AVweb Insider

In 1993, two businessmen named William Walts and George Richardson proposed to launch a new airline called Smokers Express. It was to be based in Florida. It may be helpful to recall that smoking was banned on U.S. airlines in 1990. I had to look this up, by the way. I thought it was much […]

Finishing off a series of firsts Sunday, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the first splashdown in the Gulf and the first anywhere in more than 45 years. (Remember the mission? It was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.) This was officially a demonstration mission for final proving […]

The informal definition of “genius” is the ability to maintain two irrational thoughts without getting caught compromising sanity. Most pilots qualify at the Mensa level. Example: Many of us can barely afford owning an aircraft, let alone a building in which to house it, but the enterprising pilot can rationalize either, often both. This realization […]

If this were a normal year, I know exactly what I’d be doing on this Sunday afternoon. I’d be in our press trailer in the media ghetto at Oshkosh trying to chase down the guy to hook up the electricity. Every year I promise myself to get it done on Sunday and every year, it […]

It’s raining. The “it” refers to the growling sky that hinted I should land, put the airplane away, and further discussion was pointless if not downright stupid. Although, the risk of appearing stupid has rarely dissuaded me from making the wrong stab at the Go/No-Go coin toss. Any pilot who ventures beyond the runup area […]

As in most general aviation accidents, airline crashes—what few there are these days—are often caused by human error; mistakes in judgment, ham-handed hand-eye coordination or mishandling of the ever-present automation. The errors are sometimes subtle, the result of complexities in the human/machine interface. But there was nothing subtle about the crash of Atlas Air 3591, […]

People like me who are too cheap to buy airplanes made in the current century and which have tailwheels are occasionally heard to remark that only real pilots fly taildraggers. And within that excruciatingly parsimonious cohort is an annoyingly sacrosanct subset who say real taildragger pilots don’t use and therefore don’t need brakes. Neither of […]

Often when we run a story, someone with intimate knowledge of it will contact us and fill in some details that would have been really valuable in the original piece, but don’t cut it as a separate standalone or follow-up story. You may recall the story we ran about the police helicopter that hit a […]

I learned a valuable lesson last week. My dentist called and asked if I wanted to schedule a routine cleaning. There was a long pause while I considered that offer. I was recalling an article I read that described the COVID-19 risk of various professions. The scatterplot showed that dentists were nearly off-scale high. But […]

When reflecting upon the mythical glories of flight it’s easy to ignore the unsexier aspects that rarely leak into print. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Turf ©, a treatise on North African runway maintenance in the 1930s, was an exception but found an embarrassingly limited audience, mostly in Wisconsin, the state that spawned EAA, […]