AVweb Insider

Reading the ATSB accident report on the Norfolk Island ditching I blogged about on Monday gave me a case of dj vu about another eerily similar accident in 1970. Being a student of aircraft ditching and survival, I’ve known about this accident for years as the “National Airways” ditching near St. Croix. But I never […]

If you talk to someone who’s been involved in a serious aircraft accident long enough, they’ll eventually get around to two things: The accident constantly intrudes in the daily thought process and any external description of it-an official accident report or news reports-won’t ring quite true. Experiencing something so traumatic isn’t the same as reading […]

Life is full of moral dilemmas and compromises and here’s an interesting one: Does an airplane manufacturer-including an LSA manufacture–have a moral obligation to provide as crashworthy a design as technology and economics allow? The answer might be an easy yes, but then again, maybe not.I got pulled up short on this by Aviation Consumer […]

Every year about this time, I teach a class at my local state college, and it reminds me that our nation’s young people are living in a different world than the one I know (and probably many of you AVweb readers out there). I realized a year or two ago that the students didn’t really […]

I found myself hovering the mouse cursor over the answers in last week’s simple poll question: Do you have the time to fly? The answer I finally clicked was that I’ve reduced my flying time due to other priorities, specifically work. I wasn’t surprised that the MIT study(Link) we reported on last week revealed that […]

I took an hour and a half to attend Monday’s NTSB hearing on the Reno Galloping Ghost accident. To say it was an eye opener is an understatement. It’s not much of an exaggeration, in my estimation, to assert that before it even took off, Galloping Ghost’s survival in the race was in question. The […]

Of the surface of the moon, Neil Armstrong once said, “It’s an interesting place to be. I recommend it.” For whatever else he was or was not-heroic astronaut, flight test engineer and pilot, college professor and author-Armstrong was a master of understatement. And when NASA realized Apollo 11 would be the first mission to attempt […]

Just as you think government management of anything can’t get any more ridiculous, surprise. That’s exactly what happens. This week’s supremely absurd example comes in the wake of that runway dustup at Reagan National at the end of July. I wrote about it in this blog.Saving you the click through, the executive summary is that […]

What is it about flying cars, anyway? You don’t have to get too far into the back-of-the-napkin concept phase to reach the irreducible conclusion that the idea just isn’t going to work. It’s like combining a knife with a hammer-you end up with a tool that will barely do either function adequately, never mind well.Yet […]

If you’ve been following NASA’s Curiosity mission to Mars, you can’t help but cheer the success of it. Given the high percentage of failure of Mars missions, I was sure that Rube Goldberg skycrane thing would get tangled up and make a $2.5 billion crater for the orbiter to photograph. This vehicle weighs a ton […]