AVweb Insider

Because we’re in the midst of it, it always seems like aviation and aerospace are hardest hit by economic downturns. And the one we’re in at the moment is unprecedented if only because it has hobbled a business aircraft industry that has never been larger, both in number of aircraft shipped and in dollars billed.This […]

We in the aviation media went to the National Business Aviation Association convention prepared for a show that reflected the general state of the business but there are surprises at every show. On balance, the biggest news out of the show was the redesign of the PiperJet into the Altaire, something that looks like a […]

When Apple’s iPad first appeared last spring, it arrived with such a gush of hype that I thought it could never live up to what was expected of it. But secretly, I hoped it would become the ultimate Swiss Army knife cockpit gadget, able to do navigation, grab weather, file flightplans, perform weight and balance […]

I suppose in order to really appreciate the utility of datalink weather, you have to fly 600 or 700 miles without it on a day when the weather is bad enough to be annoying, but not so bad as to get into a soiled underwear situation. And that’s exactly what colleague Marc Cook and I […]

You may recall an iconic photo that circulated a few years, a low-angle aerial shot depicting a freeway choked with traffic at a dead standstill. At the front of that bottleneck was a small fleet of emergency vehicles circled wagon-like around an EMS helo, strobes flashing, rotor spinning.The viewer couldn’t help but perceive the scene […]

I got a nice note from AVEMCO CEO Jim Lauerman on this week’s blog about traildraggers and training. He confirms what we have all noticed-or should have noticed-in the accident records: Lack of stick-and-rudder skills cost pilots and their insurors millions every year and a great majority of this-if not all of it-is avoidable. The […]

One of the things I’ve noticed about aviation journalists is that we don’t tend to run against the grain much, probably for fear of being perceived as wild-eyed lunatics. You know, the whole opinion leader thing. But I’m quite comfortable with my own wild-eyed lunacy and I like to think I pull off hysteria with […]

When a prominent pilot goes missing, as happened last week when Richard Abruzzo and Carol Rymer Davis were lost during the Gordon Bennett balloon race, it reveals the limits of our technology in unexpected ways. The failure of the balloon system, given that the team encountered thunderstorms while flying over water, is not hard to […]

In this blog and others, we have offered various theories to explain why general aviation can’t attract more participants. These vary in detail, but there’s general agreement that the largest factor is economic: Flying is just too expensive and expressed as a ratio of expense to disposable income, it’s getting worse. Why is this? Stand […]

March 8, 1910 Raymonde de Laroche of France became the first woman in the world to earn a pilot license. That same year, Marthe Niel of France, Marie Marvingt of France and Helene Dutrieux of Belgium also earned theirs.On September 16, 1910, Bessica Medlar Raiche soloed in the airplane she and her husband Francois Raiche […]