AVweb Insider

I have spent a lifetime fooling around in high-risk sports-flying, skydiving, motorcycles. It follows that I have a lot of friends who do the same and a few weeks ago, I lost one of them. In any high-risk activity, there are always people who rise to the top and stand apart from the rest and […]

I do it. You do it. We all do it. As pilots, in the wake of an accident like Asiana 214 last Saturday in San Francisco, we crank up our piety and discipline and decline public comment until the investigators are done. But amongst ourselves, theres no such restraint and theres not much in the […]

As I mentioned in Sundays blog, the Asiana crash in San Francisco on Saturday was unusual for being unusual. There just arent many Part 121 crashes these days. But its unusual for another reason: the NTSB is making effective use of social media, specifically Twitter, to pass on snippets of information as they become available. […]

On Saturday afternoon, I was grinding away on the cross trainer at my local gym watching CNN try cover the Asiana crash at San Francisco. I say “try” because reporters with absolutely no meaningful information were attempting to fill air time. Nothing new about that. For the hour or so that I watched the coverage, […]

Conspiracy theories are a little like mold: It doesn’t take much to get them started and once established, they’re all but impossible to eradicate. The crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in July 1996 has proven rich soil indeed for a perennial crop of nut cases, wild-eyed lunatics and foil-hat purveyors. The latest […]

What does it take to be a good pilot? I’m sure you could lock me a windowless room with a blank legal pad and I’d come up with nothing in trying to answer that. But I know one when I see one and that’s one of the most fun things about my job. I travel […]

If you haven’t seen this video, take a few moments to watch it. In a nutshell, it’s a video summary from several angles of a post takeoff engine failure in a Bonanza and the subsequent forced landing just off the airport. The pilot, who along with his passenger, emerged unhurt from the accident said he […]

The weekend’s tragic crash and dual fatality at the Dayton Airshow raises a perennial question. Two really: Should airshows continue to offer these kinds of acts and when there’s a crash, should we, as a news organization, show the inevitable video that results? I’ll address the second question first, because we had a complaint about […]

In the wonderful documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, there’s a revealing scene in which astronaut Alan Bean openly wonders if the engineers who designed the Saturn V booster really got the load calculations right, given how the thing shook and vibrated during the first-stage ascent. I thought of that last week when I […]

Now that the FAA is actively seeking proposed unleaded replacements for 100LL, the covers are about to be removed from what can generously be described as the hard way to solve a problem. Last week, the FAA called for the fuels industry to submit proposed unleaded replacements for avgas by July 1, 2014, after which […]