AVweb Insider

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 […]

Last week’s video of the crash of a Stinson 108-3 in the Idaho outback drew intense attention and the predictable lynching by YouTube of the pilot by post-accident armchair experts. I’m not willing to go that far, but the video does give rise this question: As the industry attempts to lower the fatal accident rate, […]

I was driving in my truck yesterday morning hearing SecDOT Ray LaHood getting mildly backed into a corner in a radio interview about that little runway departure dust-up at Reagan National last month. The host was rather insistent that LaHood assure the traveling public that the FAA would promise that this wouldn’t happen again. But […]

I took a ride over to Vero Beach on Friday to visit with Piper and fly the new Matrix for a flight review. During the course of that trial, Piper’s chief pilot, Bart Jones and I, got to talking about the place of piston engines in the current market and why the technology is so […]

Following up my wrap blog of earlier this week: Every year, after AirVenture, into my inbox comes a trickle of e-mail-and it usually is a trickle-decrying how EAA has gone further to hell than it already was. This year, given that AirVenture attendance was down 6 percent, there’s more ammunition to blame the organization and […]

Kelvin Scribner has a neat little parlor trick he was pulling at AirVenture this week. His company, Sagetech, builds a miniature Mode-S transponder and when he hands you one, he points to a little notch cut into one edge. “That’s there,” he says, “so a full-size image of it will fit on a standard business […]

When Diamond launched its diesel-powered DA42 in 2004, no one knew how well it would sell or if it would sell at all. But sell it did, despite later maintenance and support issues with the Thielert engines. At the time, the doubters said diesel wouldn’t really fly until Cessna got into the game and this […]