AVweb Insider

If there’s anything inarguable in aviation it’s this: The number one cause of accidents is loss of control on the runway, or what we call R-LOCs in our accident reporting. To be more accurate, R-LOCs are actually the result, the cause is some other factor related to the fact that pilots sometimes have a hard […]

I suppose if you hold your nose, Red Tails might be considered a decent movie in a it-could-have-been-a-lot-worse sort of way. And I understand enough of how the entertainment business works to accept a certain artistic license so I wouldn’t raise much of an issue about the pilots flying D-model P-51s instead of the C-models […]

The notion of raising the weight limit for light sport aircraft seems to wax and wane and it came up this week again at the Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring. It’s not exactly clear to me what this will accomplish, but at the LAMA dinner on Thursday, EAA’s Rod Hightower said the idea may be […]

Over the weekend, I was watching the coverage of the Costa Concordia disaster in Italy and it caused me to pull out my iPhone for a look at the calendar. This shipwreck occurred almost three years to the day after the USAir 1549 Hudson River ditching that made Chesley B. Sullenberger III a household name. […]

When I read recent news reports about new DOT regulations requiring airlines to post their fares more transparently, it suddenly occurred to me that the industry is drifting inch-by-inch back toward the regulation it threw off during the 1970s. At the time, the theory was that airline regulation, then overseen by the CAB, was a […]

This interesting story on the ditching of a Cirrus SR22 last weekend probably made the news for two reasons: It was a slow news day and the sinking airplane and inflated parachute made good visuals. Otherwise, it was an unremarkable event. A well-prepared pilot made good decisions, had the survival gear aboard and executed his […]

My blog last week on an imaginary trip in a single-engine airplane across California’s Sierra west of Reno was a little experiment that seems to have failed miserably. Or at least I think it did. I was trying to tease out of the audience a little rumination over whether having a BRS-equipped airplane like a […]

What Were They Thinking? The mystery surrounding the Air Force’s abrupt dismissal of Hawker Beechcraft’s AT-6B as a candidate for its potential light attack aircraft invites speculation since the Air Force itself isn’t talking. In fact, the Government Accountability Office seems to support the Air Force’s lack of accountability in handing the $1 billion contract […]

As part of a couple of blogs I’ll be doing on safety topics this week, here’s a chance to test your judgment. It’s a winter night in the mountains around Lake Tahoe and you need to get back to your homebase in Oakland, California, a flight of about 160 nautical miles. click to enlarge The […]

Captain X is a training Captain for a well-known regional airline and occasional correspondent to AVweb and our aviation publications. We’re publishing his compelling observations as a guest blog.–Paul BertorelliWe can’t quite put our fingers on what’s occurring in the industry right now. I’ve talked to my counterparts at other regional airlines and they all […]