AVweb Insider

The supposed benefits of living in the information age are way overrated. We’re bombarded with a constant stream of noise from cable news, radio, Web sources and even our damn cellphones. I use the word “noise” purposefully, because the information stream is mostly carrier with not much modulation.Like a swirling river at flood stage, the […]

The other day I was walking out onto the local FBO ramp and spotted a little jet idling on the ramp. It was an Eclipse and noting the N-number, I think it was locally based and I’ve met the pilot. We used to see these airplanes a lot around Florida when DayJet was running, but […]

As one AME put it, maybe the guy who flew into the building in Austin would not have if he had been treated with antidepressants.In a long overdue decision, the FAA has approved the use of four anti-depressant medications (Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, and Lexapro) for use by pilots with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class medical […]

As I write this, it’s the first of April — April Fool’s Day — and I spent the morning boring holes in the sky around Portland, Maine to shoot some video for upcoming YouTube spots. We were sure to get a real briefing for this flight because our President is due in this afternoon. There […]

There are plenty of examples of bad aviation reporting in the mainstream media — Paul Bertorelli noted one egregious one last week, all the worse for being attributed to an “aviation expert” — but this week I ran into one of the worst mish-mashes I’ve seen. And even worse, when a representative of a GA […]

There’s a certain amount of discomfort that comes from discovering the top two picks, the cream of the crop, the best-of-the-best candidates for the leader of the Transportation Security Administration are a couple of guys you wouldn’t want dating your sister.Sorry, Erroll Southers and Robert Harding, but when you initially accepted the nomination to become […]

Pilots are, if nothing else, predictable and easily disposed toward certain knee-jerk reactions. One of these is to rail mightily against news coverage of aviation topics that gets the fact wrong or that show the writer’s ignorance of the basic technology. (We all sang from this hymnal when the kid controller story broke earlier this […]

Most of us don’t think much about what happens when an aircraft goes down and the local authorities have to find it and rescue or recover occupants. This is, at best, an uncertain, time-consuming process. At worst, it’s a chaotic mess that yields no results.But as Chief Daniel George once said, sometimes the magic works […]

The late Robin Olds used to tell a funny story about his experience commanding a fighter wing in Vietnam. Olds had been a World War II ace and, during the development of the F-4 Phantom II, had become a pain to the Air Force staff during the 1950s for his insistence that any new fighter […]

After I read the NTSB’s findings on glass cockpits and safety, I felt the urge to stifle a yawn. My initial reaction was, is this all there is? My next reaction was to try to recall if glass displays were ever pitched as significant safety enhancers. Maybe I missed school that day or perhaps the […]