AVweb Insider

So the weekend turned out to be uniformly grim for aviation, first with the horrific crash in Reno and 24 hours later, an airshow crash in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Depending on what fills the news cycle for the next couple of days, the hand wringing over public safety and the need to reel in these […]

My pledge to avoid parking in front of the television for the 9/11 anniversary was a qualified success. But there was so much wall-to-wall coverage that it was unavoidable. Some of it dealt with how much and how little airline travel has changed during the last decade.Several readers sent me this link for a blogthat […]

click for larger image Some sad news over the weekend: Actor Cliff Roberston died. He was a day past his 88th birthday-not a bad run. That’s of interest to pilots because Robertson was one of us, having owned a stable of airplanes, not the least of which were a couple of Tiger Moths and a […]

If you were minding the news over the quiet Labor Day weekend, you may have noticed a bombshell of sorts: The Obama administration pulled the rug out from under EPA on proposed new regulations for tighter ozone standards. This caught nearly everyone by surprise, since Obama and the Democrats were believed to be on track […]

On the morning of September 11, 2007, I was in the security line at O’Hare Airport. At exactly 8:46 a.m., the entire line stopped and the concourse almost instantly went silent for a full minute. There was no announcement; no one said a thing. Everyone knew what it meant. When the minute passed, life resumed.As […]

In an AP story this week, the issue of pilot skills gets another look — with increasing automation, pilots just don’t get to fly enough to stay as sharp as they should be. The answer proposed most often is that procedures need to evolve to be sure that pilots spend more time as actual manipulators […]

In 20-odd years of doing aviation journalism, I have learned that the have and have-not syndrome applies as equally in aviation as it does in everything else. That’s another way of saying pilot attitudes and preferences are strongly shaped by the experiences they’ve had, especially with regard to equipment. And those who’ve gazed down from […]

Last week’s news item on the not-that-new Sukhoi T-50 fifth generation fighter and a subsequent poll we published on the appearance of the airplane prompted a curious response. The T-50 is being pitched as an F-22 wannabe, with similar stealth capabilities, super cruise, sophisticated low-observable radars and combat maneuvering capability as good if not better […]

Trying to predict what our technology will look like 10 or 20 years from now — whether it’s something as relatively simple as a new aviation fuel or as complex as a revamped electric grid that can run on renewable power — seems to me about as hopeful an enterprise as trying to predict the […]

The persistent downturn in the aviation economy is obviously related to the larger world economy, but there’s another long-term trend buried in the numbers: The pilot population is dwindling and student pilot starts have been down for a decade. Take your pick of theories to explain this, but I don’t think there’s a single cause.My […]