AVweb Insider

I gotta get out more. Or maybe be more selective in the places I get out to. Here I had been laboring under the notion that pilot training and pilots themselves are probably as competent as they’ve ever been. And why would I think this? Mainly accident rates, both in general aviation and in for-hire […]

Is Icon going to make it? As someone responsible for covering such things and presumably offering an opinion supported by disclosed fact, I’m not asked this question so much as I am informed by the aviation cognoscenti that no, it will not. I’ve spent quite a few hours during the last month or two writing […]

We all have moments in our lives when time is suspended and something happens that’s forever stamped into the memory. Such a thing happened to me in the summer of 2014. The Patriots Jet Team flew the California Capitol Air Show in Sacramento. I fly the number 3 position on our team of six L-39 […]

Somewhere in my archives, I have a collection of ATC audio recordings that were supposed to convey deeper aeronautical meaning beyond their entertainment value. A couple of them I might call non-declarations—that is, they were examples of real-life emergency situations that were never called as much. To that collection, I’ll add the ATC audio of […]

I got home from a short trip Wednesday evening and flipped on the television right at 6:30 p.m. NBC was leading with the crash of the Collings Foundation’s B-17, the Nine-O-Nine, at Bradley Airport in Connecticut. It’s never a good thing when the national news leads with a general aviation crash and even worse when […]

At the risk of extending the maudlin and the macabre into a fresh work week, Paul Berge’s blog on the passing of two friends reminds me how many of us have been asked to spread ashes from airplanes. Although it’s probably lost to the trivial details of history, I wonder if Orville or Wilbur or […]

It wasn’t a funeral, because Jack Arthur, 62, never wanted one, and we don’t do gloomy at this Midwest country airport (6Z6). Instead, to honor a departed pilot, who’d suffered a heart attack, we assembled for the Missing Man Formation preflight briefing. We the living, some with non-FAA/PMA stents in our breaking hearts, cling to […]

By now, you’ve seen Mike Patey’s remarkable video explaining in detail the crash of his equally remarkable Draco custom STOL aircraft. Based on a PZL Wilga airframe, the airplane was fitted with a 680-SHP Pratt & Whitney PT6A-28. The airplane achieved instant fame for its beyond-the-edge STOL performance and other worldly looks. It was a […]

Point is, if you’re going to pull three of the four jugs on an old, Lycoming O-235-C1 engine, then for sanity’s sake, pull the fourth one and send them all to the machine shop. Otherwise, they suffer from separation anxiety. Better yet, just buy new ones and save yourself the angina, even if you won’t […]

When I was pretending to be a journalism student at the University of Maryland in 1973, I was also masquerading as a pilot and considered myself fortunate when I discovered that the storied College Park Airport had J-3s to rent. Three of them in fact. All were post-war models equipped with metal props and C-90s, […]