AVweb Insider

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 […]

If the average pilot knew Ed Stimpson at all, they knew only a name in an occasional news story. Everyone who knew or worked with him, however, embraced this modest giant of the aviation world.From 1970, Ed was the heart and soul of manufacturers’ collective efforts to build and protect the General Aviation industry, to […]

Well, here’s an idea. Why don’t we extend an airline captain’s authority to ensure the welfare of passengers outside the airplane in exceptional circumstances and we’ll eliminate the need for politically motivated fines, screeching passenger advocate groups and a whole lot of discomfort.Last week, the Department of Transportation absolutely slayed a symptom while ignoring a […]

Here’s an amazing statistic — it’s well known that today, women make up only about 6 percent of the total U.S. pilot population, but the amazing part is that back in 1935, there were about 800 women flying, and that was also about 6 percent of all pilots. At least that is what I’ve heard […]

Try this thought experiment: Imagine the act of ditching an airplane in water; just try to visualize it. If you’re like me, your mind’s eye defaults to a daylight scenario. You don’t think about doing it at a night because there’s nothing to see and that’s the problem with putting an airplane into the water […]

From the here’s-an-accident-report-I-can’t-wait-to-read file comes yesterday’s report of a Westwind ditching near Norfolk Island, in the western Pacific. As is often the case at a distance, there’s not enough detail yet available to illuminate why the Captain decided, after several attempts to land on a runway, to ditch in the water (in darkness) instead. Weather […]

The more I read about USAirways Flight 1549’s dip in the icy Hudson River last winter and the more we beatify Chesley Sullenberger, the more I think there’s not much more to learn from this accident; nothing below the surface, so to speak. The engines choked on birds, the pilots did a masterful job of […]

When I was crawling around Joe Shepherd’s nicely restored Electra at AOPA Summit last week, it occurred to me that the new film Amelia would be worth a look. We saw it Saturday night in a near empty theater here in Florida. (I don’t take that as disinterest in aviation so much as the topic […]