AVweb Insider

When the phone rang — I think it was in 2002 — I couldn’t believe who was on the other end. Vern Raburn himself had deigned to grace me with a personal interview. As the new kid on the block at AVweb, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. After all, Eclipse Aviation was the hottest […]

I was traveling Tuesday night and missed the President’s State of the Union message. But over breakfast Wednesday morning, I caught a CNN summary of it, a snippet of which began, “This time, CEOs won’t be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks … .” As that sentence unfolded, I held my breath: […]

The collective sigh of relief among all-weather fliers was almost audible when Sirius XM got a bye this week in the form of $530 million in loans from Liberty Media (parent company of Direct TV). Datalink weather in the cockpit is possibly the best improvement to cockpit safety and mission capability since GPS.But don’t get […]

Several years ago, I saw a talk by Captain David Cronin. If you don’t know the name, you might remember the story. In 1989, Cronin and his crew were climbing through 22,000 feet en route from Honolulu, Hawaii to Sydney, Australia, when the forward cargo door blew off their Boeing 747-100. The entire cabin depressurized […]

In covering the Continental Connection Flight 3407 crash in Buffalo, we skimmed dozens of web sites to see who was reporting what. Typically, these sweeps reveal reporting of various detail and quality, some of which is painful to read. I clipped this clinker from an AP report: “If a midair de-icing system is not working, […]

Nobody’s ever accused Cessna CEO Jack Pelton of being a shrinking violet and his company’s latest ad campaign has his imprint all over it. While companies everywhere cancel business jet orders, strip logos from their existing aircraft and hide them from FlightAware and the FAA registry, he’s urging them to be honest about their value […]

As we tend to pass news assignments back and forth at AVweb, I have been drifting in and out of the USAir 1549 story. But as I’ve covered it from a distance, I’ve had this nagging feeling: I think I know this guy, Sullenberger. I met him somewhere. When I saw his interview with Katie […]

When I was editing the ATC tapes for yesterday’s podcast on the USAir Flight 1549 ditching, two things occurred to me: One, I really miss New York controllers and, two, would anyone in the mainstream media notice how seamlessly the New York TRACON controller handled the emergency, even if his actions didn’t really impact the […]

In the aviation journalism biz, we like to think we keep abreast of all the latest developments. And we do, but at a certain distance that sometimes insulates us from the real impact of new technology and products. That’s another way of saying sometimes we don’t exactly get it.I had one of these eureka moments […]

We humans like to believe that the laws of nature don’t apply to us, but certain facts are immutable. And one of those facts that we seem to struggle with most desperately and with the most futility, is the simplest: Things change.Things might go along for a while, and seem stable and reliable but then, […]