Max Trescott Aviation Trends Aloft

Flying Car, Flying Motorcycle, or Flying Boat Survey—Which Airplane would you Buy?

Last year, my imagination was captured by the ICON A5 trailerable seaplane. Last week I talked with Carl Deitrich and wrote about his Terrafugia Transition roadable airplane (think flying car). Just before I published the article on the Terrafugia, I found in my pile of press releases one from Samson Motorworks with an update on their SkyBike (pictured here), which they’ve described as a flying motorcycle. So which you would prefer to own? Take this survey now to tell us.

The first two aircraft are...

FAA Proposing To Keep Bird Strike Data Secret

Ever since Sully Sullenberger successfully ditched US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River following bird strikes that killed both engines, public awareness and interest in bird strikes has been on the rise. The FAA has a database of 100,000 bird strikes reported since 1990 and it presumably sheds some light on a problem which, according to Bird Strike Committee USA, has led to over 200 deaths--of people, not birds--since 1988.

But in what amounts to a public relations gaffe, the FAA has...

The State of General Aviation

Over the last 2 days, I’ve been in touch with a number of flight school owners and other people in GA related businesses. The overall picture is mixed. Here are some snippets of what I’m hearing.

Some flight schools are down as much as 40% over the last 2 years and a few have gone out of business. Others are managing to keep sales relatively constant. Some of this is a function of local market conditions. But a key factor seems to be...

Join My Electronic World

The world is becoming ever more tightly connected each day. The reverberations between Wall Street and my version of Main Street—the general aviation world—are becoming more intense. Just in the last 24 hours, I’ve come across a couple of surprises which I’ll share in a moment. First, if you haven’t already downloaded my Free “Learn to Fly” eBook, please do it now and send it to any friends who you think might want to learn. Let's all do our part to keep General Aviation healthy.

Electronic communication is also becoming pervasive and I’d like to invite you to sign up and join me in several ways. Want to be the first to know when my new...

Clever Marketing 101—From Air Force to Zeppelins

I've always been a fan of clever marketing. You can instantly recognize great marketing when you see it since it is always creative, effective at generating attention and often fun in the process. Sadly, it’s far from a daily occurrence, but it’s fun to sit back and grin when you see it. I worked for a large high tech firm for 16 years in marketing and later 9 years in sales and I saw a lot of ho-hum marketing with occasional flashes of brilliance. This is the norm in most industries.

A lot of people confuse marketing with...

FIKI—One more reason to consider a Cirrus SR22T

If you didn’t already have enough reasons to consider buying a SR22T, Cirrus has given you one more with their announcement that they can now equip your new SR22T Perspective with FIKI—Flight into Known Icing. Perspective is the G1000-type glass cockpit that Cirrus announced in May 2008. I help people around the world who are thinking of buying a Cirrus SR22, or Cirrus SF50 Vision Jet, so if you like my inputs, please contact me as early in your decision making process as possible, so that I can provide you the most assistance. You can phone me at 650-967-2500, or send me an email.

Recently, we awarded Cirrus Design the 2008 GAMMY award for Design Innovation. Here in Silicon Valley where innovation is everywhere, some companies have concluded that...

2008 General Aviation Gammy Awards

The quiet time over the New Years holiday is a wonderful time to reflect on the good and bad of the past year and to look forward to the New Year. While most people are familiar with the Emmy, Tony and Grammy awards, few pilots are familiar with the General Aviation Milestone or Gammy awards.

Before revealing the 2008 Gammy Awards, let me say that...

Sun Sets on DayJet—More wreckage along the VLJ highway

What started as a bad week for Wall Street has ended as an even worse week for DayJet and possibly for VLJ manufacturers counting upon a robust per-seat, on-demand air taxi business. DayJet’s website says that it “has discontinued its jet services and cancelled all future flights as a result of the company’s inability to arrange critical financing in the midst of the current global financial crisis.” While hardly a death knell...

New Cessna YouTube Video Scores a Homerun

Nothing makes me smile more than seeing good advertising. For example, the other night on television I saw a great commercial for JG Wentworth, a company of which I’d never heard. Yet their use of opera singers and subtitles to communicate about their product was engaging and left me with a clear impression of their name and services after a single viewing. That’s rare in a channel surfing world where I do everything I can to ignore commercials.

So you can imagine that I was grinning from ear-to-ear when I saw...

Blue Skies for GA and the ICON A5 Light Sport Aircraft

Humans are notoriously bad in forecasting the future. We tend to simply extend recent trend lines in whatever direction they’re currently headed, whether that be up or down. So it’s not surprising that there’s been some doom and gloom associated with the recent spike in gas prices and the twenty-five year decline in the pilot population. While I’d be nuts to predict a drop in gas prices (these have happened, but don’t hold your breath this time) I do see some signposts that suggest the General Aviation skies are not as cloudy and gloomy as some might suggest (I've included a list at the end of this post).

One of those signs arrived over my fax machine two days ago. Mixed in with the offers for health insurance and bogus stock alerts that spam my fax machine was...