Features

I’m from Massachusetts (the North) and in the mid-1960s, flying cross‑country from Daytona Beach to an airport near Tampa Florida (the South), I passed by the Orlando airport and tuned the frequency for a brand‑new reporting system named ATIS. I caught the recorded transmission about halfway and heard the following: “Temperature 28. Dew point 10. […]

In this podcast, AVweb senior editor Mark Phelps talks with Chuck Surack, founder of musical instrument and equipment retailer Sweetwater Sound and new owner of Enstrom Helicopter. Surack’s business style includes a healthy helping of customer satisfaction, to the point where he includes a small bag of (Sweet?) candy with each online order, no matter […]

When the jet age arrived in 1959, little was known about wind shear. Aviation was focused on thunderstorm avoidance. In Joseph George’s compilation of Eastern Air Line’s forecasting techniques from that era, we find thunderstorms described in terms of turbulence, icing, and hail hazards. As jet aircraft were equipped with radar, it was assumed that […]

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 […]

The Avionics Market Was There For The Taking. So Garmin Did For a VFR flyer, Garmin’s competition in avionics is the device I’m posting from. Installed avionics are one of the few things that make an Apple product look like a bargain. Steam gages and a recent iProduct for SA (or droid if so inclined) […]

What’s that? A custom-built Zenith STOL CH 701 taildragger? Now that’s something you don’t see every day. As we all know, Experimental aviation provides builders with more room to, well, experiment. Ivan Gromala of Quality Sport Planes (QSP), took advantage of this additional room to roam and put his STOL CH 701 on conventional landing gear. Originally […]

On a side street in the northern-Utah city of Logan, a large plaque celebrates the city’s contribution to aviation history. On June 23, 1924, Logan native and U.S. Army Air Service test pilot 1st Lt. Russell Maughan became the first to complete a “dawn-to-dusk” transcontinental U.S. flight from New York to San Francisco. The flight […]

Heard somewhere over Kansas: Center: “American 745, contact Kansas City on 118.12.” American 745: “Was that eighteen twelve for American 745?” Center: “American 745, yes, eighteen twelve, as in ‘The War Of.’” Elliott Cox Clover, South Carolina

Consider a route I’ve flown several times before: from the Washington, D.C., area to Asheville, N.C. Back before GPS, you eventually got on V222 at Lynchburg, Va., and motored off to the southwest. The highest minimum en route altitude (MEA) is/was 6000 feet, and flying it in good visual conditions (VMC) highlights why: This is […]

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 […]