a failure of the insurance business to get this far behind the curve that we can’t provide the product at a reasonable price.” Another made a good point: “High-performance aircraft, including turbines, may be the big-buck business insurance companies want, but they may not want the pilot that goes along with the policy.”

Stepping into the world of an owner-flown turbine means you’ll need to spend quality time with your insurance broker to find out whether you can get a policy that covers you in the airplane and limits of liability that you need to protect yourself, as well as the conditions and its cost. Accept that your age and experience are the two drivers that determine your insurability when stepping up to turbine machines.

It may be that you will be unable to buy insurance to fly a dream airplane single pilot at any price. We’ll say it right here: If you are over 65, the current market means there’s little likelihood that you can get insurance for a first-time step-up to a turbine.

Wrapping It Up

Who knows when we’ll see another soft insurance market, but for now the best thing anyone—old or young—can do to stay insured for the long haul is simply don’t crash. That could mean piling on extra layers of training, being realistic with yourself on your skill set, and for aging pilots staring down age 70, accepting that downgrading to a simpler aircraft is the simplest way to keep flying. No matter what you fly, show your insurer that you’re serious about training and proficiency with a well-kept training log.

And simply prepare for the payout. By that we mean keeping all of the aircraft’s maintenance paperwork in order, including sign-offs for annual inspections and airworthiness directive (AD) compliance. While insurers will police it before writing a new policy, you don’t want to be scrambling to get the paperwork in order after an accident.

Last, if you’ve been a longtime customer to one company, keep it that way. Now is not the time for aging pilots to jump carriers, because in a hardened insurance market, loyalty matters.

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

The post Ultimate Issue: Staying Insured Encompasses Training, Loyalty, and Downsizing appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

From the Experimental/Amateur-Built category’s emergence in 1947 through the founding of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) in 1953, the classification grew slowly—in part because building on your own meant doing everything: welding, working with fabric, painting, upholstering, wiring, and plumbing. Once you’d found all the raw materials you needed, of course.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the idea of “kit” airplanes became a serious thing. Frank Christensen is often credited for kick-starting the industry as we know it, providing builders of his Christen Eagle virtually everything they needed to build the airframe. All carefully packaged. All accounted for and tested to work with his airplane. No more cut-and-try, no more scrounging for a set of brakes that might work—or only work with serious modification. For a large part of that project, the parts fit together, turning what had often been a lot of hand fabrication into much more of an assembly process. Then came Burt Rutan and his moldless-fiberglass machines, first the VariEze and then the Long-EZ—to be followed by dozens of similar airplanes that promised greatly reduced build times alongside their impressive performance credentials.

• READ MORE: Ultimate Issue: Are You the One for That First Flight?

By the 1980s, the speed race was on, with Glasair and Lancair battling it out to make the fastest sport airplanes available. They hewed to a simple idea: Put as much horsepower into as small an airframe as you could get away with. Impressive top speeds came, but the real impact was actually behind the scenes. As the designs got faster, they had to become much stronger. Early homebuilts pulled from a rich tapestry of Piper Cub-like airplanes (along with the Cub itself, naturally), where speeds were necessarily low, aerodynamics comparatively forgiving, and the horsepower count was mostly what you could afford.

When the engineering requirements increased for the “average” homebuilt, so did expectations of what the kit would encompass. Early designs anticipated that you’d be able to weld your own fuselage tubes, engine mount, and exhaust system, for example.

From the late 1970s and into the next two decades, builder expectations changed radically. Every new kit was designed to be easier to build, either because the design itself was simpler, or because more of the tedious work had been done at the factory. In time, every flight-critical component would come to be built by professionals, either at the factory proper or by trusted subcontractors. They, as pros, used the right tooling and had the expertise to ensure that the parts were accurately built, typically to a much higher standard than the typical builder could muster.

• READ MORE: Latest CubCrafters Design Looks Back and Ahead

Which brings us to the opening question: Why aren’t there new kit companies popping up left and right, like we had in the latter part of the ’70s and through the ’80s? It’s a simple question with a multipart answer.

Let’s start with builder expectations. For the last three decades, experimental aviation has been in its maturity phase. The best-run and -funded companies chose to incrementally develop their products while working to build better factories. Investment in new tooling technologies, including CNC (computer numerically controlled) machining and, especially, punch-press machines, helped drive almost unseen development. If you look at, say, an early Van’s RV-6 and then consider a recent-build RV-7, you might conclude they’re very similar airplanes.

They’re not. The early RV-6 required a lot more fabrication by the builder and had, by modern standards, fewer semi-finished components. Meaning, the builder was responsible for a great deal of both assembly and alignment because of the need to locate parts relative to one another and drill holes in exactly the right place. Moving on to the current version, which uses something called matched-hole construction, the job gets significantly easier because the parts become self-aligning. Each mating part has the rivet holes placed in such a way that they only go together one way. You’re either way off or right on.

Even with that, though, the earlier versions required the builder to partially assemble large parts of the airplane, drill those locating holes to final size, then disassemble to remove burrs from the drilling process, primer between skins, and commit a few other steps before the parts could be reassembled and then riveted. Today’s technology involves the factory making those holes to final size, meaning that no further drilling operations are required. Assemble the pieces, make sure the surfaces align properly and there are no burrs or defects with the holes, then begin riveting. Removing builder steps helps cut the assembly time and reduces the chances of a mistake. And while it’s true the factory can make mistakes, it’s far more likely any “oops” will come from the builder’s hand.

These time-saving steps cost money for the builder but especially for the company. And they’re really not optional in today’s kit world. Builders expect a high level of completion and that every effort be made to reduce  both build time and the chances for builder error.

I asked this question of a handful of kit companies: Let’s say a tornado came through on a weekend and leveled your plant, what would it take to start again? The answer: between $5 million and $15 million. And that’s assuming you have your design and other intellectual properties already in place. Start the whole effort from zero? Perhaps double, according to my sources.

There’s more keeping this industry in the mature phase than pure economics. In the early days, there was a lot more tolerance for building one-offs and taking risks with startup companies. But those heady days were punctuated by a few marginal companies taking deposits and going under before all the kits or aircraft components were delivered. Some of these companies, trying to elbow their way to the front, found themselves unable to commit the kind of arduous, expensive development process all really good airplanes require. Not that they were dangerous, necessarily, but in many cases the last few clicks of refinement didn’t happen, at least not right away.

As a result, builders became more conservative over time, favoring the established companies that seemed to perform the development work and proved to have the financial grounding to continue producing kit components in a reasonable amount of time. They were also trending toward being followers rather than pioneers, in the sense that choosing a popular make and model gave them a built-in support group at the airport. That’s how the most popular brands became the default choice, making it harder for new entrants to gain a foothold.

• READ MORE: Van’s Aircraft Announces Recovery Plan

Cost is also a factor. Established companies have the advantage of amortizing the cost of the factory, which puts less of a burden on today’s kit prices. In fact, most kits have gone up in price mainly due to increases in the cost of raw materials. And that’s before you look at powerplant and avionics price increases. The kit market has always been price sensitive, so a company that has a stable product line with moderate costs, plenty of happy builders, support groups, and numerous flying examples has an unfair advantage over the newcomers.

But change is coming with the expansion of 3D printing and other new manufacturing techniques. Not that airplanes will, in the near future, be 3D-printed appliances, but that the technology allows for faster prototyping and the possibility of better, more accurate, more easily changeable molds for composite aircraft. (Traditional molds are intensely time consuming to create, which is why companies try to get the most out of them by not changing or updating models any more often than they have to.) And we’re not even considering the possibility of electric aircraft or other powerplant alternatives.

We may look back on this period of homebuilt aircraft as a decades-long time of stability and conventionality, but it’s not for a lack of imagination or wonder. Today’s Experimentals are the product of mature, relatively conservative companies providing the market precisely what it wants.

Tomorrow? Good question.

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

The post Ultimate Issue: It’s Time to Air Out the Kit Question appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

And if you are lucky and you become a docent at an aviation museum, you get to share your knowledge with people from all walks of life. Most, if not all, are volunteers who donate their time and expertise to educate the public about aviation. Museums simply could not function without them.

They may volunteer at a museum once a week (or more) or work alternate weekends. They often wear a uniform of sorts, such as a polo shirt with the museum logo or a jacket or vest and have a museum ID lanyard around their neck. A great many also wear a “fun meter” button with the needle pegged to maximum.

• READ MORE: Earhart Museum to Explore Evidence Related to Aviatrix’s Disappearance

The reason? They love what they do.

As someone who spends a great deal of time at aviation museums, I can tell you they all have their own character and energy, and they all rely on volunteers to operate. Some of the volunteers bring special skills and restore airplanes to their former glory. But many more are the faces of the museum to the public—the docents. You don’t necessarily have to be a pilot, mechanic, engineer, or retired from an aviation career to be a docent—you just need to bring your enthusiasm.

EAA Aviation Museum (Oshkosh, Wisconsin)

“Storytellers are the best docents,” says Chris Henry, manager at the EAA Aviation Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. “They can help make the planes pop to life and make you inspired

to learn more at home. A good docent should lead you to wonderful stories, leaving you wanting to know more and wanting to go home and research further.”

Henry notes the museum has a large cross section of society as docents coming from different walks of life and age ranges.

• READ MORE: New Museum of Flight Exhibit Explores Living in Space

“We have everything from WWII veterans to current high school kids,” he says. “It’s helpful if the docent has a passion to keep learning, and they are passionate about sharing what they learn, and they just enjoy showing people new things that they have never seen or heard before.”

Museum of Flight (Seattle)

The larger the museum, the more docents it has.

According to Brenda Mandt, docent programs supervisor at the Museum of Flight (MOF) in Seattle, the docent cadre is made up of 162 volunteers.

“Most of them work one day a week, and they work the same day and shift each week,” says Mandt.

To become a docent at the MOF, a person must take a 12-week basic training class that acquaints them with museum policy and procedures and teaches how to build a tour.

• READ MORE: Michigan Flight Museum Sells Centerpiece B-17 ‘Yankee Lady’

“Docents have a great deal of freedom to create tours that interest them most,” says Mandt.

Many of the docents either have or have had careers in aerospace or the military and often build tours around their experience.

For example, docents Jim Frank and Dave Cable are retired Navy aviators who served aboard aircraft carriers, so they know about “landing on a postage stamp.” Frank’s talk on the history of carriers is informative and entertaining, and Cable’s tour of the A-6E Intruder, the airplane that brought him home many times, and the F-14 Tomcat are quite moving and bring a smile to the face of museum visitor Jack Schoch, a retired Navy chief who served on five different carriers, including a war cruise during Vietnam aboard the USS Enterprise.

That’s one of the best parts of these tours—the docents are able to make them relatable to visitors.

Palm Springs Air Museum (California)

Requirements for docent training vary by museum.

At the Palm Springs Museum in California, the applicants are required to go through a background check and approximately 40 hours of training, “most of which can be done online,” says spokesperson Ann Greer. They also undergo on-the-job training in one of the 10 different areas of the museum.

“We have over 300 docents, and the museum is run with military precision,” says Greer. “They work four-hour shifts, [and] they may be in one of the hangars or on the hot ramp [where aircraft move] or in the library or gift shop. In the hangars we have a crew chief who keeps an eye on things, and if we want to talk to a particular docent, we have to ask the crew chief. There is a chain of command as the docents’ main job is to interact with the visitors and keep an eye on exhibits and airplanes.”

Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum (McMinnville, Oregon)

At the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, docents in training will spend at least 50 hours under the wing of Don Bowie, a retired Air Force aviator who has been with the gallery for 26 years.

Although the facility is most famous as the location of the Howard Hughes HK-1, the flying boat famously known as the “Spruce Goose,” according to Bowie, there is a lot more going on besides that popular exhibit.”

The museum features two buildings—one houses the HK-1, and the other is devoted to the Space race. Bowie works the floor, helping visitors and docent candidates learn about the aircraft and spacecraft on display.

“You are a volunteer here, and the job has to be fun and you have to be a people person,” he says. “You meet people from all over the world.”

Bowie says the best part of being a docent is when someone comes in and asks about a specific aircraft that is special to them, and there is a docent who shares their interest.

Docent Schedules

Because docents are volunteers, they aren’t required to put in massive amounts of hours on the job, but many do because it is a labor of love. Most museums ask for a commitment of at least one day a week, and often the docents rotate working weekends.

The docent’s typical day often begins with a crew briefing before the museum doors open. This is when they learn about special events at the museum, such as school tours or corporate meetings, and when exhibits are being installed or removed.

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

The post Ultimate Issue: Being Aviation Docent Simply Labor of Love appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Cooler heads observed that the majority of unintentional spins occurred in the traffic pattern, particularly on the base-to-final turn, where there was no room to recover even if the pilot knew how to. So knowing how to spin and recover served no purpose, besides its entertainment value—which, to be sure, was considerable.

Under the new dispensation, pilots were taught, in theory at least, not how to recover from a spin but how to avoid one. Nevertheless, stall spins, usually in the traffic pattern, still account for more than a tenth of all airplane accidents and around a fifth of all fatalities. Because they involve a vertical descent, stall spins are about twice as likely to be fatal as other kinds of airplane accidents.

• READ MORE: A Cautionary Tale About Pilot Freelancing

Why has the FAA’s emphasis on stall avoidance not done more to reduce the number of stall spin accidents? There are probably many reasons, but I think the lack of realism in the training environment deserves some blame. The training stall is a controlled maneuver, briefed in advance, approached gradually, calmly narrated, and recovered from without delay. The real-life, inadvertent stall is sudden, unexpected, and disorienting.

The pilot does not see it coming and so does nothing to prevent it. The training stall is so reassuring that pilots fail to develop a healthy fear of the real thing. After this preamble, you may guess that I am going to talk about a fatal stall spin.

The airplane was a Van’s RV-4, an amateur-built two-seat taildragger with a 150 hp Lycoming engine. It had first been licensed 13 years earlier and later sold by its builder to the 48-year-old pilot, a 1,300-hour ATP with single- and multiengine fixed-wing, helicopter, and instrument ratings. For the past six months, the pilot had been on furlough from regional carrier Envoy Air, where he had logged 954 hours in 70-seat Embraer ERJ-175 regional jets.

On the day of the accident, he added 24 gallons of fuel to the RV and flew from Telluride (KTEX) to Durango (KDRO), Colorado, a 25-minute trip, to pick up a friend. They then flew back to Telluride, where the temperature was 1 degree Fahrenheit, and a 10-knot breeze was blowing straight down Runway 27. The density altitude at the runway was about 9,600 feet.

Entering a wide left-downwind leg at about 100 knots, the pilot gradually decelerated and descended. By the time he began his base-to-final turn, he was about 200 feet above the runway and was going to slightly overshoot the extended centerline if he didn’t tighten his turn. His airspeed dropped to 50 knots, and the airplane stalled and spun. An airport surveillance camera caught the moment—a blur, then a swiftly corkscrewing descent. It was over in a few seconds. Both pilot and passenger died in the crash.

• READ MORE: Two Fatal Cases of the Simply Inexperienced

The National Transportation Safety Board’s finding of probable cause was forthright, though it put the cart before the horse: “The pilot’s failure to maintain adequate airspeed…which resulted in the airplane exceeding its critical angle of attack…” Actually, the opposite happened: The pilot allowed the angle of attack to get too large, and that resulted in a loss of airspeed. It was the angle of attack, not the airspeed, that caused the stall.

Still, it was an airspeed indicator the pilot had in front of him and not an angle-of-attack indicator, so to the extent that the pilot was consciously avoiding a stall, he would have had to use airspeed to do so. 

The published stalling speed of the RV-4 at gross weight is 47 knots. In a 30-degree bank, without loss of altitude, that goes up to 50.5. Individual airplanes may differ.

But in any case it’s misleading to make a direct, mathematical link between bank angle and stalling speed, although the NTSB frequently does just that. When you perform a wingover, your bank angle may be 90 degrees, but your stalling speed is certainly not infinite. In the pattern, you can relieve the excess G-force loading associated with banking by allowing the airplane’s downward velocity to increase—assuming that you have sufficient altitude.

On the other hand, with your attention focused on the simultaneous equations of height, position, glide angle, and speed that your mental computer is solving in the traffic pattern, you may not even be aware of a momentary excursion to 1.2 or 1.3 Gs.

• READ MORE: Three-Mile Limit: Novice Pilots Succumb to the Perils of Total Darkness

The RV-4, with a rectangular wing of comparatively low aspect ratio and no washout, stalls without warning in coordinated flight but is well-behaved and recovers readily. Uncoordinated, it can depart with startling abruptness. It resembles all other airplanes in being less stable when the center of gravity is farther aft, so maneuvering at a speed just a few knots above the stall may be more perilous when there is a passenger in the back seat. Like most small homebuilts, the RV-4 is sensitive to fingertip pressure on the stick and easily overcontrolled.

The NTSB’s report on this accident does not include any information about how many hours the pilot had flown the airplane or how many of those were with a passenger. The FAA registry puts the cancellation of the previous owner/builder’s registration just one month prior to the accident, suggesting the pilot may not have had the airplane for long.

The pilot never stabilized his approach. He descended more or less continuously after entering the downwind leg several hundred feet below pattern altitude—to be sure, the pattern at Telluride is 400 feet higher than normal—and never maintained a steady speed even momentarily. His speed decreased more rapidly as he entered the final turn, perhaps because he felt he was a little too low and instinctively raised the nose. Besides, the terrain rises steeply toward the approach end of Runway 27, possibly making him feel he was descending more rapidly than he really was.

A final factor that may have played a part in this accident is the altitude. The runway elevation at Telluride is at about 9,100 feet. Density altitude doesn’t matter for speed control in the pattern if you pay attention to the airspeed indicator, because all the relevant speeds are indicated airspeeds. But your true airspeed, which is 10 knots greater than indicated, can still create the illusion that you have more speed in reserve than you really do when you are making a low turn to final.

There’s a reason that students are taught to establish 1.3 V_s on the downwind leg, begin the descent abeam of the threshold, and maintain a good speed margin throughout the approach. It helps keep the stall-spin numbers down.

Note: This article is based on the National Transportation Safety Board’s report of the accident and is intended to bring the issues raised to our readers’ attention. It is not intended to judge or reach any definitive conclusions about the ability or capacity of any person, living or dead, or any aircraft or accessory.

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

The post Ultimate Issue: Analyzing a Fatal Final Turn appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It’s been the catch phrase used everywhere the last few years, and it has become the gold standard of top quality aircraft or those so realistic and so well designed that you could study them to obtain actual type ratings and pass an initial course.

Most add-ons are of simpler design and varying levels of quality, but over the years, these study level aircraft for the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS20) and X-Plane 12 (XP12) platforms have grown in numbers.

I am old enough to remember the old fighter sim called Falcon 4.0 in the late 1980s and early ’90s. It came with a thick paper manual that felt like a novel. I miss those days of real boxes, manuals, and reading material.

Some of the most detailed aircraft add-ons come loaded with PDFs to study, and some have nothing at all, leaving it up to the customer to go online or just obtain the actual real aircraft’s study manuals. It seems lazy to not bother to publish a manual for an aircraft release, but then again, if it’s so realistic that the only PDF says “go obtain a real Airbus A320 POH” for more information, I’m sold. If something is that good and complete, then I think the developer is allowed to be lazy, or perhaps a bit big braggish.

Most commercial pilots, or experienced aviators in general, were dismissive of flight sims at home. Twenty years ago, I was embarrassed to come out of the sim closet for I’d be a victim of skepticism or at least a target of laughter. “No flight sim can do anything close to what ‘real pilots’ deal with in Level D sims,” I was often told. Or, I’d hear, “Oh, yeah, that little Microsoft Flight Simulator, I played with it once. It looked like a cartoon, so that won’t help anybody.”

• READ MORE: Turn Up the Heat in Sims With Density Altitude Games

This is what every older-and-bolder, gray-haired retired airline pilot said when seated to my left.

Now that I have gray hair, I am all too happy to encourage the younger generation to get active with sims when they aren’t flying the real thing. It’s also accepted among almost all real pilots I know as a really useful tool now that photorealistic graphics are everywhere and far exceed the quality of a $20 million sim the FAA approves. For as little as $2,000, you can rival those simulators at home.

I am not going to mention every study level aircraft available—that would require a book.

Yet over the years before and even right through MSFS2020 and XP12, several come to mind and most are quite famous and have been around for a long time:

Precision Manuals Development Group

The company has been around since the early 1990s. It’s the longest add-on group ever for any sim, and in my opinion, the finest. Everything about it is study level.

Its entire Boeing products are the gold standard of what an add-on should be, and nobody has rivaled it in producing a Boeing 737NG, 747-400, or 777. Now since the release of MSFS2020, we have been enjoying the entire 737NG set, including BBJ. Almost every system, failures, controls accuracy, autopilot, performance, switchology, sounds, visuals, etc. have all been reproduced perfectly.

• READ MORE: The Art of Simulated Long-Haul Flying

Years of development for just one airframe. You’d ace a type rating in the real aircraft after spending time with PMDG products. I wish I could go get a 737 type rating just to test this theory myself. I feel I know no other aircraft as well as this one, due to my years with PMDG 737s. Now, we are about to get its 777 finally after years of waiting patiently. It will be released this year and continue the outrageous quality and realism we all crave from a company that really only releases masterpieces.

Fenix

This company is a new entrant that stormed onto the stage just last year with its completely detailed A320 for MSFS2020. Upon release, it quickly became accepted as the most detailed Airbus for any sim platform.

In my opinion, the early release suffered from performance and frame rate issues as it couldn’t compare to the smoothness and fidelity of the PMDG lineup. But a year later, with all the refinements and the recent release of the update or Block 2, it is now a masterpiece. Detailed systems right down to individual circuit breakers are modeled. Engine modeling and accuracy is key. All that has been done, and now the IAE version is included, each with its own systems, sounds, and realistic performance.

• READ MORE: Taking Risks at a Trio of Mount Rainier Airstrips, Virtually

Some say it has blown past the PMDG. Whatever the opinion, I share the zeal. It’s smooth, precise, and many real airbus pilots online tout it as basically perfect. A true study level that you’d absolutely use during type rating school. I’ve enjoyed flying it now, as much as I have over the years with the PMDG lineup.

SimMarket

This company sells the Maddog MD82 for MSFS2020. I am not as familiar with the older airliners, so I will defer to the majority of sim fans online holding this up to the level of the Fenix.

For MD fans, this is also a real keeper. It represents a blend of systems modeling and accuracy all from the later ’70s to later ’80s replicated at a high level. In a battle for the top, this is often referred to as the best airliner ever made for MSFS2020. I’ll have to learn it better to give my own opinions, as I have used it little, never being a Maddog fan. But I see the reviews touting it as in the top few airliners ever released.

X-Plane

It has the outrageously in-depth Felis 747-200 series for the X-Plane sim. It is one of the most complete jetliner simulation add-ons I have ever used—from nose to tail. This is one of the reasons I still use XP12.

I cannot say enough about this masterpiece other than I wish it was available on MSFS2020 as well. You need to be three pilots at once to handle this beast. Setting up view points is key, as you’ll not only be pilot and copilot but flight engineer as well, often manipulating the systems as you sit sideways. You can feel the quality, heaviness, and momentum.

X-Aviation

The company sells the most renowned and sought-after bizjet for any sim, the Hot Start Challenger 650. This completely study level jet is once again simulating entire circuit breakers from head to tail. Setting the bar so exceedingly high, it’ll be what all future bizjets are compared to.

Sadly, only X-Plane 12 has it, but again, that’s another reason I still use it. The accuracy, realism, handling, etc. is all spot on. I fly a similar aircraft in real life and find this exceptionally close to the real thing. Again, it’s a type rating quality example to learn from. Many have called it the best jet ever designed for any sim, and it’s impossible to disagree. It certainly rivals the airliners above in total quality and experience.

Flysimware

It has a Learjet 35A that was recently released in “early access.” I have featured this in many an article so far, and it is well on its way to what I would call an honorable mention study level aircraft.

Its blueprint quality visuals, scaled parts, and cockpit clarity make this a winner right out of the gate. I’ve never seen such a beautiful reproduction in an early access or beta-style release. The flight quality, accurate avionics, sounds, and more make this a really promising product when the final version comes out.

It is the best pure bizjet built specifically for the MSFS2020 lineup so far. Let’s leave the jetliners behind now, as accuracy and study level can go down a category and be just as advanced.

A2A Simulations

The company has the 1960s Piper Comanche 250 featuring its coveted Accu-Sim 2.0 technology to bring a living, breathing aircraft to your desktop. This example must be run as gently as a real one, maintained and babied, or else face what real owners face: expensive repair bills.

You can damage and destroy the airplane if you’re a ham-fisted pilot. The aircraft requires a full preflight and walk-around inspection. You can test the fuel and do everything a real pilot would during a flight.

Continually monitoring its wear and tear, systems, and cleanliness is all part of this intensely realistic model that keeps its constant state alive, meaning it will remember its health on a continual basis, even if you fly something else in between on different days. You even get to perform an overhaul and other yearly tasks.

This airplane has quite a following and has been labeled by many as the best general aviation aircraft ever designed for any sim. I believe A2A is leveraging its AccuSim technology to future releases, and it certainly has captured the immersion of owning, operating, and maintaining a personal airplane like no other.

Conclusion

These are all my experiences with what I own and fly in the sim world. Your opinions may vary, especially when you get into the smaller airplanes as it’s much easier to simulate a simple single-engine in study level than an airliner.

In some ways, many of the default or add-ons for GA are close to this namesake already. A basic default Cessna will accelerate any new student pilot right to the top. The graphics of MSFS2020 and XP12 aircraft are good enough and photorealistic enough to permanently lodge in the brain of anyone learning to fly and stay current.

It’s a great time to study and learn in today’s flight sim environment. Compared to what we had in 1981, everything now is study level.

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

The post Ultimate Issue: Taking Sim to a New Level appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I am coming up on 21 years as a CFI, and there are stumbling blocks I’ve seen freshly minted CFIs trip over. Here are 12 suggestions to help make your journey as an educator a smooth one for both you and your learners:

1. Use a syllabus

Even if you were not trained with a syllabus, or the school you are working at is Part 61 and doesn’t require it, please use one, be it paper or electronic form. It will help you stay organized and deliver lessons in a logical order. Make sure your learners have a copy and bring it to lessons.

Pro tip: If your learners don’t have a copy of the syllabus, you’re not really using one with them. They need to have a copy for best results.

2. Introduce FAA certification standards on Day 1

The Airmen Certification Standards (ACS) is required reading for both the CFI and learner. A learner can’t perform to standard unless they know what those minimum standards are. The ACS spells them out quite clearly.

Don’t wait until just before the check ride to bring them out and apply them. Use the ACS in the pre-brief so the learner knows the metrics for which they are aiming.

• READ MORE: The Importance of Embracing Proficiency Culture

3. Stress the use of a checklist

This starts with the preflight inspection. Have the checklist in hand. Teach to the premaneuver, cruise, and of course, prelanding checklists as well. Emergency checklists should be memorized.

Bonus points: Show the learner the pages in the pilot’s operating handbook or Airplane Flying Handbook from which the preflight checklist was derived. Teach them to use that if the checklist disappears— as it often does at flight schools.

4. Teach weather briefing and aircraft performance

Teach the learner to obtain and interpret a weather briefing and to calculate aircraft performance from Day 1. Discuss weather minimums and how their personal minimums will change as their experience grows.

If the learner does not want to fly in certain weather—such as especially turbulent days or if the weather starts to go bad during a lesson—be ready to terminate. Flight instruction is about teaching good decision-making in addition to flying skills.

5. Manage your schedule for the learner’s benefit

While it is true that most CFIs are building time to reach the airlines, do not overload your schedule at the expense of the learner. The learner should be able to fly at least twice a week, though three times is optimal for best results. Manage your student’s load so you are flying six to eight hours a day—that’s a hard stop at eight hours.

Be ready to go at least 10 minutes before the learner arrives. That means scheduling lessons so the aircraft is on the ground at least 15 minutes before the next lesson so that it can be serviced if needed and you can take care of the debrief and logbook of the previous client. Be sure the person who does the scheduling understands the limitations of scheduling, such as when you timeout at eight hours.

Pro tip: The quickest way to lose a client—and possibly your job—is to disrespect a learner’s time. There will likely be a time when you miss a lesson or are late. Apologize and make it up to the learner by giving them a free lesson, even if it means you have to pay your employer for the use of the airplane and your time. You won’t like it, but it’s about character and doing what’s right, especially if the school has a “no-show, you-pay” policy for the learners.

• READ MORE: Separation Anxiety: When Your Instructor Moves on, Your Logbook Tells the Story

6. Don’t spend too much time on the controls

This is a hard habit to break. Try holding a writing implement in your hand while you hold your other arm across your body. If you are going to fold your arms on your chest, tell the learner it’s to show them you’re not on the controls.

Some people interpret this posture as being angry, so make sure you say something up front.

8. Eliminate the ‘pretty good’ metric

“Pretty good” is not a pilot report on weather conditions or an assessment of the learner’s performance. Teach them to be precise on weather observations, such as “light winds, ceiling at 3,000 feet,”, and for learner performance use metrics, such as “altitude within 200 feet,” for performance review.

Ask the learner how they would like feedback on their performance—in the moment or at the end of the lesson in the debrief. Some learners prefer the CFI to sit there quietly while they flail around with the controls. Others prefer real-time correction, such as “your heading is off by 10 degrees,” which allows them to fix it.

9. Don’t pass up the opportunity to teach a ground school

That is when you really find out if you really are a teacher of flight or a time builder. Teaching in the classroom and demonstrating something in the airplane involve vastly different skill sets.

Reading slides off a screen or material out of a book is not teaching. To be an effective teacher, the CFI needs to get the learners engaged in the material. The best teachers are memorable.

• READ MORE: Make Flight Reviews for CFIs Worthwhile

10. Allow the learners to make mistakes

Mistakes are part of learning. In aviation, they happen quite a bit, and as long as no metal is bent, no one is physically hurt, there is no property damage, or broken FARs, allow them to happen.

If things go badly and the learner is upset, the worst thing you can do is tell them to sit there while you fly back to the airport. This can destroy their confidence. Instead, try having the learner review and practice a maneuver already learned. Strive to always end the lesson on a positive note.

11. Plan for poor weather or mechanical delays

Always approach each day with two plans for each learner—flight or ground. Let the learner know in advance what the plans are: “If we fly, we will do this; if we cannot fly, we will do that.”

There is the option to cancel if the flight cannot be completed, but you should be prepared to teach. For example, if the weather is below minimums or an aircraft is down for maintenance and the shop rules permit it, take the learner into the hangar and do a practical pointing using the aircraft engine or cockpit instruments.

12. Make time for your own proficiency and currency

Protect your flying skills. You can do this in part by demonstrating takeoffs and landings or by asking the learner if they are OK with you doing a few at the end of the flight with the understanding you will be paying for that aircraft time and will adjust the bill accordingly.

Don’t neglect your instrument skills either. Use the advanced aviation training device (AATD) if the school has one and shoot a few approaches and holds a couple times a month, or pair up with another CFI during off-peak hours to do some real-world IFR flying.

An instrument rating is part of the requirement to be a CFI, so make sure you keep it ready for use.

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

The post Ultimate Issue: First Few Hours of Being a CFI Are the Hardest appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It is a lovely, peaceful spot set on a knoll, but most of the remains—people who went down the Ohio River and settled on the flat ground below in the late 1700s—were reinterred up here above the floodplain. That large, flat area, called the Turkey Bottoms, would become “Sunken Lunken” Airport in the early 1920s.

I’ve heard comments about how many approach and takeoff paths take you right over graveyards, but I never realized how many cemeteries are located on airport properties.

• READ MORE: Perusing Some Old Logbooks

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. The ground between or alongside runways and taxiways is flat and well cared for, and what could be a more appropriate resting place for pilots and aviation aficionados? The thought of resting in a place with airplanes soaring into the sky nearby…hey, that makes sense to me.

But since Lunken (KLUK) hasn’t yet seen things my way, I have a plot in a little and very old cemetery at the base of the Mount Washington neighborhood water tower, sitting on a hill about 4 miles from the airfield.

The airport beacon is mounted on top of the tower, and many a night I’ve navigated home fi nding my way toward that bright light.

Out of curiosity, I “uncovered” information about the incredible number of airports—large and small—where an old cemetery is found on the property. And it’s fascinating how the problem is solved.

A Chicago field, originally called Orchard Airport and the site of the Douglas Aircraft Company, was renamed O’Hare (KORD) in 1949, and in 1952, graves in Wilmer’s Old Settler Cemetery—0.384 acres on O’Hare Airport property—were removed by court order because they were in the path of a proposed new runway. Reportedly, 37 whites and an unknown number of Native Americans interned there were reburied in three nearby cemeteries.

Just how long a grave can be “reserved” for sole use by the original inhabitant seems to depend on state and local practices. It’s common for cemeteries to rent plots, allowing people to lease a space for up to 100 years before the grave is allowed to be recycled and reused.

In Ohio, it’s 75 years, but I could find no universal law here. It seems that much depends on the preference of surviving—if any—family members. Sometimes a court order is required.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (KATL) consistently wins the title of the world’s busiest airport and it continues to grow, engulfing more and more small communities. When a fifth runway was added in 2006, it vastly increased the number of possible operations, but it also enveloped two century-old cemeteries.

• READ MORE: Sometimes the Flying Weather’s Fit Only for Turkeys

Authorities decided that these two small family and church burial grounds, Hart and Flat Rock cemeteries, would simply be incorporated into the airport’s master plan. Despite being located between runways with takeoffs about every 30 seconds, they are still publicly accessible via a dedicated access road with signs showing the locations.

Probably the most famous—and curious—on-airport remains can be found at Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (KSAV).

Members of the Dodson family, Daniel Hueston and John Dotson, are buried alongside Runway 10, while Richard and Catherine Dodson’s graves are actually embedded beneath that runway. If you look really hard out of an airplane window, you can see the markers.

On quiet Saturday mornings, local pilots have been known to ask ground controllers for the “Graveyard Tour.” If cleared, this allows one to taxi out to the Dotson grave markers on Runway 10/28 so passengers can snap a picture before taking off.

Everything is haunted in Savannah and ghost tours are big business, but thus far, no one has figured out how to monetize the graveyard tour at the airport. Perhaps the two flight schools on the field could start incorporating a ghost tour into their sightseeing flights.

When Smith Reynolds Airport (KINT) in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, acquired property in 1944 to extend a runway, about 700 graves in the private African American Evergreen Cemetery were relocated to a new location. But it seems some marked graves remain in a wooded area within the airport complex.

• READ MORE: The Man Who Saved the Iconic Hartzell Propeller Company

If you watch carefully while driving on Springhill Road south of Tallahassee International Airport (KTLH) in Florida, you’ll see a break in the security fence. Pull in there and drive between the fences with signs proclaiming it is a restricted area, and you’ll come upon gravestones of a cemetery around which the airport runways were built. It’s known as Airport Cemetery and was originally a pauper’s graveyard. About 15 graves are designated with stones, but it appears there are about 20 other sunken depressions marking graves.

I’m betting you know many others, but I found one at Burlington International Airport (KBTV) in Vermont, where the graveyard is surrounded on three sides by the facility. And there’s Florida’s Flagler Executive Airport (KFIN), North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International

Airport (KRDU), New York’s Albany International Airport (KALB), and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport (KSHD), where Revolutionary War veteran Mathias Kersh and his wife, Anna Margaret, rest—all sites of small family plots. The behemoth Amazon recently added 210 acres as part of its air cargo hub at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (KCVG) and is seeking permission to move 20 graves from the land it owns there.

No discussion of final resting places and cemeteries would be complete without a mention of a glorious shrine to aviation built a quarter mile off the end of Runway 15 at California’s Hollywood Burbank Airport (KBUR), formerly known as Bob Hope Airport. It’s called the “Portal of the Folded Wings.” The 78-foot-tall structure was designed by a San Francisco architect and built in 1924, intending it to be the entrance to a cemetery called Valhalla Memorial Park.

With its location so close to Burbank Airport—then called Union Airport—and the site of the Lockheed Company, aviation enthusiast James Gillette wanted to dedicate it as a shrine or memorial to early aviators. It took Gillette nearly 20 years, but it was finally dedicated as the final resting place of pilots, mechanics, and aviation pioneers in 1953. In addition to the ashes of those actually interred inside the portal, a number of brass plaques honor famous aviators resting elsewhere, such as General Billy Mitchell and Amelia Earhart.

Familiar aviation pioneers whose ashes are found inside include Bert Acosta (Admiral Richard Byrd’s copilot); Jimmie Angel, whose remains were removed and scattered over Angel Falls in Venezuela, where he crashed flying a Cincinnati-built Flamingo; W.B. Kinner, builder of the first certified aircraft engine as well as Earhart’s first airplane; and Charlie Taylor, who built the engine for the Wright Flyer and operated the first airport on Huffman Prairie in Dayton, Ohio. You can visit the site in Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, California.

But I can’t write a story about aviators who legally rest on airport properties without mentioning who knows how many ashes that have been surreptitiously scattered from airplanes flying over the deceased’s beloved home airport.

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

The post Ultimate Issue: The Connection Between Airports and God’s Acres appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

For the 1956 model year, the company applied the nosewheel concept to its tailwheel 180 and smaller sibling 170, creating the 182 and 172. Thus began a sales tour de force that continues to this day. Where the 172 became the most popular general aviation airplane in history, the more powerful and capable 182 became the big-engine, reliable, go-almost-anywhere, powerful climbing, carry-almost-anything, good-handling, comfortable old boot that could be found nearly anywhere on the planet where there was space into which to shoehorn an airplane.

In the first decade of manufacture, Cessna fine-tuned the 182 with a wider and deeper fuselage that made the cabin truly comfortable for four, added a panoramic rear window, as well as beginning steady gross weight increases so that what was soon named the Skylane became the utility infielder of the GA world.

• READ MORE: We Fly: Embraer Phenom 300E

The original design was eventually stretched to become the models 205, 206, 207, and, with retractable landing gear, the 210 and retractable 182.

In 1962, Cessna became the first to successfully bring a form of turbocharging to general aviation with its model 320 twin. A turbocharger is an air compressor that pumps more air into an engine, allowing it to develop greater power at higher altitudes than a normally aspirated engine as intake pressure drops with altitude. A turbocharger uses exhaust gas to turn a turbine, to compress and boost intake pressure. When there’s more air entering the engine, more fuel can be added to the fuel/air mixture resulting in greater power.

Turbochargers have been around since World War I, but their complexities and fiery operating environment prevented their widespread use in GA until the Cessna 320 debuted with a system that was reliable and didn’t require a degree in engineering for pilots to operate safely. The 320 sold like mad, so Cessna expanded its turbo offerings.

For the 1981 model year, Cessna turbocharged the Skylane, but with a relatively primitive, fixed-wastegate system that involved significant pilot workload. Nevertheless, it proved popular, outselling the normally aspirated 182 until Cessna’s hiatus on piston-engine production in 1986.

When that production began once more in 1996, the 182 was reintroduced in its normally aspirated form. In 2001, to start out the new century, a new turbocharged 182—the T182—was offered with important updates, including aggressive corrosion-proofing and aerodynamic tweaks to the airframe. Motive force now came from a Lycoming engine with slightly more power, the 235 hp TIO-540-AK1A with 2,000-hour TBO. Most significantly, the turbocharging system was a sophisticated set-and-forget type.

A sloped controller in the system sensed manifold pressure and modulated the wastegate to keep the correct amount of exhaust gas going through the turbine section of the turbocharger to maintain the desired manifold pressure. The wastegate is a valve that adjusts to direct exhaust gas through the turbine section of the turbo until the system decides the amount is appropriate, and then it directs any excess into the overboard exhaust pipe.

There was one more pause in Turbo Skylane production—in 2013—when Cessna explored replacing it with a diesel version. I’ve heard various reasons that the diesel didn’t work out but don’t know if any are true. Cessna, wisely, in my opinion, reintroduced the T182T with deliveries starting in 2023. The newest version included the latest Garmin G1000 NXi avionics suite, a heated prop, and upgraded interior amenities. Max operating altitude is 20,000 feet. Base price is currently $760,000.

As an aside, the first “T” in T182T refers to the Cessna’s way of saying that the flying machine is turbocharged. The second letter designates the specific model (as type certificated) of 182. The first model 182 had no alphabetical suffix—it is called the “no letter.” Each subsequent model change received a new letter, although some letters were skipped. The current normally aspirated 182 is the 182T.

The Basics

The T182T I flew was the first off of the assembly line in the 2023 production restart. It was flown as a demonstrator for 240 hours before being purchased by Phil Preston of Poplar Grove, Illinois. The airplane came with most available options including electric air conditioning, oxygen, and a striking interior.

The T182T’s Lycoming engine is a “max continuous power” engine—it develops its full-rated 235 hp continuously at 32 inches of manifold pressure, 24 gallons per hour (gph) fuel flow, and a quiet 2400 rpm all the way to 20,000 feet. There is no time limit on full-power operation.

• READ MORE: We Fly: Cirrus SR G7

Empty weight of the airplane I flew is 2,191.5 pounds. With a maximum ramp weight of 3,112 pounds (max takeoff weight is 3,100 pounds), it has a useful load of 920.5 pounds. (Cessna’s advertising claims a 998-pound useful load.) Max landing weight is 2,950 pounds, so 192 pounds of fuel (27 gallons) must be burned off following a max-weight departure. Fuel capacity is 92 gallons in the integral wing tanks, of which 87 is usable.

With full fuel—522 pounds—398.5 pounds can be loaded into the cabin. At first blush that doesn’t seem like much for a legendary load hauler like the 182, but the huge fuel tanks make the airplane a camel. At 15 gph, full tanks give well over five hours endurance.

Still, with all the options, this airplane is heavy. Putting four 200-pounders in the cabin means the airplane is over its maximum landing weight without any fuel aboard, so juggling fuel and passengers is required. Assuming having 10 gallons of fuel on board when landing at maximum landing weight after burning off 27 gallons following a gross weight takeoff, the maximum possible cabin load for the airplane we flew is 698.5 pounds, or three large adults and baggage. Maximum baggage is 200 pounds—split between three baggage areas.

Cessna singles have a reputation for some of the longest center-of-gravity (CG) ranges in the industry. The T182T lives up to its reputation. I ran several weight-and-balance scenarios and found that in none of the occupant and baggage combinations I tried was the airplane out of the forward or aft CG limit. That’s impressive.

The fuel system is simple. Two tanks and a fuel selector that offers left, right, and both and off positions. Leaving it on the “both” position means getting all the available fuel and minimizes the risk of selecting a tank that doesn’t have fuel in it. To avoid inadvertently shutting off the fuel, the selector valve must be pushed down before it can be rotated to the “off” position. I was impressed by the accuracy of the fuel gauging system, something important when launching with partial fuel may be routine.

The electrical system is straightforward—dual bus, 28-volt DC, powered by a 95-amp alternator with primary and standby batteries. The standby battery will power the equipment on the essential bus for about 45 minutes.

Walking around this new T182T revealed excellent fit and finish, a beautifully applied paint job and some of the aerodynamic touches made over recent years to maximize speed, such as smaller steps, low-drag wheel fairings, and a low-profile beacon.

The Cabin

Opening one of the large cabin doors, you notice little touches, such as their solid feel and the easy step into the cabin itself. Preston has owned several airplanes, high-wing, low-wing, and biplane. He told us that he chose the 182 because of the ease of entry: “I don’t like climbing up onto a wing to get in and out of the airplane.” He also likes the high wing because he’s loaded and unloaded airplanes in the rain many times and prefers to be able to stay dry.

The seats are delightfully comfortable and adjust far more easily than older 182s to fit a wide variety of pilot sizes and shapes. Cessna has been a leader in GA crashworthiness going back to 1946 when it began offering shoulder harnesses as optional equipment for all seats in its singles, continuing through the 1960s when it did full-scale crash testing and later when it donated some 172s to NASA for its crash research. Where it shows in this new T182T is with the best occupant restraint systems available in general aviation—AmSafe airbag seat belts for all four seats.

• READ MORE: We Fly: Diamond DA62

The clean panel is dominated by the Garmin NXi two-screen display with all controls, switches, and knobs easily accessible to the left-seat pilot.

Flying It

Start-up is not simple. The process, including system checks, takes nearly a minute before the starter switch is engaged. On my flight the engine started easily on the first try, even though it was hot. Preston told me that he has not had any problem with hot starts.

Once the avionics were on, Preston showed how easy it was to load a route into the Garmin NXi system. He said that he appreciated its wireless database and flight plan loading capability.

Taxiing out, I was impressed at how easily the airplane rolled and the lightness of the nosewheel steering—there’s no sense of a heavy engine pressing down on it as there is in older Skylanes. On the hot morning of our flight, I came to quickly appreciate the electric air conditioning. It cooled the cabin rapidly.

I used Cessna’s recommended 10 degrees of flap for takeoff. Lined up, and throttle forward, I monitored the manifold pressure to make sure that it stopped at the 32-inch redline. While the turbocharger control is automatic, if the engine oil is cold, the control can be sluggish, and it’s possible to overboost the engine slightly. If 32 inches is reached before the throttle is fully open, just stop pushing it forward until the control system catches up. Acceleration is rapid, and right rudder is most definitely required, especially once the nosewheel leaves the ground.

The aggressive takeoff performance of the turbo Skylane reminded me that the T182T meets the U.S. Department of Defense’s definition of STOL aircraft right out of the factory—no mods required. At sea level, it will take off or land over a 50-foot obstacle in less than 1,500 feet. Few production airplanes are that capable. For a short field takeoff, 20 degrees of flaps are used.

Cleaned up and holding V_Y, 84 kias, loaded about 200 pounds below gross on a warmer than standard day, the rate of climb approached 1,000 feet per minute (fpm)—book is 1,015 fpm on a standard day. When I pulled the power back to what Cessna calls for in a “normal” climb—25 inches of manifold pressure and 16 gph fuel flow, while maintaining the full 2,400 rpm—the rate of climb sagged off by nearly half. At the suggested 95-knot airspeed, it was only 550 fpm.

Frankly, in my opinion, making a power reduction for climb in an airplane with a max continuous power engine makes no sense. It greatly increases the time to altitude and burns slightly more fuel—according to the POH—than a climb at full power. In addition, in case of an engine failure after takeoff, the higher it happens, the better the radius of action for a forced landing. Using full power and climbing at V_Y, the time to 20,000 feet per the POH is only 23 minutes from sea level and burns 9.2 gallons.

For a “normal” climb, it takes 24 minutes just to get to 12,000 feet and burns 6.3 gallons. Comparatively, at full power and V_Y, it takes 13 minutes and 5.1 gallons of fuel to get to 12,000 feet.

As with all but the oldest Skylanes, control forces on the Turbo Skylane are not light.

However, if sufficient pressure is applied to deflect them, the airplane is quite responsive with a most satisfying roll rate. Pitch forces are heavy, mostly due to the downspring in the elevator system that allows the long CG range. The first rule of thumb when flying a Skylane is to use the trim when any change is made in power or speed. With trim, the Skylane is a pure pussycat to fly—one of the reasons it has been so popular for so long. With trim, steep turns are a piece of cake. The solid stability of a Skylane in slow flight could set the standard for GA aircraft—the T182T proved no exception.

The Garmin Electronic Stability and Protection system kicked in while I was maneuvering (it can be disabled). It is a safeguard to protect the pilot while hand flying. Once the aircraft is rolled beyond a selected angle of bank or gets faster or slower than set speeds, it applies control forces to roll the airplane toward wings level or pitch up or down to control speed. Given that in-flight loss of control is well up there when it comes to risk of fatal accidents, I like this system a lot.

Stalls—hey, what do you want? It’s a Cessna. Power on, power off, full flaps, or clean, it’s a nuthin’ muffin. With the ball centered, it breaks straight ahead. A little pitch reduction, and it’s flying. Adding power (right rudder, remember!) turns any descent into a climb forthwith.

Preston and I then looked at cruise power versus airspeed. As much as I despise the overused phrase “power packed,” that describes this Lycoming engine. For pilots used to maximum cruise at 75 percent power, this engine gets one’s attention because it can be run, and leaned, at as much as 87 percent power—204 hp on a 235 hp engine. At 10,000 feet, the POH quotes a cruise speed on a standard day of 155 knots and 17.8 gph at 87 percent—that’s moving in a 182. At 20,000 feet on a standard day, 82 percent generates 165 knots while burning 16.3 gph.

Some time ago, I was told that Cessna does its cruise speed testing by launching above gross weight so that the airplane is at gross at altitude—and therefore the book speeds will be conservative. For over 40 years I’ve cross-checked book versus actual speeds on new Cessnas, and that’s always been the case.

Descending to 10,000 feet and setting up 75 percent power, at 15 degrees above standard temperature, the book called for 144 ktas. Preston and I saw 145, however, our fuel burn was 13.8 gph versus the book’s 13.6. Want to save some fuel but still move along nicely at 10,000 feet? Pull the power back to 60 percent and get a quiet decent 131 knots at 11 gph. Want to go far? According to Cessna, max range is 971 nm at best economy power.

Leaning leads to an issue that is troubling for an airplane of this sophistication and a useful load that is, let’s face it, not exactly great. Lycoming’s recommended lean mixture setting is 50 degrees rich of peak turbine inlet temperature (TIT). (Lycoming certificated the engine, so Cessna must follow Lycoming protocols.) With what we know now from published data from sophisticated general aviation engine test facilities, 50 degrees rich of peak is not at all good for an engine.

It is the power setting for the highest combination of heat, internal cylinder pressure, and minimum detonation protection—and may necessitate cylinder replacement prior to engine overhaul. For best power, Lycoming calls for 125 degrees rich of peak TIT—which is better for detonation protection. Per the POH, best economy is at peak TIT. That setting is not wonderful because it is still in the range of maximum heat and internal cylinder pressure as well as lower detonation protection.

Lean of peak (LOP) operation is not “approved.” As far as I can tell, it’s not a limitation, so it is a recommendation. Still, it makes no sense to me. Lycoming engines have a reputation for excellent mixture distribution between cylinders and have been run LOP for decades. LOP reduces fuel burn 2 to 3 gallons per hour and dramatically reduces CHTs as well as internal cylinder pressures.

In an airplane that is heavy to start with, having to burn 2 or 3 gph more than necessary isn’t a stellar idea. It means having to carry extra fuel instead of payload. For a trip of several hundred miles, that can mean an extra hour of endurance wasted. To make a good airplane even more capable by reducing fuel consumption, extending engine life and increasing payload, one wonders why Cessna hasn’t leaned on Lycoming to come into this century with engine operating guidelines.

As we flew, I purely enjoyed working with the Garmin automation in the Turbo Skylane. Preston demonstrated that not only did the autopilot engage smoothly, programming it to do what we wanted was easy.

Millions of words have been written about Garmin automation, so I won’t add more here, other than to say it was intuitive, easy, worked well, and seamlessly integrated into the T182T.

Approaching our towered airport, I was asked to keep the speed up until short final. Those are magic words to a Skylane pilot. The T182T smoked down a long final at 150 kias until 3 miles out—then I took advantage of the high flap speeds. The first 10 degrees of flaps can come out at a blistering 140 kias, 20 degrees at 120 kias, and all of them at 100 kias. The airplane slowed so quickly that it was a piece of cake to be stabilized at 60 kias while still several hundred feet up.

I’ve heard pilots complain that 182s are nose heavy. They aren’t. The reality is that with just two aboard, the airplane is near the forward CG limit, so a lot of nose-up elevator is necessary to flare. Plus, if the airplane isn’t trimmed, it’s going to take a lot of effort to heave the yoke aft because of the downspring in the system and the airframe’s attempt to nose down to maintain its trim speed.

The POH says that the demonstrated crosswind level is 15 knots. With the effective flight controls of the T182T, I suspect that number is conservative.

Conclusion

The Cessna 182 became the four-place airplane everyone wanted because it does almost everything well—it’s the SUV of the general aviation world. With turbocharging the T182T takes that utility and performance to new heights and new capabilities, giving a pilot more options and more ability to deal with weather and winds.

Spec Sheet: Cessna T182T Skylane

2024 Base Price: $760,000

Engine: Lycoming TIO-540-AK1A

Propeller: (Manufacturer, metal or composite, number of blades) McCauley, metal, three blade

Horsepower: 235

Length: 29 feet

Height: 9 feet, 4 inches

Wingspan: 36 feet

Wing Area: 174 square feet

Wing Loading: 17.8 pounds per square feet @mtow

Power Loading: 13.19 pounds/hp

Cabin Width: 42 inches

Cabin Height: 49 inches

Max Takeoff Weight: 3,100 pounds

Max Zero Fuel Weight: N/A

Standard Empty Weight: 2,114 pounds

Max Baggage: 200 pounds

Useful load: 998 pounds, depending on options

Max usable fuel: 87 gallons

Service Ceiling: 20,000 feet

Max Rate of Climb, MTOW, ISA, SL: 1,040 fpm

Max Cruise Speed at 82% Power at 20,000 Feet: 165 ktas

Max Range: 971 nm [45-minute reserve]

Fuel Consumption at 82% Power: 16.3 gph

Takeoff Over 50 Ft. Obs: 1,385 feet [ISA, sea level]

Landing Over 50 Ft. Obs: 1,335 feet [ISA, sea level]

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

The post Ultimate Issue: We Fly the Cessna T182T Skylane appeared first on FLYING Magazine.