AVweb Insider

I wonder what the vetting process is for items that reach FAA Administrator Steve Dickson’s desk. There’s a lot going on at the agency these days and he’s just one guy. Something I’m sure he’s noticed, however, is how many of his valuable seconds and minutes are expended on the issues of the day that […]

I take my amusement where I find it and a reliable source seems to be when people see an AVweb video and suggest that my audio person should try a different mic or that my animator is channeling South Park. One reader told me my camera presence was OK, but the editing sucked. I’m doubled […]

Today’s misapplied quote flutters over the transom on the butterfly wings of 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I understood as a child. However,” the author continues, “when I became a man (no mention of women; undoubtedly an oversight), I put away childish things.” Only not so much in aviation, because as an […]

If you can imagine for a moment an all-powerful criminal mastermind like Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld convening his evil minions for a can’t-miss diabolical scheme to take over the world, what would it be? A fleet of space weapons capable of seizing control of all the world’s airliners and threatening to crash them? Amusing […]

I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday but I know exactly where I was on July 17, 1999. I was standing on the ramp at Waterbury-Oxford Airport in Connecticut pre-flighting an F33 one of my students had loaned me. I was flying down to Cross Keys, New Jersey, to go skydiving. A lineman […]

With the Senate’s confirmation Monday of Jennifer Homendy as the Chairman of the NTSB, I’ll resist cliches about frying pans and fires and instead offer the observation that she has work to do. In my view, the NTSB was once the gold standard for efficient, competent government agencies, but of late, it has been less […]

Whenever a video appears depicting a fatal crash—and given the profusion of cameras, that’s as often as once a week–we have an AVweb internal debate. Should we publish it? We’re right to have this debate, but lately, the terms of it have shifted from “should we publish it?” to “is there a good reason we […]

It’s hot. The air is a muddy bisque of pine smoke from Canadian wildfires, making for freakish sunrises and sets, dotted with multi-colored flaming orbs. If I didn’t know better—and I rarely do—I’d swear this was the CGI backdrop for a rejected George Lucas student film project, but its weirder. It’s Iowa. Between EAA’s mass swoon […]

Given the natural order of things, you don’t expect to see big movements in anything related to aviation. Or maybe anything else other than real estate and plywood prices. So when Jack Pelton was talking about aircraft arrivals during his AirVenture opening day remarks, I didn’t trust my ears to hear what he said, so […]

People who invent things—or at least some of them—are often driven by visions the rest of us either can’t see or consider fringe insanity. One man’s disruptive technology is another’s delusional fever dream. Remember Dean Kamen’s Segway? It was an invention so fundamentally disruptive it would be more momentous than the wheel. Twenty years later, […]