News

Don’t let someone pressure you into doing something foolish. You probably heard this sentiment (or some form of it) as a child—as a pilot, foolish mistakes can be deadly, and sometimes very public. You may know someone who did something foolish with an airplane and ended up on the local or national news. This isn’t […]

Sun n’ Fun’s Paradise City is home to Lakeland-Linder International Airport’s grass strip where homebuilts, ultralights, gyrocopters, LSAs, and the like make their base camp during the week of the Sun ‘n Fun Aerospace Expo’s displays, demos, and flying. It is also the home of the STOL Corral, which this year was open to the […]

Regular readers know I have closely followed the Merlin developments. I use plural because developer Chip Erwin has steadily built this single seat flying machine into a whole fleet of its own. At Sun ‘n Fun we saw a display of three airplanes in different variations. Let’s begin with a focus on the modest cost of Merlin. […]

Picking out a gift for a pilot can always be a challenge, especially when they already have a great headset and flight bag. With graduation season approaching, and Mother’s and Father’s days around the corner, there will be plenty of gifting opportunities for pilots this spring.  Aeroswag, an aviation website that specializes in print on-demand […]

CubCrafters has never made an aircraft powered by a Rotax engine. Images accompanying this article portray their very first example using the 9-series engine in a model intended for production. Most of their factory pilots or dealers have never flown behind a Rotax. Yet Carbon Cub UL is also the first aircraft in the world […]

It’s rare to find a pilot these days who doesn’t rely on a digital service for their flight planning, management, or debriefing. Often that means using multiple platforms—until now.  ForeFlight, a Boeing Company, has announced its acquisition of CloudAhoy, a debriefing software provider. According to a post on the ForeFlight blog, the acquisition was completed […]

During 2023, in only three months, I’ve lost count how many airframe producers have told me a story that goes something like this… “We (some manufacturer) offer two 100-horsepower choices: a Rotax 912ULS (carbureted) and 912iS (fuel injected), plus the new 141-horsepower 915iS (fuel injected, intercooled). Yet everyone is ordering the 915.” More power always […]

In the film Back to the Future II, the antagonist Biff Tannen steals a sports almanac containing scores from every major sporting event over a 50-year time span and delivers it to his younger self via a time machine. Armed with this knowledge from the future, his younger self then utilizes the almanac to gamble, […]

Welcome to a new era for Plane & Pilot.  We are excited to embark on reimagining what Plane & Pilot will be in the future. The brand has a storied history and we want to honor that legacy so Plane & Pilot can live on for another 50 years.  Our goal is to make Plane […]

Textron Aviation said it agreed to deliver 15 new Cessna 172 Skyhawks to Epic Flight Academy as part of a plan to expand the flight school’s fleet. The companies announced the deal during the recent Sun n’ Fun Aerospace Expo. Epic, based at New Smyrna Beach, Florida (KEVB), has been training pilots since 1999. Its […]