AVweb Insider

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 […]

Sooner or later, the FAA—and regulators worldwide—will reach an inflection point with electric aircraft and it may be that sooner has arrived. Or at least has been hinted at. Last week, Air Currents reported that the agency is switching gears, at least with regard to the burgeoning eVTOL category, which appears to mean these aircraft […]

While adorable in the cradle, three aviation phrases have decayed into Hallmark substitutes for thought. First: “Any landing you can walk away from….” You know the rest and that it’s nonsense. Merely surviving an arrival that leaves the FBO’s 172 a crumpled monument to incompetence does not make for a good landing. Another trope: Non-skydivers—and […]

The answer to this question is almost certainly yes, but I’ll ask anyway. Has an airplane you’ve flown ever crashed? Has it taken lives with it? For me the answer is yes to both and when I considered it casually, I thought maybe two or three. But it’s really seven or eight, if not more. […]

And so another Sunday morning in a week bookended by whipsawing from skydivers smashing a hapless pilotless 182 to a popular YouTuber getting busted for low flying. On the one hand, it’s fearless feds protecting the public, on the other, it’s unelected bureaucrats abusing their enforcement authority. The appetizer for this circus was the previous […]

This could appear on a check ride, if your examiner watches too much YouTube: What do LR23, 8-track, and Frank Sinatra share? The answer without thinking, because I haven’t, is: They made the 1970s marginally tolerable. Each is connected to Bill Lear, who invented the Lear 23 personal/corporate bottle rocket in 1964 and channeled Alexander […]