AVweb Insider

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 […]

AVweb used to run an April Fool’s edition that was popular but ultimately confusing. As Internet news evolved, our reputation as a trusted source of accurate information about GA conflicted with the devil-may-care attitude that governed some sites.I only took part in one of the April 1 editions and it was a challenge coming up […]

I don’t know what the normal NTSB response is to a fatality-free runway overrun in a foreign country but I’ wouldn’t be surprised if Canada’s Transportation Safety Board will have to call in reserves just to make sure they have the numerical advantage at the soggy end of a runway at Ottawa’s MacDonald-Cartier International Airport.The […]

The companies that build aircraft engines-and for the purposes of this discussion, let’s call them Continental and Lycoming-are staffed by the dumbest people on the planet. This would be the general gist of opinions of pilots who know automotive technology and who also own or fly airplanes.To them, the ongoing discussion about finding a replacement […]