AVweb Insider

Scrolling through Russ’s blog on the Northwest Flight 253 terrorism incident, I noticed readers made this comment in the context on how inane aviation security has become: “Well, what would you do?”What indeed.First, in reading over the timeline on this incident, I was stunned by the realization that we have become a nation of incompetent […]

It’s kind of a strange feeling to save someone’s life. I may have done it a couple of times and it’s not because I’m the kind of person you’d expect that from. There were no hails of gunfire or burning buildings involved, just, I guess, the ability to size up a situation and not be […]

Sometimes I think the longer I’m in the aviation journalism biz, the less I know. That’s the sensation I have from blogging on the Cirrus stall accident covered in this video. The research that led up to this video involved a sweep of fatal accidents in which we discovered that 18 percent of all fatals […]

This week’s video on the Cirrus stall accident drew an immediate hey-wait-a-minute trickle of e-mail calling the report’s premise into question.”The real problem and the story not being addressed here,” wrote one reader “is that the stall is not the cause of the accident–and the NTSB is very clear on who caused the accident. The […]

As the passing parade scrolls by, I sometimes find myself asking what’s worse; new proposed regulations or our sometimes silly knee-jerk reaction to them. This week, we’ve got both. Specifically, I’m referring to proposed legislation that would require pilots flying in FAR 121 operations to have a minimum of 1500 hours.This gem comes from the […]

On a cool January day in 2006, I walked onto the street from a hotel in downtown Bangkok and nearly swooned from a visceral sense of deju vu. For a moment, I was back in Saigon circa 1970. It was the smell that did it-a pungent cocktail of two-cycle exhaust, fermented gutter water and street […]

Last spring, I bought a Kindle e-reader from Amazon. It is a cursed thing. Why, at the mere push of a button and for $10, you can instantly have any of hundreds of thousands of titles in about 30 seconds. I’ve been pushing the button. A lot. I was once a voracious reader of books […]

When I was young pup newspaper reporter, I rolled into the newsroom one day at the crack of noon-we were an a.m. daily-to hear a most disconcerting one-sided conversation between the city editor and some unknown entity at the other end of the line. “Yeah, well,” he was saying, “it turned out our source was […]

I was stumbling through the Web the other day and came across some video that nicely summarized what anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows: Lou Dobbs is a paranoid lunatic. But even lunatics have moments of lucidity, and so does Dobbs. He was talking about the rising anger in the U.S. concerning the […]

As Drew Steketee noted in his blog earlier this week, aviation has its share of notable people, and Ed Stimpson’s death marks the passing of just one. Quite by happenstance, another of the greats died this week, although not all of us will recognize the name.To any naval aviator trained during the 1960s, the name […]