Every summer, hundreds of thousands of pilots and aviation enthusiasts descend on Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for EAA AirVenture, the world’s largest aviation gathering. While most drive to the show, more than 10,000 airplanes call the airport home for the week, making the small midwestern town the busiest airport in the world for a short period.
STOL videos are fun to watch. Seeing stripped-down Cessnas and homemade purpose-built tailwheel airplanes land and stop in mere feet brings out the airborne cowboy in all of us. There’s just one problem.
Toward the bottom of a list of concerns from the prepurchase report on a Piper Cub I was considering purchasing was a troubling line: “Engine data plate missing,” it said. So began a yearlong quest to get it back.
It’s rare that a technology comes along that’s so transformative it completely changes the way we think about training pilots. Virtual reality has that potential.
Of all the pain points in the aircraft purchasing process, the prepurchase evaluation is the most ouchy. It’s difficult to bring together, the results are sometimes not definitive, and it’s expensive. It’s also essential.
It’s rare that a technology comes along that’s so transformative it completely changes the way we think about training pilots. Virtual reality has that potential.
