UCAP Blog

Here’s a tip of the wing to the Obama Administration. In the Administration’s initiation into the Presidential Circle of User-Fee Proposers the authors at least hit on an honest justification — We, the royal “We” of Americans, need the money. Thanks for not setting off on that old, discredited canard about general aviation not paying [...]

This is the first time I’ve seen this video. Starting around 7:30 in the vid is some excellent footage of the plane as it began to lose control. Final Flight of the Ghost from Jason Schillereff on Vimeo. This video DOES NOT show the impact. Just the events leading up to it.

Boeing today made its first delivery of the sexy new 787 “Dreamliner”. Business news is all abuzz about what this means for Boeing’s bottom line. Mostly we just care about it being a cool airplane.

Jeff Ward and I tried to crash the Mike Goulian photo shoot at the AOPA Summit Airportfest. (*) We were lurking in the background of this shot. But they asked us to move away. Amazingly they didn’t seem to think we were adding anything to the view. (*) OK, not really. We were accidentally in the [...]

I can’t remember, was this one of the tie-downs that Jeb tested way back when?

Mockup of the new 4-seater C4.

Wandering the aisles during my final minutes at the Summit, this booth caught my attention for some reason I didn’t immediately understand. Looking more closely I saw the sweatshirt with mutliple autographs and the big block letters on it. I looked more closely. Hmmm it says UCAP… hey wait! it says UCAP! Turns out this is the [...]

The “HotSeat Chassis” is a somewhat low-tech solution (as compared to some motion sim platforms that is) to the age-old desire of making your flight sim experience as real as possible. This tube frame seat and monitor stand will support multiple screens to simultaneously show multiple views of your sim experience. A quick look at [...]

Garmin introduced their new touch tablet EFB the Garmin 796. I seldom meet a gadget that I don’t like, but I’m not sure if, at $2,500 this is a better value than an iPad with Foreflight and other av apps. Having said that, it does have some nice features. The screen is bright enough to [...]

Thanks to all who joined me at the very nice Arch Street Tavern for last evening’s UCAP meetup. Some old friends, and a couple of new ones. I’ve said it before: One of the best side-effects of doing the podcast is all the interesting and nice people it’s introduced me to.