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Continue reading →: The Last Form: The Repairman Certificate, ExplainedAfter years of building, the final piece of paper is a five-minute formality — but the certificate it produces is the most misunderstood document in homebuilding. Here’s what the experimental aircraft builder repairman certificate actually grants, the FARs behind it, and what the FAA application process looks like.
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Continue reading →: Your Sling Will Get AC Before It Gets a Real Heater. That’s the Whole Story.GA has invested 18 years engineering cabin cooling. It hasn’t invested meaningfully in cabin heating since 1948. The same airplane that’s getting vapor-cycle AC this year is still using an exhaust muff to heat the cabin. That asymmetry is the story — and it starts with a valve, a cable,…
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Continue reading →: FAR 91.171 Made Easy: A Free Electronic VOR Check Logger for IFR PilotsSlingologyVOT is a free, offline-first Progressive Web App for IFR pilots to log VOR checks as required by FAR 91.171. Electronically signed, export-ready, and no account required.
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Continue reading →: The Future of ATC: Why the Controller Doesn’t Need to Tell You the Altimeter SettingThe U.S. air traffic control system is understaffed, aging, and straining under the weight of routine, repetitive communications. A technical and economic case for what could — and should — be automated, and what it would take to get there.
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Continue reading →: The Build Is Over. The Flying Has Begun.For the better part of two years, this blog had one job: document the journey from a signed purchase agreement to a flying airplane. That job is done. N117ZS is in her hangar at KAWO, the logbook has its first real entries, and the questions that drove most of what…
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Continue reading →: From Torrance to KAWO: The Ferry FlightSometime in August of 2024, I stood in a hangar in Torrance, California, looking at a pile of aluminum and wondering what I had gotten myself into. Eight months later, I was strapping into that same airplane — now fully built, tested, and signed off — for the longest flight…
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Continue reading →: Sling TSi First Flight — The Good, The Great, and the Open DoorN117ZS — Roci — flew for the first time on March 20th, 2026. Three days at Torrance that covered everything from first flight euphoria to a door-open emergency over Los Angeles. Here’s the full story.
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Continue reading →: One Checklist, Every Garmin Device — Here’s How (Garmin Won’t Tell You)Garmin makes remarkable avionics. They also can’t be bothered to sync checklists between their own products. Here’s how one open-source developer fixed what Garmin wouldn’t.
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Continue reading →: The Builder’s Spectrum: What I Learned Choosing Factory Assist for My Sling TSiThe detailed program guide arrived after I’d signed the contract. I read it at my kitchen table, and somewhere around page five I felt the first flicker of something I couldn’t quite name. Not alarm. Not regret. Something quieter — the gap between what I’d imagined and what I was…
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Continue reading →: Cockpit Refreshers: How Flight Plans Sync Between the G3X, GTN, and iPadShort, practical explainers for avionics features and cockpit tools pilots may not use every day. You enter a flight plan on the GTN 650, glance at your G3X moving map, and — nothing. Or you modify a waypoint on the G3X and wonder why the GTN is still flying the…
Eating an elephant one bite at a time.
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