AVweb Insider

Sigh. They’re back. The modern resurrection of the pattern wars. As an inveterate FAA jailhouse lawyer, I already know the arguments. “Discouraged doesn’t mean prohibited.” “Advisory circulars aren’t regulatory, that’s why they’re called advisory.” “The FAA has no clue what’s really going on in traffic patterns.” And so on and on and on. The occasion […]

Given how much information hurls at us through our phones, our tablets and computers, not to mention the odorous miasma of cable news, you have to have either a heightened appreciation for the absurd or some kind of low dB auto filter just to make it to lunch. It’s not often that the deafening dissonance […]

An elusive key to the skeleton closet of successful flight life is to do less, much less. “Straighten up and fly right” made for a catchy Nat King Cole lyric in 1943, but is it good advice for today’s pilots? Having been one for a half-century I can unequivocally state, “I don’t know.” That’s also […]

When CubCrafters announced the novel idea of raising capital through a public stock offering last year, I think the general reaction was, well, that’s creative. Now along comes Cirrus with its own IPO plans, this time on the Hong Kong exchange, and it’s tempting to think we’ve got a full-blown trend afoot here. But if […]

Big league pitcher Gaylord Perry was famous for his goofy, hard-to-hit Vaseline ball, but he was equally renowned for his anemic bat. That led Giants manager Alvin Dark to observe of Perry, “There’ll be a man on the moon before he hits a home run.” In the third inning of a game against the Dodgers, […]

“Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle!” was once the first idea every student learned—or at least heard—in Marketing 101. When the phrase was coined in the 1930s by Elmer Wheeler, it was accepted that there actually was a steak involved somewhere. Elmer would have swooned in the internet and social media age when even […]

Given the state of the world, you are forgiven if you missed the news that the U.S. has, for the second time in a year, exerted its authority to deny access to one of its homegrown weapons systems. You’ve heard of Ukraine’s yearlong and ultimately successful bid to add F-16s from neighboring countries to its […]

I enjoyed your story about your uncle Louie and the SeaMaster.  I have a related story to tell that shows how interconnected aviation can be. In 1987 I joined NASA HQ in Washington, D.C., to help modify the Space Shuttle program after the Challenger accident. I was hired by what they called Code Q, the brand-new […]

When I was in ninth grade—hell, when I was in college—I didn’t know what an algorithm was. Now, my life—yours too—is ruled by the damn things. Absentmindedly click on something and within hours, you’re buried in a tsunami of more of the same, ultimately building into that $#@%storm that fuels social media: outrage. You have […]

In my underachieving college years, I learned the merit of injecting quotes from collectively admired thinkers into essays, particularly if—as was often the case—I’d never read their works. My go-to source was Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922), whose full name is thirteen French syllables longer but was simply Proust to us loitering in café society. […]