Chris McGonegle

At the conclusion of every quarter, we like to reflect on some of the more notable products that joined Sporty’s offering. Here are the top ten new products we’re excited to offer to our customers from the fourth quarter of 2022, from cold weather apparel to a new handheld com radio.

Portable electronic devices have become more and more common on the GA flight deck since the turn of the century. From early GPS navigators gaining popularity in flight bags to a company offering a mini computer with a touchscreen that could make phone calls in mid-2007, these devices have improved safety as well as convenience when we fly. As we enjoy the leading edge of technology, though, it’s important to have a basic understanding of how to keep them charged. This article will cover electronic device charging 101, including plug types, cables, and new options like Power Delivery.

Complement your Instrument flight training or challenge yourself as a digital pilot with the Instrument Rating Flight Sim Training Guide from Sporty's Pilot Shop. This guide includes an introduction covering how best to use this guide with an at home simulator as well as keyboard shortcuts to help make you a Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 power user. It includes 22 lessons featuring clickable links directing the user to Sporty's Instrument Rating Course to view how a maneuver or approach is executed before digitally flying.

Ever wanted to pilot an eVTOL aircraft that has the capability to transition to a pusher propeller? Well now you can with X-Plane 12 and the digital ALIA eVTOL from BETA Technologies. With the latest version of X-Plane 12 the ALIA is included in the fleet of digital aircraft bringin the total to 23. Rated for a 250 nautical mile range and the ability to take off and land on a helipad, you'll quickly find yourself touring areas of your hometown that wouldn't necessarily be approachable from an airplane.

The Honeycomb Bravo is one of the most popular flight sim pieces on the market. The challenge is making sure that our hardware configuration is understood by X-Plane 12, which can be a tedious task each time we make a lever change. For that reason, Sporty’s provides preconfigured airplane profiles for X-Plane 12 that will make the transition between different aircraft seamless.

At the conclusion of every quarter, we like to reflect on some of the more notable products that joined Sporty’s offering. Here are the top ten new products we’re excited to offer to our customers from the third quarter of 2022, from charging accessories to a new training course.

The team at Laminar Research has long been working on improving the X-Plane platform and just recently the newest version debuted, X-Plane 12. Everything from wake turbulence produced by wide body aircraft to supersonic flight has been critiqued and fiddled with until it was ready for the community. But what good is a flight simulator if you don’t have great aircraft to fly? Enjoy a quick review of the aircraft changes from X-Plane 11 to X-Plane 12.

The Honeycomb Bravo throttle is an amazingly capable hardware piece that, once configured correctly, leads the pack in flight sim throttle options. The downside of all these options is that it can be intimidating to program all the commands and levers to operate as we would like. For that reason, the flight simulation department at Sporty’s put together a configuration map for running the Honeycomb Bravo with X-Plane 11. We cover how to configure the throttle for single engine GA, single engine GA complex, multi-engine GA, two-engine jet, and four-engine jet aircraft.

At the conclusion of every quarter, we like to reflect on some of the more notable products that joined Sporty’s offering. Here are the top ten new products we’re excited to offer to our customers from the second quarter of 2022.  

Submit your highest score from the Aircraft Carrier challenge within Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and the top five scores as of July 14^th will win a Logitech Simulator Flight Stick! Please submit screen grabs of your score to : flightsim@sportys.com with the subject line Carrier Challenge. Good luck aviators and don’t forget to call the ball.