It is September 2021 and I’m in Sutton, Alaska at Kingdom Air Corps (KAC) assisting them by administering checkrides. Basically, KAC trains missionary pilots throughout the summer in the rugged beauty of the Matanuska Valley in Alaska, and then I come to KAC in September to administer checkrides for the pilot candidates. It is a…
I really like the Kingdom Air Corps in Sutton Alaska! There’s the bottom line forward. KAC is such a cool place. Here’s their link: https://www.kingdomaircorps.org Both Ben and I went to KAC in September of 2020 and were blown away by the wonderful team of people that make this one of the coolest places on earth. Completely devoted…
Stand by the wing of your PA46 and just gather in the view. It is a gorgeous wing, and truly the secret to the incredible performance of the PA46. You might think this wing was a new-fangled idea from Piper’s R&D department, but that is not so. They didn’t so much design the wing type,…
I’m a definite headset snob. There…it’s out there. Guilty as charged, but no apology offered. I’ll be a headset snob until the day I die or they figure out how to create airplanes that don’t need headsets. But, it has little to do with cleanliness or germs. It has to do with fatigue and comfort. I’m…
The prototypical Malibu pilot steps up from a Saratoga, Cirrus, or a Cessna 210. All want more speed, most want pressurization, and none want the aviation budget to be stretched too far. Any multi-engine airplane will break the budget insofar as operational costs (comparatively speaking) especially any multiengine that is pressurized, turbocharged, or a turbine. So, what…
I get a lot of questions from piston drivers about the true performance of the Jetprop. So, I made a video of the performance of a PT6-34 powered Jetprop in cruise. This video was made in the heat of the summer, and hence the airplane has a fairly low cruise KTAS. In the colder months,…
Skyhawk vs Cherokee, Centurion vs Saratoga, Cub vs Champ, Citation vs BeechJet…there’s much passionate debate in the aviation world about which airplane type is best compared to its closest competitor for each class of airplane. One of the greatest debates amongst type clubs exists between pilots of the King Air and the Mitsubishi MU2. Since…
A phrase I heard many years ago, and believe to have a lot of truth is, “The piston PA-46 is the finest airplane ever built for personal travel….firewall backwards”. While I love the piston Malibu/Mirage, there’s no doubt that most of the mechanical problems occur “firewall forward” on this airplane. For a given annual on a Malibu…
The Meridian is Piper’s pinnacle of aircraft design and manufacturing. And, they have lots to be super-proud about. The Meridian that rolls off the assembly line at the Piper Factory in Vero Beach, FL today is a fabulous airplane with a bunch of pilot-friendly changes that make flying a Meridian quite intuitive. But, it’s taken…
I’ve been a part of many prebuy inspections on PA-46 aircraft lately, and it seems that the Windshield Heat is the elephant in the room during the prebuy. If the windshield heat does not work properly, then someone gets to write a $30,000 check to fix the problem. Who gets to write this check is…