Remember the analogy for flying helicopters? Something like rubbing your tummy and patting your head while playing hopscotch? "Well, imagine doing that while precisely hovering at 1,000 feet in one of the busiest airspaces in the world, looking for traffic and a place to set your aircraft down, just in case," says AOPA Pilot Senior Photographer Mike Fizer (see " Video Killed the Radio Chopper," page 72). "All this while reacting to ATC's request to get out of the way of an incoming bizjet, and while complying, not bumping into a neighboring TV helicopter that also happens to be commenting on the morning over another frequency. And if this isn't enough, another radio outputs the current studio broadcast and layered over that cacophony is a TV producer excitedly telling you in no uncertain terms to get a better camera position for the upcoming broadcast." All in a day's work for the folks at Helinet Aviation Services ENG (electronic news gathering) based in Teterboro, New Jersey. "Besides this organized chaos, you get one of the best seats in the house for sunrises and sunsets over the Big Apple," adds Fizer. Writer Phil Scott has become quite the fan of traffic choppers since flying in Chopper 5. "Well, except when a chopper is covering an event at the United Nations, and it is hovering right outside my bedroom window at 6 in the morning," he says. But he's developed a newfound respect for the pilots. "Anyone who can hover in the vicious wind currents above Manhattan has my vote."
Maule Air, located in Moultrie, Georgia, slices and dices its options to create new models so often that an FAA official once referred to the company as "The Potato Head Factory" (see " The Potato Head Factory," February 1998 Pilot). Now Maule officials have returned to the original potato, so to speak, the M-4 first offered more than 40 years ago (see " Back to the Future," page 66). It's modernized with GPS and a full VFR instrument panel but still does something most manufacturers of certified airplanes only dream about — breaking the $100,000 barrier. AOPA Pilot Senior Editor Al Marsh explored its capabilities during a recent factory visit and found that the M-4 does what most pilots want: It flies fast and can carry two people — plus 200 pounds of potatoes, if desired.
"When I started instructing as a sideline almost 20 years ago, I found myself in a lot of strange cockpits," says author Bill Kight (see " Getting to Know You," page 103). "That made me uncomfortable. I didn't instinctively know where to reach for vital cockpit functions and a few aircraft systems didn't operate in a way I expected. What really surprised me was that some of the people I was instructing didn't know their airplanes much better than I did, and they had owned the airplane for several years!" Kight spent a Saturday with his computer and created a two-page cockpit familiarization outline on a Tandy 600 disk. His students said that going through the process revealed things about their airplane that they had either forgotten or didn't know in the first place. Kight doesn't do much general aviation instructing anymore and no modern computer can read a Tandy 600 disk, but when he's going to be in a strange cockpit, he dusts off the old hard copy of the outline and takes it with him.
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