AVweb Insider

This week’s news is dominated by the massive earthquake that seems to have all but leveled Port au Prince in Haiti. This morning, I noticed that the initial aid is arriving the only way it can arrive-via airplane.As I’m writing this, a substantial airlift is underway flying supplies, medical equipment and food into Haiti. As […]

This Friday will be the one year anniversary of US Airways’ ditching of Flight 1549 into the Hudson and I just realized that I have contracted a fully metastasized, CDC-certified case of Sully fatigue. The only known treatment is…you guessed it, disgorge more pixels about Sully.The occasion is TLC’s documentary on the Flight 1549 ditching […]

Don’t see a video screen?Try disabling ad blockers and refreshing this page.If that doesn’t work, click here to download the video directly. Colleague Mary Grady sent me a link from Jim Fallows’ Atlantic blog making note of an interesting site that publishes public domain government video and other information. Click here for a look.The video […]

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 […]