KITPLANES May/June 2024

Humans are amazingly adaptable but sometimes we lack imagination. Here’s one example. When it came time to upgrade my airplane’s panel to fullsize modern glass, it was after spending time with different systems, trying to understand the philosophies behind both the presentation and the ergonomics—switchology and knobology. After all, these are things you can’t often control but have to live with once invested. Your first few minutes with any new display can be discomfiting. I vividly remember jumping in an airplane with the then-new Advanced Flight Systems big EFIS, which had a lot of forwardthinking features and presented a massive amount of data to the pilot. All the time. I worked really hard just picking out airspeed, altitude, vertical speed and heading. Somewhere on the display it probably showed the…

In June of 2023, I took my little jet—the SubSonex we call Loki—over to an airport open house in Carson City, Nevada. That’s just about 8 miles from my home base as the crow flies and for reasons I’ll mention later, I don’t like to do flights of less than half an hour, so I fired up and launched to altitude to enjoy a little light aerobatics and some cool smooth air before recovering to KCXP and parking on the show line. It was a nice morning, with a small but steady flow of spectators wandering the ramp. I was pleased at just how many had to stop and look at the tiny airplane with the jet engine on the back. Four years after we first flew, it’s still a…

With 200 hours in type, I am probably among the higher-time pilots in the SubSonex, so let me comment a little bit about what it is like to fly. First, the stall speed is relatively low, so it doesn’t require the skill of an F-104 pilot to get it off and on the ground. The speed range is very similar to a Rocket, to pick a good comparison—a bit faster than an RV at the top end, but we’re not talking about flying a Citation. As mentioned, the low stall speed is a nice cushion should the worst happen and you end up setting it down off-airport. The airplane is a little less enjoyable in handling than types with a center stick. The sidestick means that you have very little…

It’s been almost 20 years since the FAA implemented the Light Sport Aircraft category. While the planes might appear similar to traditional Experimental/Amateur-Built (E/A-B) aircraft, there are significant differences in how they are designed, constructed, maintained and operated. Light Sports have had a major impact on flying in the U.S., even if their numbers are still relatively few. Without Light Sport (and the accompanying Sport Pilot program), the FAA would have lacked data to justify the simplification of pilot medicals known as BasicMed. Light Sport’s proven safety led to the MOSAIC program, featuring a major relaxation of the limits of what can be flown without an FAA medical. In our last installment, we looked at the safety record of Special Light Sport Airplanes, which are the versions sold ready to…

Back in January 2020, Juliette and Roger Cosh of Athens, Tennessee, were just starting to build an RV-14A in their garage, never once dreaming of how many places it would take them or how it would influence their worldview. Remarkably, they had already logged 372 hours in it and landed in all but three states of the Lower 48—just 21 months after N8181J received its airworthiness certificate. Prior to flying N8181J, Juliette went through transition training in another RV-14A. She carried her enthusiasm from that training right into flying the requisite 40 hours in her own airplane. She well remembers the date of her first flight, 12-3-21, because as a former math teacher, she recognizes its symmetry as a palindrome. As soon as she’d flown off the 40 hours, it…

Last month, I walked through the block diagram of the Dynon SkyView HDX system—what you need to order to get certain functions and features—and now it’s time to put those pieces together in the airplane. A note or two before we start. This is a retrofit to an existing, flying airplane with an eye toward balancing a few key objectives. On one hand, you could say if you’re spending the money on a full panel redo, you might as well just rip out all the old stuff and start anew. On the other hand, there are systems in place that have functioned well for more than 1000 hours, so the benefits of rewiring the bulk of the airplane would be more for aesthetics and ergonomics than for any functional reason.…