AVweb Insider

Bose Marches AlongIt seems hard to imagine, but when Bose introduced the first noise cancelling headset in 1989, it caused a stir that bordered on the scandalous. I can’t recall if they did the actual product intro at Oshkosh, but the reaction was memorable: Are these guys kidding? A $1000 headset? Nobody is going to […]

Before introducing EAA’s new president, Rod Hightower, to a roomful of reporters on Monday, current president Tom Poberezny took a minute to talk about the weeks of torrential rain, topped off by a soaking storm, that preceded this week’s event. “In the 35 years I’ve been at the helm, this was, I think, the most […]

Now that aircraft buyers, manufacturers and the alphabets are waking up from a comfy snooze behind the wheel and realizing the GA limo is about to sail off a cliff for lack of avgas, we should expect to see plenty of activity at AirVenture this year on the subject of a replacement for 100LL. (I […]

If Charles Lindbergh had equipped the Spirit of St. Louis with a Packard Dr-980 instead of the Wright Whirlwind, he might not have had to stuff a gas tank in the nose in lieu of a windshield and he could have enjoyed the view while crossing the Atlantic. And that would have made ditching easier, […]

I grew up in the 1950s and have the scar tissue to prove it. So it was a little unsettling to see one of the victims of notorious alleged teen airplane thief Colton Harris-Moore generously dismiss the theft of a $620,000 Corvalis as sort of a teen-age prank. Never mind that it was Grand Theft […]

Twenty years into what seems like a hopeless search for an avgas replacement, the only thing that appears to have emerged-other than reams of depressing reports-is fear and paralysis. So Cessna CEO Jack Pelton’s unambiguous statement last week that yes, he has seen a replacement fuel, it appears to work and looks producible was a […]

The news, even our little corner of aviation news, can seem all too bleak sometimes — airplane crashes that shouldn’t happen, an economy that won’t quite rebound, bureaucracies that won’t get out of the way, fuels that won’t work — but hey, it’s summer, and with the sun shining and a cool breeze blowing, I’m […]

Seven years seems like a long time. By 2017, there will be 30 million more of us in the U.S. and demographic and economic shifts will be profound. That’s also the year, at the latest, that leaded aviation gasoline will, by government fiat, disappear. It if doesn’t happen sooner. Or if would-be buyers of airplanes […]

Over the past week, a curious sort of news coverage has emerged. AOPA aired a video with Craig Fuller explaining the difficulties in finding a replacement for 100LL. The industry’s FAST fuel group-really a committee of associations such as AOPA, EAA, GAMA and so forth-held a couple of Webinar briefings, one of which I attended […]

The way the story goes, Cirrus Aircraft (still called Cirrus Design back in 2006) didn’t initially want to sell a turbo version of the SR22. Then customers starting seeing SR22s regularly doing 200 knots on FlightAware, clustered around central Oklahoma. The story continues that there were threats of canceled orders; customers would rather buy a […]