Flying

But the engine is only part of the picture.

The headline in Flying Magazine's coverage, and the detail that really caught my attention, is the landing gear suspension.

They describe it as exotic.

That word is doing a lot of work, and it's worth unpacking.

Bush Flying puts a unique set of demands on landing gear.

Most aircraft landing gear is designed for smooth, paved runways with some allowance for grass and turf.

Even aircraft certified for off-airport operations often have gear that was engineered primarily for predictable surfaces.

The best aviation tools are purpose-built.

The Senate Commerce Committee cleared a bipartisan runway safety bill earlier this week.

Flying Magazine broke the details and the legislation is targeting exactly what you think it's targeting.

Surface operations, incursions, the category of incidents where a perfectly serviceable aircraft ends up where it should never be.

And the only thing standing between a news story and a tragedy is luck or timing or the alertness of a crew who caught something just in time.

That's still the scan, the readback, the pause before you roll.

No bill covers that ground for you.

My thanks to Flying Magazine for covering the Senate committee action.

You can find the full story and track the bill's progress at flyingmag.com. More aviation news and analysis at radiohangar.com. Clear skies.

The question is whether this latest round of testimony leads to action or becomes one more entry in a long file of acknowledgement and delay.

Pilots will be flying in the answer to that question long before it shows up in a press release.

Sources today include Flying Magazine and the FAA's public modernization program documentation.

Backgrounder on what your local facility has deployed and what is still pending is at the FAA's NextGen status page and at radiohangar.com. I'm Tower.

Fly safe

That is the Tecnam reputation: workhorses.

So when Giovanni Pascal, the company's managing director, sits down with a Flying at AirVenture and starts talking about a new era of personal flying, the natural question is, what exactly does that mean? And is it real, or is it another concept that lives on a rendering board for five years? Here's what you need to know about where Tecnam is pointing.

The conversation Pascal had with Flying wasn't about one airplane.

It was about a philosophy.

And the core of that philosophy is that personal aviation is at a genuine inflection point, and manufacturers who treat it like it's nineteen seventy-eight are going to lose.

When they say something is in development, the context is different.

For the pilot listening to this who flies a Cessna 172 or a Piper Archer or a Diamond DA40, what does the Tecnam conversation at Oshkosh actually mean for you? In the short term, probably not much directly.

None of what Pascal was walking Flying through is going to change the airplane you fly next weekend.

It was supposed to breathe new life into general aviation at a time when pilot numbers are still recovering.

Training costs have gotten painful, and the average age of a certificated pilot keeps moving in the wrong direction, so what happened? The short answer, according to Flying Magazine's reporting, is that the industry went somewhere else.

Think about where the energy and aviation manufacturing has been going over the last four years.

Electric aircraft, hybrid propulsion, advanced air mobility, EVTOL, the companies that might have built the next generation of affordable two-seat airplanes under the Omo Asai framework have largely been chasing a different set of certification pathways.

Keep an eye on what the manufacturers announce over the next 12 to 18 months.

That's where this story goes next.

Sources today come from Flying Magazine's coverage of the Mosaic rulemaking and its market effects.

You can dig deeper at RadioHanger.com. Tower Out.

The kind of nickname that only happens when the pilots who fly something genuinely like it.

Now let's talk about the specific aircraft that Flying Magazine and Aircraft for Sale have highlighted.

This is a 1956 example which puts its manufacturer right in the sweet spot of the type's production run.

The chipmunks built in the mid-1950s were built during the height of the type's military service life, when quality control was tight and the manufacturing process was mature.

It's not rare enough to be unobtainable, but it's not common enough that you'll find one on the ramp at every regional airport.

Airframe prices for a sound example in good condition have historically ranged from around $40,000 to well over $100,000, depending on condition, avionics, and cosmetic state.

The aircraft highlighted by Flying Magazine is presented as a top pick, which in the aircraft for sale context means the editorial team reviewed it and found it worth calling out specifically.

Parts availability is one of the questions that always comes up with an aircraft this old.

The operation that wears a customer's brand without necessarily sharing that customer's safety oversight.

Flying Magazine has reported on accounts from former 21 Air employees who describe a safety culture that had serious problems.

And the word former should not be read as a qualifier that makes this less credible.

In aviation, sometimes the people who are willing to go on record are the ones who no longer fear the consequences of doing so.

Whether they had that is something the investigation will work to answer.

The former employees who are speaking now apparently didn't think they had it, and they are saying so.

Flying Magazine has the full reporting on this.

The story is at flyingmag.com, and it's worth reading if you fly cargo or if you're thinking about making the move to the freight side of the industry.