Paul Bertorelli from AVweb provides an in-flight commentary and demonstration of the new 796.

This just in from Sporty’s President and COO, Michael Wolf:

Last year, we issued a Trends Report for 2009, highlighting shifts and developments in general aviation products based on our own research, marketing and sales experience. Now, with 2010 almost in the rear-view mirror, we want to share with you some trends we saw for the year.

1. It’s all about the iPad. Pilots were early adopters of the Internet, laptops and GPS so it makes sense that they feel totally comfortable with technology. Lightweight and compact, the iPad was built for cockpit use and pilots have made this gadget their own in huge numbers. Sporty’s hosts a growing collection of apps at sportys.com/apps. With all that said, paper charts are still quite popular. Pilots like the security of a no-battery backup.

2. Name that tune. In-flight music is almost an essential, at least for passengers. Accessory adapters, Bluetooth on headsets, and other gear which brings music to the cockpit are all very popular.

3. JC Penney had a bad third quarter. Tiffany & Co. had one of its best. Same with headsets. Despite economic conditions, premium-priced headsets such as the Bose A20 are hotter than ever. In fact, Hal has said that the most surprising thing in his career has been that pilots would pay $1000 for a headset, and now they are paying slightly more.

4. Retrofit glass panels are the must-have upgrade for owners of older aircraft. Sporty’s on-site avionics shop, Cincinnati Avionics, has kept busy this year with numerous Garmin G500 and Aspen Evolution installations. Still, round gauges are not dead. We estimate that the majority of our customers — and that’s the majority of GA pilots — have yet to fly glass.

5. Modular flight bags are the new thing. Consumers’ desire to personalize and customize many of their belongings now extends to flight bags. A contributing factor is that electronic devices can be padded and protected and not just thrown in a duffel bag. That was the impetus behind Sporty’s Mission Bag, launched this year.

6. When is GPS not enough? Even with GPSs everywhere, pilots still want and need a backup Nav/Com, and they want it to do more than ever. Sporty’s SP-400 is becoming a must-have backup.

7. New student enrollment in the University of Cincinnati’s Professional Pilot Program, which Sporty’s manages, is up significantly this year. More and more young people are choosing aviation as a career path, and preparing now for an expected hiring boom.

8. Portable traffic systems are hot–not just as stand-alones, but as an add-on to a portable GPS. This combination creates a real portable MFD–navigation, charts, weather, traffic, terrain.

9. Sales activity at Sandy’s Airpark, Sporty’s fly-in community at the Clermont County/Sporty’s Airport (I69), remains slow in the face of a weak housing market.

10. Consumers have more power in a tough economy. This trend continues. At Sporty’s we are practiced at making customers happy, but we never thought that being able to talk to a real-live person (and a knowledgeable one at that) when a customer calls with a question would turn into such a compelling selling point. You’ll never hear a recorded voice say, “Please enter your 16-digit customer number” at Sporty’s!

11. Portable eBook readers became mainstream in 2010, and in many cases eBooks have outsold their paper cousins. eBooks are an ideal tool for pilots on the go – portable, buyable anywhere there’s Internet access and (pilots love this) less expensive than regular books. Sporty’s introduced four eBooks in 2010, and Sporty’s eBook offerings will continue to grow in 2011.

12. Teaching people to fly is still what Sporty’s is all about, and providing the finest educational materials has kept Sporty’s strong for the past 49 years. Sporty’s Complete Pilot Courses, which evolved from the original three day ground schools in the 1960s, are now available on DVD, online and on mobile devices. In 2011, expect to see some exciting news about Sporty’s signature product.

As we begin a new year (Sporty’s 50th anniversary), our hope for all of us is that 2011 will be happy, healthy and prosperous. We remain grateful for your support during the year, so Happy Holidays – Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noel, Fröhliche Weihnachten, Buon Natale and Merry Christmas in other languages we don’t know to all our friends worldwide.

What’s more, the S3 is a very compact unit, designed to sit atop the glareshield (where its two GPS engines have a clear view of the sky). The system uses standard GPS for positioning, plus it includes a data link through the Iridium system to send tracking and “canned” messages, which can then be seen on a website or transmitted to users through text messages.

Spidertracks also allows dedicated tracking through a system called Spiderwatch, which acts similarly to SPOT; if tracking is lost while the unit is presumed active, Spidertracks will alert selected individuals, who may then contact emergency responders.

For more information, visit the Spidertracks website.

Three levels are available for customers in the U.S. and Europe. The full U.S. update package for the 695/696 includes the NavData, obstacles, terrain, AOPA data, FliteCharts and SafeTaxi diagrams for $699.99; the same package without the NavData, called U.S. Lite, is $499.99. Packages for the 495/496, which doesn’t have the FliteCharts, range from $299.99 to $499.99 per year. European database packages for either unit are $399.99.

“The GPSMAP 296 was our first portable GPS to have multiple databases that could be updated. It was introduced in 2004 and was a breakthrough product at the time because it had terrain and obstacle data,” said Gary Kelley, Garmin’s vice president of marketing. “As technology has improved, we’ve been able to offer customers additional information like FliteCharts®, SafeTaxi® and the AOPA Directory. We recognize that many customers rely on these databases for safety of flight and convenience, and the new bundled pricing packages make it easier for budget savvy pilots to keep all databases up to date.”

In other Garmin news:

• Pilot My-Cast℠ by Garmin is now available in the Android market for smartphones running on the Android™ platform. Pilot My-Cast by Garmin is a premium mobile phone aviation weather, flight planning and flight filing application exclusively for customers in the U.S. and Canada. It is also available on popular phone models such as BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile.

• G600/G500 PC training software is available at Garmin.com for free. The G600/G500 PC software includes Synthetic Vision Technology (SVT™) and FliteCharts®, and is designed to help customers gain familiarity with their avionics before take-off.

• Up to $6,000 in bonus purchase rebates are now available with the purchase of a new G600, G500 and other avionics. Purchases must be made between now and June 30, 2010.

• Limited time rebates are available for the GTS 800, 820 and 850 traffic systems.Customers can save $750, $1000 and $1250, respectively, on purchases made between now and June 30, 2010.

For more information, visit Garmin’s web site.

Kitplanes’ sister publication, Avweb, has posted a new video on Garmin’s touch-screen aera handheld GPS. The bulk of the flight testing was done aboard Kitplanes’ editor’s Glastar Sportsman. Avweb Editorial Director Paul Bertorelli reports on Garmin’s latest offering.

Understanding starts when you turn on your GPS and get a cute little map of GPS satellite positions; Is that important? Does it matter where the satellite is positioned? You need only three, right?

The answers are yes, yes, and sort of. For now…

We sat in on a “Wings” seminar recently where the subject was WAAS; what is it, why is it, why you should know, what does the future hold, and why should you, the day VFR, don’t-go-more-than-an-hour-or-two-from-home pilot care.

The speaker, Larry Oliver from FAA Flight Standards was very clear on a couple of things: one, VOR stations are expensive to build and maintain hence they’re not being repaired as they fail; two, GPS is here to stay but portable units will never be certified for IFR use.

It’s that last one that caused some mutterings of “Well, why aren’t they?” from the audience.

The answer lies in three factors: antenna position, satellite position, and clock accuracy.

First there’s the unpredictability of antenna position; On your lap, tied to the yoke, or mounted to the side of the window frame all look nice and work fine for day-VFR, but the antenna is the key; without it having a clear shot at the sky there’s no way to ensure that it’s receiving as many sat signals as possible.

When your vanilla GPS sees three satellites it can give you a position fix within about 100 meters. And that’s good enough to get you to that two-hundred dollar hamburger (that’s the price of AvGas for you). But to get the accuracy needed for night flight to a cloudy airport you need better than that.

Second, if the satellites are grouped together it’s not going to be a high resolution picture. And if they’re low on the horizon the signal degrades in the slant-distance through the atmosphere.

And third there’s the clock factor; Contrary to popular opinion, the clocks on the satellites are not those hyper-accurate atomic models that keep time to one second in a gazillion years. Your portable GPS takes the signal from several satellites and averages the answers to give you a position. But because it’s an answer with a relatively fuzzy key factor in the calculation, you get a relatively fuzzy position of somewhere in a 100 meter circle.

The WAAS system, however, uses those satellite signals and compares it to ground based super-clocks. Mind, this is so precise that even at the speed of light, the distance to the satellite is a factor. Indeed, without Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity factored in, the system wouldn’t work.

The WAAS system takes those satellite signals in on a net of ground stations, corrects them, and broadcasts to a pair of geo-synchronous satellites over North America, which then sends them to the WAAS-enabled receiver on the panel of your airplane.

The result is that where your vanilla GPS is accurate to 100 meters, a WAAS-capable GPS refines your position to within 7 meters.

Additionally, the more expensive WAAS certified GPS on your panel is heavier because it has the circuitry to receive that signal and check it for errors. If something is amiss it will then inform you within six seconds that all is not right and you can pull up for a go-around or whatever you need to do, but you know better than to continue thinking that you’ve got good information.

This will allow airliners to use parallel runways in poor weather; shorter transcontinental routes with closer spacing; and shorter approaches to landing. And all of this is done without airport-based hardware thereby enlarging the number of IFR-capable airports. With this in mind it makes sense to spend money on new WAAS stations instead of maintenance on VOR and Loran stations.

So, keep those VORs for a few more years, but it won’t be long until they’re sitting on the shelf with the sextant. But should you buy that big-bucks panel-mount GPS for your baby? Only if IFR is in your future.

If you’d like to know more, visit the FAA web site.