AVweb Insider

In today’s news feed, we’re reporting a brief summary of the responses to our avgas replacement survey. More than 3000 people participated and at least 2000 of them provided written comments, most of which I have read. I consider the effort required a valuable education in what owners think about this critical issue. And they […]

Fire in flight is such a universally horrible thing to think about that most of us probably just don’t think about it much. But the tragic incident involving Kyle and Amanda Franklin over the weekend reminds us that we probably should think about it. Or more accurately, think about what we would do about it. […]

I’ve been spending the past couple of days sorting through the results of our avgas replacement survey. The response was overwhelming: more than 3100 respondents completed the survey and perhaps two thirds of them included direct comments. This one, among many, caught my eye: It is so ridiculous that in this day and age we […]

Whenever I hear about efforts to recover the wreck of an airplane, it always reminds me of the Titanic. In the years since the Titanic was found, it’s been visited numerous times, and salvagers have taken away parts of the wreckage, much to the dismay of ocean explorer Bob Ballard, who first located it. The […]

When I stopped in at Cessna’s Wichita HQ on a Midwestern swing last week, the lunch time conversation settled briefly around the AVIC acquisition of Cirrus. I asked Cessna’s VP of U.S. sales, Tim White, what he thought of the deal. He laughed and said, “I was going to ask you the same thing.” His […]

When Leland Snow died a couple of weeks ago a chapter of a great American aviation and business story closed. What makes it so great is that it isn’t the final chapter. The story continues and, with any luck, the theme will remain the same.Snow was the founder of Air Tractor. He built his first […]

I got a note from a California reader this week looking for a reality check on pattern operations at Rosamond, which is in the high desert, just west of Edwards Air Force Base. He reports that there’s quite an active homebuilt community there and a group of them have become what he described as “insular” […]

It’s almost 75 years since Amelia Earhart went missing, yet the mystery of her fate continues to fascinate aviators and the general public. One interesting thing about this fascination is that there is absolutely nothing to be gained at this point from knowing. Investigators spend years trying to figure out why a commercial airplane crashed, […]

“Be careful out there, now.”I can’t begin to explain how irritating I find this phrase. It was said to me twice last week, both times as I was about to set off on my bicycle on the way home from the gym. Both guys who said it to me either knew someone who had been […]

Stories about pilot fatigue as potential accident factor seem to come and go in the daily media. At the moment, ABC News has been running a series of reports that it claims shows that many regional pilots are so poorly paid that they can’t afford hotels when on non-reimbursed commuting time. ABC’s reporting showed at […]