AVWEB'S FRIDAY PODCAST:
WHERE DID ALL THESE ROTAX ENGINES COME FROM?
MARK PASKIEVICH CLUES US IN
Visit your local airport, and chances are you'll hear a different sound in the air these days. Rotax engines, until recently relegated almost entirely to the ultralight segment, are in almost all Light Sport Aircraft now being sold in the U.S., and it's a case of the right engine at the right time, according to Mark Paskievich of Rotech Research Canada Limited. The Canadian company pioneered the gearbox technology that led to the development of Rotax aviation engines. AVweb's Russ Niles talked with Paskievich about the success of the engines worldwide and their humble beginnings in British Columbia.

Click here to listen. (10.9 MB, 11:56)

AOPA EXPO 2007 PODCAST ROUND-UP: COMPLETE AUDIO COVERAGE FROM HARTFORD, CT
Last week, we managed to record a bumper crop of podcasts with the aviation industry's leading figures — covering topics that ranged from inside the cockpit (synthetic vision) to new airplanes (from Diamond and Cessna) to Lockheed Martin's embattled perspective on the newly-privatized AFSS system. In case you missed any, here's a complete recap of our exclusive audio coverge from the show:

• Piper CEO Jim Bass introduces the Piper Matrix, a non-pressurized variant of the company's popular Mirage.
• Heike Larson from Diamond Aircraft rolls out the welcome mat again — this time for two new builds based on the venerable DA40, the high-end XLS and the introductory CS.
• Dan Courain of Lockheed Martin answers criticisms of the newly-privatized AFSS system (and there are many) and shares a few of LockMart's strategies for stabilizing and growing the new system.
• University of North Dakota flight operations director Don Dubuque tells us what they're going to do with the brand-new Diamond D-Jet acquired by their training department. (It didn't involve flying us home from the show.)
• Tecnam's Lynne Birmingham says the LSA manufacturer is ready to move into making Part 23-certified aircraft, including a retractable-gear trainer and a new light twin.
• VistaNav's Jeff Simon knows there are a lot of synthetic vision products on the market competing for your cockpit spending; in this interview, he shares a few of the reasons why VistaNav continues to be an industry leader in a tight market.

Thank you to all the listeners who responded to our call for information in the last issue of AVwebAudio. With your help and feedback, we were able to track down two intermittent issues that were causing download problems.

The first issue involved the production process for the AVwebAudio newsletter, which differs slightly from the production of our other newsletters. A coding shortcut that works fine with the other newsletters was causing some paths to be mangled, but now that we're aware of the problem, we'll be compensating for it in each e-mail.

The second issue involved one of our back-up servers. (When traffic on AVweb is particularly high, you might receive files from our back-up server, which is how we keep the site running smoothly during peak traffic times.) This too has been resolved, and we don't expect any further "Not Found" errors when downloading podcasts from AVweb.

We will, however, leave the error-reporting address (podcast-error@avweb.com) active for another week or two, just in case anyone experiences problems.

Thanks again for your help in diagnosing and correcting the errors!