Features

The images above show the busy view outside of Garmin’s King Air somewhere around Memphis cruising northwest-bound, and how it looks on the GWX 70 Doppler weather radar. Plan your path through—we’ll come back to it later. ADS-B may pause an active radar upgrade decision for anything but twins and turbines, but radar is far […]

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 […]

Too Much Avionics? Avoid Sensory Overload Joe sixpack here. I spent a long time wondering if I should give up the six pack and finally did it. The installation has been repeatedly delayed because I need the airplane for work and haven’t had the time to take it off line. Next month will be the […]

A popular misconception is that the Wright brothers, in addition to all of their other achievements, invented the airfoil. They didn’t. Sir John Cayley, an English engineer who also first identified the four forces of flight—lift, drag, thrust and weight—developed the cambered airfoil through detailed experimentation. His three-part work, On Aerial Navigation, published in 1809 and 1810, […]

Recently overheard on Washington Center frequency on an afternoon with plenty of thunderstorms in the vicinity: Center: “All you guys going into Raleigh, there will be a short delay. They’ve evacuated the tower. I’ll keep you posted. … I’d rather be in an airplane than a tower today.” Reid Ashe Winston‑Salem, North Carolina

I have often written that before you start building an airplane, you should set your requirements: What is the airplane designed to do? What design satisfies that goal? How does it need to be equipped to perform that mission? Once you have decided on a project for a specific mission, it is important to keep those […]

We’ve long maintained that weather poses the greatest risk on any given day to a proficient pilot flying a well-maintained aircraft. Presuming there’s adequate fuel aboard and the pilot knows how to ensure that it gets to the engine(s), it’s more likely than not that the flight will be completed pretty much as planned. Everything […]

Will Russia Really Leave The ISS? Thank you for a well written, experience-based commentary. Having had the great opportunity to work with a former NASA engineer for several years, I too see the team finding a workable solution to manage orbit, if it hasn’t already been designed and with plans sitting on the shelf. James […]

From the front lines, I’ve watched integrated avionics— retrofit and forward-fit—energize the avionics market for the past 15-plus years. The amount of technology packed into this equipment continues at the pace of the personal computer in its heyday. The vast amount of information now available should allow us to aviate, navigate and communicate with a […]

Keen to show off their new High-Wing variation of the well-regarded low-wing TSi, South African airframer Sling has done so in spectacular fashion by flying the prototype and production serial numbers one and two from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The trio landed at AirVenture yesterday afternoon. The epic jaunt was flown in daylight in legs up […]