AVweb Insider

Earlier this week, as I was freshening the flowers in my patio shrine to Friedrich Engels, reader Will Alibrandi asked this perfectly reasonable question: If the price of oil has tumbled on the spot market, why hasn’t the price of avgas come down?The short answer is it has, you just haven’t seen it yet. Or […]

Many owners contemplate the pros and cons of upgrading to a higher horsepower engine for their airplane. Does it really make sense to do so? Do the actual gains outweigh the time and expense? What are the unforeseen costs of such an endeavor? Will you end up with a white elephant?We can tell you up […]

But first, reader discretion advised: Politics and aviation sometimes intersect and I know by experience that some readers don’t like hearing about that. If you’re one of them, be forewarned.If anyone has doubts about general aviation’s vitality, this morning’s market opening should remove them. Since August, the Dow has declined by a staggering 5000 points […]

At this week’s NBAA convention in Orlando, AAI Acquisitions-these are the Russian-funded guys who bought up the bones of the Adam Aircraft business-showed up to update the world on their plans. But I came away doubting how serious they are and whether the wobbly VLJ market really wants an odd-looking, twin-boom jet even if they […]

That’s the way I would describe the overall mood here at the National Business Aviation Association convention in Orlando, as the event officially opens this morning. My colleague Russ Niles and I spent the day rushing around to press conferences and conducting interviews on what has become the main press day at NBAA. Every conversation […]

As editor of Aviation Consumer, I receive a small trickle of e-mail decrying the demise of general aviation. The details of these notes vary, but the theme is always the same: The manufacturers have ruined the industry by tilting toward big-ticket, high-priced new models that only a select few can afford. Or the oil companies […]

It’s been three years since Lockheed-Martin took over the management of the Flight Service system and we’ve finally reached an important milestone: Flight briefings are almost as good now as they were before the FAA stepped down from the helm.This is after the precipitous drop in service that left pilots to figure out useful weather […]

I sometimes find it hard to believe, but lots of owners of large displacement engines don’t have multi-probe engine monitors. Given what they cost-that’s to say not that much-these instruments ought to standard equipment on two counts: fuel savings and safety.In an era of $6 avgas, leaning correctly is a survival skill and you can’t […]

If you’re in the aviation business-maybe you build airplanes or you’re a busy STC house or a charter operator-the last thing you want to see is a televised Congressional subcommittee hearing on how flawed the FAA’s oversight is. Yet that’s exactly what happened this week in Washington as House Aviation Subcommittee grilled various FAA and […]

Even before the market tanked this week-taking Asian and Euro stocks with it briefly-I held out only lukewarm hope that Thielert Aircraft Engines will right itself and recover to survival, never mind profitability. The company convened a press conference via phone from Europe on Tuesday to discuss the latest develops.Far be it from me to […]