AVweb Insider

With AirVenture returning to the show circuit after 24 months in hibernation, it seemed impossibly tacky not to write an advance blog about it. I’m so excited, I’m packing an extra box of Depends and transitioning soon to decaf, just to keep things on an even strain. Actually, I am not excited about the airline […]

Waiting for the clouds to part a couple of weeks ago at the drop zone, I was trying to explain how flight instructors teach student pilots to land. I may be a little rogue on this, but I don’t think we teach them so much as we keep them from smashing the airplane while they […]

Remember that great scene in “Full Metal Jacket” where Gunnery Sgt. Hartman screamed, “Who said that? Who the &^% said that?!” Only with great discipline do I restrain myself from blurting this out on the CTAF when someone says, “last call.” This evidently has become a thing, at least around this part of Florida when […]

The hangar door’s ratchet clicked with a sound attributable to Archimedes when he expounded on the titanic power of levers and pulleys while attending Syracuse University in 252 BCE, making him more relevant to aviation than upperclassman, Hercules. So why, 2200 years later, did Lockheed name its C-130 transport after the latter and not the […]

What a country, right? In 1960, we were locked toe-to-toe with the Ruskies over who would seize the high ground of space and then the Moon. Sixty years later, three billionaires are checkbook-to-checkbook to see who gets to claim astronaut firsties. And it looks like Amazon impresario Jeff Bezos won’t be the guy.* The cheeky […]

I kind of got it when I was looking for photos to accompany last Monday’s story on an FAA committee’s recommendation that the agency adopt gender-neutral terminology for its reams of printed and digital material, trading terms like airman for aviator, cockpit for flight deck and unmanned for drone. As a relatively privileged white male, […]

Kitty Hawk—The Wright Cycle Exchange announced today that it has firm commitments from several airlines to purchase 50 Wright Flyer machines with options on 100 more. The airline companies will be announced as soon as such companies have actually started and it can be determined what an airline actually is, which is expected by the […]

All airplanes should be yellow. Cub yellow, even though I’m not a huge fan of J-3s but admit they’re fetching in Lock Haven livery with tails in the grass. I’ve known some off-color Cub pilots, such as Brian in California, who back in the 1970s flew a green Cub. Flew it well, too, by avoiding […]

I sometimes like to affect a look of wide-eyed, engaged curiosity to hide my usual jaded seen-it-all worldliness so as not to appear too enthusiastic. I could probably work that sentence a little more but I’m sure you get the gist. But even I will admit to some surprise at the rumble last week’s video […]

Yesterday—a nonsensical dateline since I don’t know when you’ll read this—I encountered the unimaginable. Asked to move a friend’s Nissan Altima (car not an airplane), I pressed the brake and turned the key. I didn’t first check the oil, drain a fuel sample, or yell, “Clear!” as I would in most modern airplane starts, and […]