AVweb Insider

The expression, “Got the surprise of my life,” loses credibility when the speaker shouldn’t be that surprised, e.g., “Got the surprise of my life and passed the check ride.” Congratulations, but why surprised? When an instructor preps a client properly for an exam, then neither applicant nor examiner should be surprised at success. I’d be concerned […]

One of the many things I inherited from my father, in addition to his volcanic impatience, is a predilection for planning, especially contingency planning. Aviation, for me, has honed that obsession into a habit of preloading decision making. By that, I mean I like to think through what difficult decisions I might have to make […]

In the world of mass production things, 25,000 is not a very big number. It’s about an hour’s worth of iPhone production and an eyeblink in the trillions of metal oxide transistors that make gadgets like that possible. Ford makes that many F-150s in about 10 days and Tesla does a few more than that […]

It’s possible you’ve never heard of the legendary pilot, Ann Dearing Holtgren Pellegreno. But you should have. In 2019, Ann received the FAA’s Wright Brothers’ Master Pilot Award for a lifetime of aviation achievements. Swell, but who hasn’t? Me, for one and for good reason. The FAA, my favorite former employer I love to disparage, […]

When last I worked myself into a virtual lather over the glacial non-progress of the stupidly over complicated process of finding an unleaded aviation fuel, I allowed as how I had grown old watching this process. I’m two months older now and still, nothing has happened.   At Sun ‘n Fun, George Braly told us […]

All these stories about the Airplane that Won’t Die, otherwise known as the A-10, always remind me of missed opportunities or perhaps of an underdeveloped sense of curiosity. When I started my journalism career all those years ago, the aviation beat went to me, since I was then a relatively new pilot. All these years […]

First, a nod of thanks to John Lehman Jr. Without him, this thing would never have gotten started. Lehman was Secretary of the Navy in 1984 when Jerry Bruckheimer approached him about doing a movie on the Navy Fighter Weapons School. Lehman saw it as a recruiting bonanza—he was right—and his greenlight begat “Top Gun,” […]

I’m always a little trepidatious about recommending intervention by the FAA, but it’s probably long past time to have an official look at STOL competitions. By all means, tell me how wrong I am but be constructive and polite. And while you’re at it spare a thought for Tom Dafoe’s beautiful family as they ponder […]

While it sounds like an unsightly ridge in fresh Aero-Thane paint after removing the fine line tape, or the 49th parallel checkpoint that Prohibition bootlegger, Jake Hollow, referenced when air-smuggling whisky across the Canadian border into dry Minnesota in his Standard LS-5 biplane, dryline is neither. Both would make great HBO dramas, but only one […]

Driven by diabolical algorithms as they are, YouTube audiences can veer from the surprisingly urbane to the utterly lunatic and lots in between. In that vast middle is one viewer who goes off on me about once a year for a cavalier remark I made a few years ago about the morality—or lack thereof—of landing […]