AVweb Insider

TSA now boasts that it has its controversial full body scanners in every major U.S. airport, which it seems to think is quite the accomplishment.Unfortunately, as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano tours the country trying to sell this turd of an idea, she’s navigating a PR disaster. But she’s not giving ground, insisting that the […]

For an organization as media savvy as the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be, its performance on the issue of lead in aviation gasoline would be laughable if it wasn’t so infuriating.Granted, there’s no Love Canal on the horizon with the relatively small amount of lead (140,000 tons since aviation was born) airplanes have loosed […]

Last week’s story on Senator James Inhofe’s encounter with a closed runway generated quite a bit of mail, including one note from a reader asking why I hadn’t commented on it in this blog. Shouldn’t the senator be reminded, he asked, that most of us do indeed check NOTAMs before every flight? Okay, consider him […]

I’ve been doing some editorial trials of a couple of the satellite trackers, the Spot and the recently marketed (at least to the U.S.) Spidertracks. Interesting technology, and although they’re useful and effective, they represent something larger: We’re entering the age of pay-for-it-yourself aviation services.We’ve actually been getting there for awhile, but with the recent […]

A few years ago, the Extreme Makeover guys came to my town and built a new house for a deserving family, and, watching it on TV, the thing that struck me was how much it meant, not to the mom and dad and kids, but to the workers who built the house. A few of […]

In writing about things to do with airplanes, I find myself using the word “progress” advisedly, especially when discussing anything to do with regulation. Unfortunately, that includes about everything. One area where progress has been glacially slow is convincing the FAA to give up on the idea of requiring steam gauges to backup glass panel […]

Over the weekend, when I wasn’t dodging Cherokees, I was holding my breath wondering what impact Friday’s story on an attempted freighter bombing would have on airline security. It may still be too soon to judge whether it will result in us poor hapless sots having to further disrobe just for the privilege of flying […]

Like most pilots, I have a short list of things I’d rather not hear in an airplane. Such as…do you smell smoke?; Is that oil on the windshield?; I know I put the gear down. Near the bottom of the list is, “I’ve got it!” followed by having the controls snatched away at 5000 feet […]

In a recent blog, where Paul Bertorelli described our flight without XM weather and playing my bile level “like a $2 harmonica,” he also touched on the fact that my Glastar Sportsman is fitted with a Garmin G3X EFIS/engine monitor running, shall we say, commando. That is, I don’t have backup mechanical gauges to rely […]

It was inevitable that TSA would face a high-profile Fourth Amendment challenge for its use of full-body scanners as a primary airport security tool. I’m a little surprised, however, that the challenge is coming from an active airline pilot, as we reported last week in this story. In standing his ground on Fourth Amendment principle, […]