Thank you to everyone who made the 2022 Texas Top Aviation Fly In at the Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder Resort a success!
We had 22 attendees and 12 airplanes make it out to beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico for the week.
After 2 days of very competitive golf, Chris Travland was our 2022 Texas Top Aviation Fly In Golf Tournament Champion.
While you are out in Santa Fe on your next trip, go check out the Rancho de Chimaya restaurant. It was excellent and a true New Mexican experience.
Mark your calendars for the 2023 Texas Top Aviation Dallas Fly In at the Westin Stonebriar Resort in Frisco, TX. McKinney National Airport (KTKI) will be our host airport. The event will be April 12th-April 14th, 2023. Hope to see you all there!
Most pilots have seen the Icon A5 light sport amphibious aircraft. It’s a neat design that can land on water or on a runway. The high wing design with a pusher prop has foldable wings that allow it to be put on a trailer and towed behind a vehicle, allowing it to be offloaded at boat ramps (it also begs the question can you wakeboard behind it?).
Apparently, not all non-pilots know about the Icon A5. Last week, one landed in the water near a beach in Southern California, but most of the beach goers and local authorities believed it had crash landed in the water. Emergency crews were dispatched, but everyone was surprised when the two occupants crawled out on the wings, had a cup of coffee, and took back off.
The Malibu & M-Class Owner’s and Pilot’s Association recently released their MMOPA Vision Video. It is a great video detailing the history of the Piper PA46 & the history of MMOPA. The PA46 would have ceased to exist without the founding of the original Malibu Coalition.
Checkout the video above (and Texas Top Aviation’s Hank Gibson even gets a cameo!).
From the time I started flying, I have always had the dream to learn how to fly a seaplane. As I learned in November, it’s actually learning to land a seaplane, and the veterans call them floatplanes.
ProMark Aviation at the Burnet Airport (KBMQ) offers a weekend float plane course that is high on fun and low on stress. The school has a Piper PA12 Super Cruiser on amphibious floats (amphibs as I was corrected at one point. I mean, if you’re going to fly a seaplane, er, floatplane, you have to know the lingo) that will land and takeoff on water, but does little else with ease and grace. At 150 HP with those big floats and all the associated rigging hanging underneath the airplane, you are lucky to get to 500 feet before you get to your destination.
We weren’t working on setting any speed records. I was learning the lay of the water. I learned about the step, the keel, pumping the floats, how to read the water, currents, ducks (yes, ducks and birds are important to know about when you are flying low on the water), buoys, docking, and ditching. Step taxiing was fun as you are basically at 3/4 throttle screaming across the top of the water just below flying speed. It’s the best way to taxi a seaplane (truly, it is. You get more air in your engine, you can see better, and you are moving. Just don’t try and turn sharp).
Floatplanes also don’t have any shock absorbers, so the higher the wave, the more you get knocked around, so wind velocity and, in turn, wave height is very important.
A very important nuance of an amphibious floatplane compared to a straight floatplane (one that doesn’t have wheels that come out of the floats), is at one point, you want to make sure your gear is down for landing (runway landing) and at another, you want to make absolutely sure your gear is up for landing (water landing). If you land wheels down in the water, you will capsize, 100% of the time. Thankfully from my good instruction, I did not capsize.
Ken Wittekiend, my instructor, and I spent the majority of the weekend landing and taking off on Lake Buchanan (I was informed by locals it is pronounced “Buk-cannon”, not “Bue-cannon”), which is more open and therefore has more waves. We did one landing on Inks Lake so my kids could see me land, which they thought was the best thing since cheese sticks.
There is a check ride at the end of the training, but, as Ken reassured me, it’s the most fun check ride you’ll ever have. I still hate check rides, but that one I think I hated least of all.
I hope someday I can put my floatplane skills to practice, but for now, I can vouch that I now speak seaplane!
Austin Executive Airport opened a control tower on Friday, February 23rd 2018. The airport is now officially Class D airspace. The charts and A/FD are not updated yet to reflect the tower, but there is a NOTAM with the tower and ground frequency information. The tower hours are from 6am to 10pm. The weather frequency remains the same.
Make sure you check those NOTAMs if you are headed to KEDC anytime soon!
A brand-new event for Lancair owners, the 2018 Great American Lancair Rally will be a multi-stage “grand tour” of the Western US. Starting and ending in Central Texas, the Rally will take place September 24th through October 5th 2018.
The Rally will begin in Uvalde, TX (KUVA) on September 24th at the Lancair headquarters. There will be 6 legs, with stops at:
Sedona, Arizona (KSEZ)
Paso Robles, California (KPRB)
Redmond, Oregon (KRDM)
Spanish Fork, Utah (KSPK)
Taos, New Mexico (KSKX)
San Marcos, TX (KHYI)
At each stop, there will be food, drinks, and fun for everyone.
Lancair plans on making instructors available to pilots who would like any kind of training along the way. Hank Gibson from Texas Top Aviation will be one of the instructors available.
Lancair plan to make the Great American Lancair Rally an annual event, with the 2019 Rally spanning the eastern half of the country.
The Great American Lancair Rally is open to all Lancair owners, potential owners and interested aviators. Fly a different airplane? All makes and models are welcome!
For more information & to register, check out the 2018 Great American Lancair Rally’s website.
In July, Stratos Aircraft completed the first test flight of the single engine Stratos 716X personal jet. Stratos, based in Redmond, OR, is taking a page out of Epic Aircraft’s book in how the company is planning on bringing the Stratos 716X to market.
Epic Aircraft first released the Epic LT composite single engine turboprop in the early 2000s as an experimental. The first kit was completed and flying in 2005. Epic’s goal was to bring the airplane to market as a certified aircraft, a feat that took them almost 20 years to do, achieving full certification earlier this year.
Stratos Aircraft is hoping to learn a lot from their Bend, OR neighbors. The 716X is going to start off as a limited release experimental kit, while the company is working on achieving certification for the airplane. Once the plane is certified, it will be dubbed the Stratos 716. The 716X experimental kits will be assembled through a factory builder assist program (no garage built single engine jets here!). The kit will cost $2.5 million assembled, while the expected cost of the certified Stratos 716 will be $3.5 million.
Now, let’s talk about the airplane. 400 KTAS. One engine.
That’s right, you did hear correctly. The Stratos 716X is expected to cruise at 400 KTAS on only one engine. Compared to the Cirrus Vision Jet, that’s 100 knots faster. Think, “I’ll be relaxing at the hotel pool with a drink in hand when you are landing” type speeds. The fuel burn of the Pratt & Whitney JT15D-5 engine (3,000 lbs of thrust) is about 25 GPH more than the Vision Jet (the Stratos 716X will burn about 98 GPH of Jet A while the Vision Jet averages about 75 GPH of Jet A).
Comparing the two engines, the above numbers start to make sense. The Williams FJ33 engine on the Vision Jet only puts out 1,850 lbs of thrust, significantly less than the 3,000 lbs of thrust that the Stratos 716X Pratt & Whitney JT15D-5 puts out.
What does that mean to the pilot? In the Stratos 716X, it means less takeoff roll, better climb rate, faster cruise (as evidence by the 400 KTAS expected cruise speed), and a better payload. More power = more weight carrying capacity. And, the 716X is expected to have a service ceiling of 41,000 feet. I probably wouldn’t want to go that high single pilot with one engine, but I’d be very happy with that speed in the mid-30s.
The cabin, based on the pictures I’ve seen, looks very comfortable. The Stratos 716X seats 6 and can be configured in several different ways. Baggage is no problem as Stratos Aircraft stretched the fuselage from their original 714 Proof of Concept aircraft, adding a very roomy baggage compartment above the engine compartment. The passenger compartment is as big as a Phenom 100, providing more leg and head room than the Vision Jet. The front seats have plenty of legroom too, as Stratos has opted for a side stick instead of a yoke.
The avionics for the Stratos 716X are expected to be the Garmin G3X Touch for the panel which will be driven by a Garmin GTN 750 GPS. Autopilot will be integrated within the G3X. I would imagine that once the plane is certified, the panel will be switched to a Garmin G1000 NXi and a GFC 700 will be installed.
The genius of the design of the Stratos 716X is the aerodynamics of the engine placement. Instead of hanging the engine out in the slip stream and going with a drag inducing V-Tail like Cirrus did, Stratos took some notes from the myriad of single engine military fighter jets out there, placing the engine inside the fuselage. The fuselage is then built around the engine with two air scoops for intake directly in front of the wings. With two intakes instead of one, that leads to more air flow, which again, means more power. The Vision Jet has only one.
I’m going to keep tabs on the Stratos 716X (as I kept tabs on the Epic E1000). I’m hoping Stratos gets several flying soon (the company expects to do 3 kits a year till the airplane gets certified) and certification comes quickly after.
I got to stick my head in the mockup of the Stratos 716X when I went to Osh Kosh in 2018. I was very impressed and was excited to see the airplane was finally airborne this summer.
For more information about the Stratos 716X, check out the Stratos website.
