AVweb Insider

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 […]

This is a chicken-egg thing. I don’t know whether people like to tie things up in 10-year bundles because they like bundles or we do that in the press because some long-dead editor proposed it and we could never stop. Or because some of us work on New Year’s day. Nonetheless, as the decade closes, […]

I can’t pretend to know that Boeing’s firing of CEO Dennis Muilenburg should have occurred months ago and that this should have been intuitively obvious around the boardroom. From the inside looking out, it may have appeared that booting him sooner would have made a bad situation worse. But evidently, the housecleaning has begun. What […]

One of those clear winter dawns, and the preheated 65-HP Continental engine popped awake on the first pull of the propeller blade. Standing in the prop blast (I hand-prop from behind) provided time to marvel at how my Aeronca Champ has been so reliable in our 37 years together. Plus, how increasingly miserable it is […]

Dating occurrences from memory is always an iffy thing, but I can clearly recall a phone conversation I had with Burt Rutan. I know it was in the summer of 2001 or 2002 because my old home office in Connecticut had a skylight and I was sweating as the afternoon sun streamed through the glass. […]

The shock of it all still hasn’t worn off. About things which can kill me, embarrass me or cost me a lot of money, I am obsessive in making sure they don’t happen. Yet there we were on the runway, with the gear switch in the retracted position. Oh, the humanity! After this sentence, you […]

“We were a little slow to take responsibility,” said Dennis Muilenburg, President and CEO for Boeing, at a two-day meetup between Boeing’s executives and a handful of industry influencers from across the globe I attended last week in Seattle. Aircraft crashes rarely create mass panic. As rare as they have become, we still understand that […]

The film accompanying this blog, WORLD WAY: The City of LAX, follows the layers of movement at a major airport through timelapse photography. The idea for this piece was born in 2013 as I sat on a rooftop in El Segundo, waiting for a shoot on another subject to begin and looking out over Los […]

Thanksgiving weekend was a bad time for air safety. Nine people were killed in a PC-12 crash in South Dakota and seven more died in a PA-32 accident in Ontario. And we didn’t even mention the three who died in the crash of a Comanche in San Antonio. What’s going on here? This spate of […]

The smell of Varsol—a petroleum-based solvent that’s essentially paint thinner—all but makes me nostalgically woozy. It’s cheaper than drugs and probably healthier, too. It’s the smell I remember when I walked through the pressroom every morning at my first newspaper job. A decade later, when I became a magazine editor, the job changed but the […]