AVweb Insider

For as long as I’ve been flying instruments, my idea of a perfect day is about 200 and a mile. A little rain, maybe blowing up to 20 knots and with a hint a rime? Sure, fine. Why not? So that aspect of living in Florida is disagreeable to me because Florida is where instrument […]

Growing up watching cartoons taught me the value of applying extreme measures to simple problems, such as dropping anvils on adversaries or, for delayed impact, introducing round bombs with hissing fuses. But aviation issues require mature reflection, so I consult the 1950s cartoon cat vs. mouse wars, including Tom & Jerry or the copycat duo […]

Diamond Aircraft’s factory—a place with a storied history—is located quite some distance from the London, Ontario, airport where it’s sited. Access to the runways is via a long, tree-lined taxiway that would be a pleasant trip if I hadn’t been nearly killed on it at least three times. For editorial titillation, I’m exaggerating, but not […]

When then 15-year-old Greta Thunberg gave a face and a voice to the Fridays For Future movement in August of 2018, climate change was already a passionately discussed topic around the globe. What followed as the global movement gained momentum can be described as a historical miracle of modern times. Rarely in history have so […]

Crashes are crashes, but when one involves a major celebrity, as the Kobe Bryant accident did on Sunday, the daily press launches into frenzy mode. Audiences do their part by clicking on everything published and the resultant feedback loop can yield some pretty dodgy reporting. The need-to-know-right-now impetus sometimes puts reporters—even those with aviation expertise—in […]

In Peter Mayle’s 1989 memoir, A Year In Provence, a naïve British couple purchased a bargain home in France, unaware that it was cheap, because it faced north, away from the sun. That winter they learned how unwise their relationship with the Earth’s furnace 93 million miles away was. I have a similar history with […]

When I was but a tyke, we lived in the oil fields of Texas’s northern panhandle. I had a swing set made of drill pipe, monkey bars made of drill pipe, a teeter totter, slide and climbing rack, the stair rails into the storm cellar—drill pipe. A family friend named Jim Wolfe drove a big […]

It might’ve been old flight-school technology, but the unsung weather tool, HIWAS, is no more. The NOTAM announcing its passing read like a heartless obituary: “…outlet decommissioned Jan 8, 2020-permanent.” Permanent. So cold for a reliable friend that, frankly, few of us understood. HIWAS means (meant), Hazardous In-Flight Weather…um, something, something; its purpose in life […]

The other week, my colleague, the stalwart Kate O’Connor, sent along a wry email: “I’m going to be writing about this for the rest of my life, aren’t I?” It was in reference to yet another development in the Boeing MAX story. You can hardly open a web browser without seeing another story unfavorable to […]

Show of hands: How many know how to start an airplane’s piston engine without using an electric starter? Follow up: How many believe that starting an engine by pulling the razor-sharp propeller blade through by hand is the stupidest thing anyone can do short of wearing a Top Gun flight suit in a Mooney? Although […]