AOPA Aviation Summit

Last week I attended the AOPA Aviation Summit in Tampa. Compared to the 2007 AOPA conference in Palm Springs, this years event had many more airplane manufactures represented and there seemed to be more vendors present on the convention floor. I sat in on a couple of the keynotes and some instructional seminars. One of the keynotes was a round table discussion by the leaders of various segments of general aviation and how they were all unified in their fight against the attack on GA and business aviation by the media and Washington D.C. Another take away from the discussion is that 100LL fuel will eventually go away and how the engine manufacturers are working on how other fuels perform with existing GA airplane engines. I attended Max Trescott's seminar on night flight and another seminar on single pilot IFR. Both offered a lot of safety tips and things to pass on to future students.

Lastly, I am in the market to buy new headsets and took the opportunity to try out some of the top ANR headsets out there. I visited the Bose, David Clark and Light Speed booths and got the sales pitch for each model and was able to try out each unit with simulated engine noise in the background. So far I'm leaning toward the Bose headsets, but I kind of like the idea of having built in Blue Tooth in the Zulu model. The DC X11's are by far the lightest of the three, but they don't seem to have enough ear clamping pressure to provide a tight seal around the ear to keep out background noise. My Telex headsets after a while start to move around on my ears during long flights, so I believe that the X11's would have the same problem. I forgot to try out the Clarity headsets, so I'll need to try them locally to see how well they work before I make a decision.