AVweb Insider

While my long suffering wife has called me many versions of the same thing, often in colorful language, I would not characterize myself as a wild-eyed romantic. Yet my life, and by extension hers, is littered with the unfinished, sometimes half-baked and, I hasten to add, modestly successful flights of fancy that, to me, make […]

Considering its impact on aviation, we’ve done relatively little coverage of COVID-19, believe it or not. I didn’t have to scroll back in the video backlist very far to find the video interview I did with Jack Pelton in which we were both filleted for allowing as how it might take a vaccine to bring […]

In my (sometimes) fevered imagination, I can conjure tense meetings in a windowless government conference room where well-meaning functionaries and assistant sub-secretaries are arguing about who’s going to do it. “Well, I’m not doing it. You do it.” “I’m not doing it. You have to do it.” “No way. Someone else has to do it.” […]

Once again in an egregious snub, the Nobel prize for literature did not go to an aviation novel, such as Rick Durden’s “The Old Man And The Seaplane,” about an aging CFI’s lone struggle against an enormous walleye on a lake up in Michigan. Not aviation’s first rejection from the Swedish rodeo. Instead, Nobelers went […]

Over the weekend, a highly experienced skydiver acquaintance of mine died in an accident that was, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of last week’s midair collision in Colorado. It was a midair canopy collision that the other skydiver survived. This news reached me on Sunday morning as I was thinking about the Centennial […]

Douglas Adams, the noted author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” was a prolific writer whose creative work encompassed essays, books, screenplays and television. I can’t say I’m a devoted fan, but I think I read Hitchhiker some years ago. After his death in 2001, an unfinished novel called the “Salmon of Doubt” was […]

Someone accused me of disliking Piper Cubs simply because I’m an Aeronca snob. Not true … mostly. I’ve adored Cubs since I first saw a J-3 levitate off Ramapo, New York Airport on an unstable spring morning when I was an unstable kid. Making little forward progress, it dangled as though suspended by a stray […]

I was thinking the other day that I’ve come to view social media as sort of like four busy Unicom frequencies continuously splattering each other until the occasional legible word breaks through. Then I realized I’ve always thought that, just more so now. But the legible word did break through last month on our YouTube […]

When it comes to taxes, there aren’t very many original thoughts on the subject. The same old methods, occasionally with a smear of lipstick, rise and fall with the same platitudes about why they work when they’re introduced and why they don’t work on the rare occasions when they’re pulled. For most of us, the […]

If I were more diligent about keeping logbooks, I could look up the date when my airplane partner and I flew up to meet John and Martha King in Jacksonville for some kind of event or another. When we got to the airport to depart, the weather was crap; probably ¼-mile and indefinite ceiling. It […]