Beechcraft Approach Plate Holder

Update 11/24/2008:

Anyone who has browsed our website will know that we're really a race car engineering company and we work on the aviation stuff in our spare time. And anyone who knows professional motor racing knows that "spare time" is a well-worn joke.

To all the people who have written and called asking when our Approach Plate Mount will be available, we're sorry it's taken so long. But we now have results in from our test pilots and, in the hiatus between racing seasons, we're working on the mounts again.

We have met a lot of nice people through doing the mounts and one of the very best is Mr Louis Febre of Sherman Oaks, CA. We're grateful to Mr Febre for sending us these beautifully clear photos of one of the prototypes in his own H35 Bonanza. Clicking on any one of the photos or graphics on this page will download a larger, high resolution copy.

The view above shows how the holder is sized the same as a full size plate. That's wider than the gap between horns or the late style yoke so it's necessary to move the plate towards the pilot to make room for his thumbs to go behind it. The shot below does a good job of showing this.

Mr Febre thoughtfully sent the third photo below which shows how the entire plate mount is flat so it makes a great place to put your paper when you're writing down your clearance.

Please note that we did not attempt to make this mount in such a way that it would hold an entire NACO plate book. Honestly, we tried this and were never satisfied the entire book would stay on the mount. Since our stuff is designed to do what it does properly, we decided on balance to go with a mount that would hold only a few plates or sheets of paper but do that well. Another reason we decided to go this way was that the completely flat plate surface has no sharp edges pointing towards the pilot.

The CAD screen dumps below show what we will be offering as our definitive product.

Compared with the prototype in Mr Febre's H35, we have made a number of enhancements. Firstly, the actual yoke faceplate is designed for the job and has only the holes it needs. Secondly, and probably more importantly, we now do not use the Beech faceplate retaining method, instead providing a strap that locates behind the bosses cast into the late ram's horn yoke. The effect this has is the entire mount is now retained with two proper stainless steel bolts rather than Beech's self tapping screws.

We expect to have production plate mounts ready to sell in January 2009 for $249 plus $10 shipping. Please feel free to email us with any questions you may have. If you would like be one of the first owners of this product, we are now taking orders via the Shopping Cart button below.