AVweb Insider

From out of the blue came this week’s announcement that Piper will discontinue selling the PiperSport LSA, an airplane it conveniently nameplated from the Czech Aircraft Works Sport Cruiser. If the timing of this is a little surprising, the decision itself isn’t, at least to me. Piper announced the airplane at last year’s Sport Aviation […]

Back when I was first starting out, I spent some time at a local airport and wrote a newspaper profile about a small airline based there. The day the story came out, an airplane crash at the field took the life of a local pilot, a young guy who crashed on takeoff, and died when […]

Last week’s news stories on business jets used by governors raised the ever-sordid notion that anyone who sets foot in a Citation is a fat cat. And if the airplane is state supported, the cat is fat on the backs of taxpayers. In the current season of overspending government, it’s fruitless to try to explain […]

Editor’s Note: In my earlier blog on the FlightPrep patent, I complained that they were not responsive to some basic questions. Here’s what they had to say, unedited. Russ NilesEditor-in-Chief Q: What does FlightPrep’s online flight planning patent mean for the industry?A: It means that we have a patent for a specific online flight planning […]

I’ve never been much of a believer in filing VFR flight plans and, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, I’m still not. I think they often cause more trouble than they are designed to prevent and end up wasting everyone’s time and energy. And yet…I still teach students to use them because as […]

For as long as I can remember, the powers-that-be in general aviation have been worrying that there are too few new pilots. Recently, AOPA said as many as 80 percent of prospects who start flying lessons never get a certificate. That seems like a pretty low completion rate. Maintaining the flow of money to keep […]

Several times I’ve asked FlightPrep what their goal was with the patent they received on online flight planning. The first time was Jan. 21, 2010 right after they announced the patent and here’s the email exchange with then-CEO John Bouyea.“What does this mean for all the other online flight planners out there John?”The answer: “We […]

South of Venice, we’re blessed to have a nice little grass field called Buchan. Nothing fancy, just a couple of thousand feet of cleared Florida scrub maintained by the county. It’s a dying breed, I guess, but it’s perfect for the Cub so I use it a lot.Our new Cub partner, Jack, lives on the […]

I was just a kid of 10 when a United DC-8 and a TWA Constellation named Star of Sicily collided over Staten Island on December 16th, 1960, raining debris and bodies over a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Park Slope. It would be an accident of many firsts-the first passenger jet crash in the U.S., the […]

There’s nothing better than flying for a living, unless it’s not flying for a living. That seems to be the consensus of the 90-plus commenters who had their say over the last week or so on the U.S. News Web site, which listed “Commercial Pilot” as one of the “50 Best Jobs for 2011.” We’ve […]