Features

No matter how successful we are in life, there’s always someone with a bigger house, a newer car and a better job to help keep us honest. That’s certainly true in aviation, where we’re often left to wonder how some pilots can get away with buying and flying more airplane than they can handle. You […]

Which Came First, The Hangar Or The Airplane? There can be a third dimension regarding whether to acquire the airplane or the hangar first – the vacation home. I can recommend acquiring the airplane first. Then, it’s necessary to purchase a vacation home to justify the airplane. Finally, one builds a hangar near the vacation […]

Most everyone appreciates pilot reports. Two of the most important are turbulence and icing. But both require a degree of judgment with respect to the severity. It’s great to hear from a pilot 50 miles ahead of you that the ride is “smooth.” But what if he says that it’s moderate chop? Is his “moderate” […]

By LeRoy Cook Burt Rutan wasn’t the first to build and fly a pusher-type airplane with the tail in front, but he did solve the inherent weaknesses in the concept, flaws that had bedeviled the similar WW-II era Curtiss XP-55 Ascender fighter plane. Rutan’s strength as a designer has always been to find innovative ways […]

A Tale of Two Airports: There seems to be a rivalry between San Diego International Airport (KSAN) and Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (KDTW) on who is the legitimate owner of Top Gun. TOPGN TWO ARRIVAL at KSAN has dogfights (DOGFTs) among TMCATs. But only two call signs of the protagonists. Goose (GUUSE) and Iceman […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause on the NTSB’s website at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the […]

Cue The Towering CUs You’ve reminded me of the time back in the 70’s we got SO tossed around in an early 50’s V-tail over eastern Kansas that the airplane got upside down … and we weren’t IN the TCU. An old heavy mike came off its perch and boinked the PIC/owner who was spurting […]

For those who have experienced it, the fun of going on a flying trip with your friends and their families in the airplanes you built comes pretty close to maxing out the fun factor for many of us. What really makes this experience enjoyable is being able to share it with a group of competent […]

By Ken Scott Throughout the 1980s, tandem two-seat homebuilt designs were firmly in the mainstream. Burt Rutan’s VariEze and Long-EZ were popular, and examples of Dick VanGrunsven’s RV-4 were showing up at Oshkosh in rapidly increasing numbers. Then came the RV-6, a side-by-side airplane that was destined to become the most successful kit airplane of […]

I sometimes fly SIC on a Citation X based in the Dallas area, and on this occasion, it was my first “real” flight after simulator training. We were heading to Las Vegas, cruising at about 39,000 feet and Mach 0.92. I was thinking about the SR71 “ground speed” story often repeated on aviation forums and […]