AVweb Insider

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 […]

Remember five years ago when convergence was the buzz word among techno futurists? The idea was that technological development was drifting toward products that would be all-in-one appliances. You’d surf the Web on your TV and watch movies on your phone. You can actually do those things, but I note with some irony that on […]

Walking around in our bright green AVweb newsteam shirts at shows like Sun ‘n Fun has a certain advantage I had never figured on when I picked that color out of a catalog. People stop us all the time to ask questions, offer opinions and make interesting comments about what they’ve seen or heard. There’s […]

Redbird Takes FlightAt the Piper booth Wednesday morning, Jerry Gregoire of Redbird Simulation took delivery of a new Seminole painted in the company’s swirling red livery. As you’ve probably read, Redbird has an intriguing project underway in San Marcos, Texas to basically re-invent flight training by basing it heavily on flight simulation.Gregoire said Redbird has […]