AVweb Insider

I listen to a lot of ATC tapes and the latest was about the flap damage on the Southwest flight at Denver Sunday morning. When pieces fall off an airplane in flight it’s a flat-out, hair-on-fire emergency. Neither the controllers nor the pilots know for sure what has been damaged and even though decisions are […]

Non-pilots may be hard to deal with, but we all must interact with them from time to time, and this was my time. I was pickleballing at the local pickleballing venue with a group of tottering and doddering old friends. We were staying out of the kitchen and, because of our advanced age, found ourselves […]

One of the hazards of this job is inadvertently becoming a poser. It’s easy to appear more knowledgeable about topics on which you have no direct experience so the golden rule is to attribute every fact to a credible source. Still, there seem to be a lot of people who think I have personal experience […]

While I am all in favor of a healthy respect for weather among VFR pilots, I also believe there could be excessive fear instilled during the training process that makes an inadvertent encounter with IMC more dangerous than it needs to be. Having gotten my private-pilot certificate in 1981, I was a VFR-only pilot for […]

The forums and news threads went berserk when Garmin sounded the warning horn last year that the parts bins stocked with major components to maintain the world-conquering GNS-series navigators are thinning, and that owners should start planning an upgrade. Garmin Service Advisory (23018 Rev. B) makes it official, saying in part that display repairs for […]

As you can imagine, we get a lot of email here at AVweb and it’s frankly overwhelming. Over the years I’ve learned to discern the potentially fruitful communications in terms of newsworthiness, and I open and read them carefully. The rest, I’m afraid, run the risk of remaining unopened on our server and for that […]

You talk too much  You even worry my pet You just talk…  Talk too much       Joe Jones What a nice day to go flying! I had spent an hour or so committing flagrant acts of aviation with my rag-wing Cessna 140, and after the obligatory three touch-and-goes, I parked it next to my […]

So, when it first popped up on one of the aviation networks that I frequent I decided not to bite on it. The crew of a United 737 MAX 8 misjudged a taxiway turn and collapsed the left main in the mud. Minor incidents like this are a tough call when it comes to news […]

Cirrus took its marketing strategy in a new and different direction with January 11’s livestream “reveal” of the new G7 version of the SR-series piston singles. As a “mature” pilot in the process of reestablishing instrument currency, I had mixed feelings on the overriding message. The livestream made no secret that Cirrus is targeting customers […]

I lead a double life and in my other manifestation I am but a humble merchant who hawks his wares at a public market in a little mountain town that is crammed with tourists every summer. Our little winery seems to make products that those enjoying the clean air and drop-dead stunning landscape like to […]