It’s Thursday at AirVenture and the weather is great so, with feet worn out through hiking the booths and flight lines, I took the bus out to the seaplane base. Out of the way, yes, but well worth the ride. Wandering around I spotted a very small aircraft that had drawn a few folks and [...]

I was walking among the thousands of airplanes at Oshkosh this week and noticed a subtle, but significant transformation; that square tip on the end of the prop of yore is giving way to a more scimitar looking device. Where a few years ago there were a few to be seen, now they are the [...]

Why is this man smiling? George Mendonca has been flying for more than 51 years and has just made a personal goal: fly left-seat into all 68 non-privately owned airports within 100 n.m. of his home base in Hayward, California. That took more than you might think, though. Among the airports are SFO (Class B), [...]

We recently tried out a set of VedaloHD sunglasses and are quite impressed with them. They’re made in Italy and have the look of sophisticated style that one expects of Italian products. More importantly, they function as well as they look. Rather than depend on polarizing or bizarre lens colors, VedaloHD has embedded a proprietary [...]

Anywhere Map made quite a splash in the pond of low-cost GPS devices when the company introduced its PDA-based systems in 1999. Early users were attracted to the ability to upgrade the software through their computer, and even get the latest TFRs just before a flight. The separation of the hardware from the software also [...]

The extensive smoke from the fires in northern California had dissipated enough to make the annual airshow at the Lake Tahoe Airport (KTVL) worth going to. Normally a small event, the smoke did not inhibit the performers or intimidate drive-to attendance. It did, however, have the effect of making the ramp area look more like [...]

On Saturday, June 21 some 8000 people decided it was a perfect day for an airshow in Northern California, and they all came to San Carlos KSQL just 15 miles from San Francisco. The event is called Vertical Challenge, and it’s unusual primarily for the aircraft: They’re all vertical takeoff and landing types. This is [...]

Your hand-held GPS works great and gets you where you want to go. Why would you want to take up precious panel space with a version that costs three to five times as much? Those panel-mount versions are just bigger, heavier computers, so shouldn’t they be cheaper? Understanding starts when you turn on your GPS [...]