Product Reviews

Review of Unforgettable: My 10 Best Flights by Flying magazine’s Lane Wallace. Many of Lane’s unforgettable best flights are in her beloved Grumman Cheetah. She shares with readers the joy of fish tacos in Baja Mexico, her serendipitous encounters while hop scotching between small airports in Texas, and the contrast in a Florida flight that started in bad weather and ended in joy. In other non-Cheetah flights, she takes readers through the Alps in a blimp, on two trips years apart to small villages in war-torn Sudan and to the stratosphere in the back seat of a U-2 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft.

I wish that everyone who loves aviation will buy a copy of the movie FlyAbout and watch it with their family. Better yet, buy it as a gift for a young person to help inspire them to get their Private certificate.
Words are inadequate to describe the beauty of this 74-minute film. FlyAbout chronicles a young woman’s four-week trip with her father flying a Cessna 172 around the continent of Australia. Against the backdrop of the trip, you’ll see beautiful scenery and exotic animals. But best of all, you’ll see the introspection of a young woman in her twenties working through conflicts that emerge as a result of her being a more experienced pilot than her strong, German father.

Garmin’s announcement today of four new portable GPS products—the aera 500, 510, 550 and 560—essentially refreshes all but the high end of their portable aviation GPS product line. To help pilots understand these products, I’ve put together a comparison chart that compares the aera GPS with the Garmin… 296, 396, 495 and 496 units that … Read more

While surfing the internet, I read an update on the David Letterman blackmail sex scandal. The key takeaway for me was that Steve Martin and Martin Short are on the show, so I’ll be watching tonight when I otherwise wouldn’t have—so that’s good for Letterman’s ratings. Is the next step for him to start an … Read more

It's not often that a new piece of avionics comes out that changes a paradigm. The introduction of GPS certainly did that in the 1990s as did the Avidyne Entegra and G1000 in 2003 and 2004 respectively. I just flew behind the Aspen Avionics EFD1000 Pro and frankly I think it is in the same … Read more