AVweb Insider

In the world of military aviation, the piston engine was left for dead sometime in the 1950s and it would still be thus if drones hadnt come along. But piston engines swinging old-school props give unmanned aircraft something that jet engines cant: unrivaled mid-altitude efficiency and endurance. So as unlikely as it seems, drone technology […]

I read a quote from tennis star Andre Agassi the other day that resonated with me. What makes something special is not just what you have to gain but what you feel you have to lose. That pretty well describes how I feel about our annual airport open house day, which we held in Venice […]

Five years ago, or maybe 10, stem was something usually used in the same sentence with seeds, but lately, you cant hardly open a Cessna door without hitting uppercase STEM. This, of course, refers to teaching science, technology, engineering and math courses and if you subscribe to mass-media wisdom, the U.S. is the laughingstock of […]

Sometimes, you just have to pause, stand back and admire a perfect marketing plan. And thats exactly what Lakemaid Brewery pulled off the week leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, but Im not sure how many people got the joke. By now, you will have read that Lakemaid, a craft brewer in Wisconsin, followed Amazons […]

Looking over the glareshield at the future of GA, I dont get a good feeling about the FAAs NextGen program and the 2020 ADS-B mandate. Its not that I think the concept is flawed, although the agency seems to have done its best to complicate the deployment of this technology, which will eventually replace radar. […]

Surfing the untracked wilderness of modern cable television, my scroll-around sometimes lands on something interesting. Lately, its been a show called Dangerous Flights, another of the Discovery Channels reality series. These sorts of programs are called reality TV and if reality were scripted, theyd be accurately named. Otherwise, like a patient drifting in and out […]

The stick-and-rudder component of flying airplanes, while challenge enough, is the lesser difficulty compared to learning to makedecisions that wont kill you or at least rend metal. Teaching it or learning this has everything to do with recognizing risk and hazards for what they are and preparing accordingly. In fairness, I think most pilots do […]

One of my many character flaws is a complete disinterest in filling out forms of any kind including, Im sorry to say, logbooks. I scribble down the legal requirements for currency, but thats about it. As a result, Im not quite sure when I last flew an airplane that wasnt an LSA. Might have been […]

Although Im afraid to add up the actual number of years, I sometimes feel like I have spent most of my journalism career-at least the aviation portion of it-writing about economic downturns. An occupational hazard of that is inflating every little clue, no matter how silly, inconsequential or comically irrelevant as evidence of the r-word-recovery. […]

The smog in some Chinese cities is too severe to fly these days, but two new general aviation policies recently coming into play may hopefully clear the forward vision a little for the market players in China. First, the Chinese regulator Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) loosened licensing requirements for private pilot licenses (PPL). […]