AVweb Insider

Just as I thought I’d seen everything, along comes Spirit Airlines suing the government for the right to engage in bait-and-switch advertising. You probably saw the story this week.Spirit has taken the idea of unbundling-that is, unbundling everything from the seat except the upholstery (and maybe even that)– and charging extra for it to absolutely […]

Last month, on the drive from our hotel in Austria to the Aero exposition halls in Friedrichshafen, the route carried us over a stretch of one of those famous autobahns with no speed limit. Actually, it may have had a posted limit, but no one was paying any attention to it. I wound up our […]

If you haven’t seen these video reports by CBS on the F-22 Raptor story, they are worth the time to watch. When they first aired on CBS on Sunday evening, I’m sure I missed the first third of what these two officers were saying because my thoughts wandered off wondering what these two will do […]

As we all probably did, I watched and read a lot of coverage on the Bin Laden raid a year ago. What caught my eyes and ears was speculation on why the MH-60 Blackhawk crashed when attempting to land in the compound. We may never know the real cause, but the most-reported reason was that […]

In my video blog earlier this week, I touched on the idea that, in Europe at least, regulation doesn’t seem to put much of a throttle on innovation and new product introduction. In merely making the observation, I wasn’t implying that more regulation is better than less because I am, at heart, an anarchist. If […]

Don’t see a video screen?Try disabling ad blockers and refreshing this page.If that doesn’t work, click here to download the video directly. There’s a ton of U.S. capital on the sidelines looking for growth opportunities. In Europe, some of it goes into aircraft manufacturing. Why not in the U.S.?

With its approval ratings hovering in the single digits, the U.S. Congress doesn’t come immediately to mind as a towering institution for common sense and wisdom. Nonetheless, the Senate Appropriations Committee deserves props for reining in the FAA’s AeroNav division, which launched an inept and ill-thought-out effort to begin charging airspace users for navigation data […]

The Great Hall WalkAs I mentioned in the opening day video Aero isn’t exactly a European version of AirVenture or Sun ‘n Fun. The business model of the hosting organization, Messe Friedrichshafen, is trade fairs and Aero is just one of at least a couple of dozen they do every year. That makes it fundamentally […]

When I was kid growing up and fantasizing about airplanes, I’d occasionally read stories about overlooked warehouses stuffed with factory-fresh airplanes slathered with cosmoline and awaiting only discovery by some lucky buyer. As I got older, I assumed these stories to be apocryphal, but when I met Bill Lear Jr. in the early 1990s, he […]

At Sun ‘n Fun, just a couple of weeks ago, one of the most interesting news conferences I went to was hosted by Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the Moon during the last Apollo mission, with Gene Cernan. It was fascinating to hear him talk about the strangeness of the bright Moon landscape against the […]