AVweb Insider

  If you could somehow tune your eyes to see the electromagnetic spectrum while watching yesterday’s spectacular launch of SpaceX’s Super Heavy/Starship, you’d see fat ropes of 0’s and 1’s streaming back to earth. And therein lies the explanation of why the thing blew up four minutes into the flight and the solution to fixing […]

I’m sure I’m not alone in this reaction: When I hear about a crash, especially one with fatalities, at my local airport, the first thing I want to know are the names. Is it someone I know takes priority over what happened. Two weeks ago, we had a particularly bad one here at Venice. Four fatalities […]

Breaking news: To the shock of few, FAA administrator nominee, Phillip Washington, withdrew his name from consideration for an underpaid government job (about $140,000/year plus free pens), overseeing the most complicated aviation system in the Universe. Stepping in to the run the agency in an acting capacity is Billy Nolen, a pilot. Gutsy choice. Talk […]

When I was but a tender student pilot, my instructor put three of us in a brand-new airplane to fly around North Carolina to complete our cross-country work. The airplane was sleek, sexy and had eyeball vents, just like an airliner. It was a 1969 Cardinal and we knew it would replace the doddering 1967 […]

This appeared in an Aeronca web discussion; I’m paraphrasing, but it’s a perennial issue of minimal importance, requiring in-depth review: Can the 7AC Champ be flown with its door removed? Answer: Yeah, pull the pin(s), extract door, go fly. Follow-up: Is there an STC permitting door removal? Yes, and I’m guessing a few Champ owners […]

For most of us, history is kind of a remote thing corralled into books or shallow films. Interesting, maybe, but too distant to rise to the definition of firsthand relevance. So I’m lucky to have, by sheer happenstance, clapped eyes on this photo recently. It was posted on Facebook by one of my distant cousins. […]

If you’re running low on outrage and haven’t enjoyed any angertainment say, since about two hours ago, click on this link. It’s an excruciating seven minutes of FAA admin nominee Phil Washington being grilled by the Senate Commerce Committee as part of his confirmation process. It’s also partisan sniping at its typical worst. The senator […]

The emotion in Sheriff Billy Garrett was clear as the 40-year veteran officer described the task of breaking the news. “It’s horrible . . . it hurts an old man’s heart to hear a young girl cry like that.” It had been a stressful couple of days for the sheriff, culminating in the duty to […]

For the 40-odd years we’ve been trying to eliminate tetraethyl lead from avgas, general aviation has been a target of opportunity for dirty-little-secret headlines. The industry’s amazing persistence in preserving this problem has cost me at least several pairs of shoes trooping to press conferences where the various “stakeholders” offered progress reports we were all […]

If paranoia and hysteria aren’t brother and sister, they’re at least first cousins. A whiff of the former isn’t a bad thing in aviation, but during the past two weeks or so, we seem to have overdosed on both. And now, in attempting the unlikely feat of tying runway incursions to Chinese spy balloons, I’m […]