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Can you answer the following: a) What type of instrument approach leads in shear numbers? b) What is the fastest growing type of instrument approach? c) What instrument-approach type offers minima as low as 200 feet ceilings, and visibility of a half-mile without a ground system to support it? d) What instrument- approach type will dominate approach options more and more in the coming years?

I happened upon part of a conversation at the recent EAA AirVenture Oshkosh that made me stop in my tracks. “Well I guess you could say they still build them like they used to,” one attendee said to another. “…except for the new equipment they attach and install. That’s what keeps them viable.”

The ticking clock inside the collective heads of your maintenance chief, avionics technician and chief pilot may not disturb your peace of mind at the moment - but the noise is likely to grow between now and the last day of 2019. Unless adapted, the company airplane stands to lose considerable access from January 1, 2020.

Recently, I chanced upon a heading that crossed that of an old friend: a professional aviator. Something about him seemed different as we visited at the airport coffee bar. As the young barista topped of our demitasse, the change hit me: she didn’t trip on, or step around his standard-issue pro-pilot chart case.

Houston, we have a system! More accurately, America has a system – a Wide-Area Augmentation System (WAAS). In Europe, the parallel system goes by the acronym EGNOS. WAAS (on-line and operationally complete for nearly eight years) needed the industry and regulators to catch up with its potential. With accuracy levels to within a few feet, GPS enhanced – or “augmented” – by the more-precise position data WAAS provides underpins virtually every element of the much-debated Next Generation Air Traffic

A flight data recorder is a system designed to collect and record data from a variety of sensors. These sensors are mounted throughout the aircraft structure picking up data from appliances, components and co-dependent systems that tell their story of how they were configured, and being used during the time before, and at the time of an accident. All of this data is collected and stored digitally within a reflective, fluorescent yellow or orange crash-proof container.

There’s good news to report on the NextGen front: It’s progressing! That progress is measurable and visible in the expanding ground-support infrastructure for Automated Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) and a continually lengthening list of Instrument Approach Procedures that build on the operational Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS).

The approach is almost as old as powered flight: improve a proven airframe by grafting on a better powerplant. In aviation, the quest never ends to make airplanes better, more efficient, more capable, and always faster. For business turboprops, upgrading offers a path to such outcomes and better value than sticking with the old engines, as we have been outlining recently. In some instances, converting to a different brand engine or to a different type provides the same benefits.

Nextgen: Infrastructure progress is accelerating, final decision is not...The aviation world got some excellent, long-awaited and somewhat unexpected news in early December - the kind of news that should quicken the heartbeat of many a technology junky. Later that same month, more news followed related to the same topic, fueling a feeling of actual progress in the often-moribund feeling realm of the nation’s next-generation air-traffic control system.

The idea that many pilots live - openly or secretly - as lifelong gadget freaks probably won’t surprise anybody… Who doesn’t know an aviator that coverts the latest high-tech equipment for the flight bag; be it a stand-by transceiver, a new flight-planning program for their wireless smart phone, or maybe a sophisticated pocket-size satellite navigator that can also guide them from the airport to the hotel in a strange city.