AVweb Insider

Pity the poor instrument pilot on a low approach. After slogging through rain, bumps and too many clouds, he or she slides toward a runway from the final approach fix, straining to see what’s ahead. Needed is something within the runway environment: approach lights, centerline lighting, the runway edge lights. Using precious milliseconds of attention […]

As we in the aviation journalism field prepare to slouch aboard crowded, pay-extra-for-the-checked-bags airliners (hoping against hope that we’ll actually get there the day we intend to) aimed generally toward Oshkosh, we do so knowing that fireworks could be in our future-and I don’t mean the kind associated with the aerial exhibitions.Just two weeks before […]

…it’s just not as critical, although it’s getting there. Specifically, it’s the industry response-or lack thereof-to escalating fuel prices. All we’re doing, really, is reducing flying hours, just as drivers are reducing car trips. Both are a logical and, for the time being, necessary response. But the world auto industry is doing something the general […]

Just as I was thinking the plight of the airlines couldn’t get any worse, it devolves from ridiculous to pathetic. The latest chapter unfolded this week as a dozen of the CEOs of the major airlines sent a mass letter to their customers asking them to pressure Congress to enact legislation to curb oil speculators.”This […]

Although I try to stay in touch with the issues, concerns and interests of AVweb‘s readers, there is one experience that I have not had that I’m sure puts me in the tiniest minority of AVweb subscribers.I have never flown on Southwest Airlines.It’s not because I’ve been avoiding them or them me. It’s just never […]

How many times have you heard this when someone is talking about the FAA? “They have some really good people at the local FSDO” or “My PIO is really a nice guy, but…” and then the sentence trails off into a litany of how miserable it can be to work with the FAA at the […]

Former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall once famously said the airline industry is always in the grip of its dumbest competitors. What he didn’t add, however, is what if they’re all dumb? Fortunately, they aren’t, but the legacy carriers-chiefly American and United-seem incapable of facing the music on rising oil prices and are choosing instead […]

Last week, ICON Aircraft introduced its A5 amphibian LSA, promising “a new dimension in sport flying” and to usher in a “sport flying revolution.” The crowd at the Los Angeles venue was suitably chic and monied, so the grab for $5000 deposits to hold a place in line before the unwashed general public would be […]

I got an email the other day from Lou Churchville, a pilot in Oregon who works for a company that makes enhanced-vision systems for aircraft. He had read a story of mine about safety issues for emergency medical helicopters, and he felt compelled to write. “We’re extremely frustrated — all of us in this business […]

These days, anyone who maintains the slightest notion of actual enthusiastic involvement in general aviation needs, above all else, an elevated appreciation of the absurd. Like a connoisseur of fine wine or a collector of vintage European cars, the GA enthusiast has to have a refined, educated taste for stupidity in all of its colorful […]