AVweb Insider

Sometime in 1978, I was thumbing through an issue of Esquire magazine and it fell open to an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.” The book would appear the following year. Esquire picked Wolfe’s breathless recounting of Chuck Yeager’s historic Mach 1 flight in the X-1. Today, October 14, is the 73rd anniversary of […]

An airport hath no soul without a pilot lounge … or pilots/pilot’s lounge, depending on possessive plurality issues unspecified in the AIM’s social amenities supplement. Lounge accessories should include: A coffee pot, a bulletin board papered with FAA notices no one reads, a faded copy of Magee’s High Flight (genuflect), and ads for aircraft sold years […]

To paraphrase and mangle the famous Robert Oppenheimer quote, “I have become a taildragger bigot, maker of dreams.” There is simply no other way to describe the somewhat out-of-body reply I sent to a polite reader asking for guidance in picking the best of three light sport airplanes. The candidates: The Vashon Ranger, The Flight […]

Andy Warhol famously remarked in the 1960s that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” What a failure of imagination. He simply couldn’t foresee the advent of cellphone cameras, GoPros and the vast digital sewage processing plant otherwise known as YouTube. Once upon a time, home movies were just that, but easy […]

Monday’s AVweb homepage had a pair of whipsaw headlines that only 2020 could provide. At the bottom of the page: Airline Support Ends: Future Looks Bleak. At the top of the page: United, Union: No Furloughs Until 2021. As I was posting the latter story, I couldn’t help but feel we must have missed a […]

Editor’s note: The AoD flyover was intended to commemorate the formal end of World War II. It was scheduled for Friday, September 25 and postponed to Saturday due to weather. Conditions were still too poor on Saturday and the event was canceled. World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945. Although victory in […]

No sooner had I posted this week’s video on Pipistrel’s Panthera than a frustrated YouTuber vented his spleen. “Very disappointed with this aircraft. Don’t know why anyone would buy one when it doesn’t do anything better than its competitors.” Good point. I thought by now that Pipistrel would at least have developed impulse power or […]

I got into aviation journalism because I possess exceptional perspicacity and a keen sense of what the future holds. This talent, sadly, deserted me when I reduced $1200 to $1.27 in a sure-bet penny stock buy and further ill served me with regard to predictions about the Cirrus parachute system.    I bet a friend […]

We pilots are second to none in our adoration of firsts: First solo; first crossing of Lake Erie in a Savoia Marchetti amphibious biplane to smuggle whisky from Canada during Prohibition; or the first time you taxied over a runway light and inscribed a jagged scar into the elevator when first flying your new Citabria […]

The full report by the Office of Inspector General on the FAA’s implementation of BasicMed reveals it was a politically driven rush job and the agency is hiding behind gaps in the Congressional mandate to avoid fixing some pretty glaring voids in its effectiveness. As we reported earlier this week, the OIG found that the […]