AVweb Insider

For many of our readers, AVweb is not just an aviation news and feature service, but also, at times, an ethical or moral sounding board. We are sometimes expected to be, to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, a lonely beacon of restraint in a squall of aviation crazies who strut the stage on YouTube.If we’re to meet […]

In reading over all those fatal accident reports for my blog earlier this week, the pedestrian obvious suddenly occurred to me halfway through the sweep: When we climb into airplanes and to slip the surly bonds, we don’t expect to crash. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we should expect it and thus develop what I’ve […]

So here’s an idea, courtesy of the friendly frozen folks of the country that puts the north in North America. Canada is pitching in to help determine what less environmentally-damaging alternatives to 100LL might be out there.The country’s National Research Council was perfectly willing to all but go it alone and do a comprehensive study […]

We are all, I suppose, victims of our own obsessions and one of mine is the notion that among the many things we don’t teach well in aviation is risk assessment. That’s not risk management, mind you, which I view as an overused buzz word, but rather a realistic grasp of what’s most likely to […]

Last weekend, a rep from Flight Design, Brian Boucher was in town with Dan Johnson to demo the CTLSi, with Rotax’s new 912 iS engine. During the course of shooting video, something came up in the discussion that frequently does: Can you and should you fly LSAs under IFR? On the trip down from New […]

During the evenings, our cable channel box is pretty well locked on The Military Channel because I’m kind of a one-trick pony when it comes to viewing habits. The other night, one of my top, all-time favorite aviation movies appeared and even though I picked up the action in the middle, I knew instantly that […]

Here’s an astonishing fact: The Air Force recently announced that the B-52H, of which 74 are still in service, will remain in the active fleet until 2045. By then, the design will be 93 years old. Lots of technologies-steam propulsion, the internal combustion engine, stick-built houses, the air brake-have lasted longer than that, but I […]

Out of far-left field comes a proposal from the FCC to the FAA to relax standards on the use of cellphones, tablets and other personal electronic devices during takeoff and landing aboard airliners. In his letter to the FAA’s Michael Huerta, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski basically pitched a novel argument: Banning of these devices stifles […]

Curiosity unsatisfied is like the itch that can’t be scratched, which is how I feel in sorting through reports on the spec ops helicopter crash during the May 2011 raid that took out Osama bin Laden. I wrote about it in this blog a few months ago.I keep seeing accounts of this event and although […]

When the government audits itself-say the GAO or an internal agency OIG-the results can be impressively self-critical or glaringly myopic. Unfortunately, with no independent data, you never know which you’re getting.I thought of that last week when reading the DOT’s internal audit that-surprise-showed that contract towers are both cheaper and safer than FAA-staffed towers. While […]