AVweb Insider

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, […]

I wasn’t flying for my airline job on 9/11. I had just finished a trip the night before and was lazily reading the newspaper when one of my twin girls getting ready for school ran in and told me to turn on the television. Minutes later we watched the second tower collapse.   “What does […]

The news coverage coming out of the northern Bahama islands is heartbreaking. The damage done by Hurricane Dorian to Abaco and Grand Bahama is so profound as to defy comprehension. In responding to such major disasters, general aviation has—or can have—a role in providing immediate assistance and services that either can’t be delivered by traditional […]

The wording is being massaged, the lawyers are poring over every character and punctuation mark and the speech writers and communications folks are already well into their initial drafts of the public comments that will herald the beginning of the end of the most costly and disruptive aircraft grounding in history. It looks like the […]

I’m not a superstitious person, nor am I particularly spiritual nor religious. I’m an agnostic on the paranormal, but I’ll admit to going a little around the bend on the existence of gremlins in old airplanes. Gremlins were, of course, well supported in World War II aircraft training manuals. Also, William Shatner saw one on […]

I have never been to Skaneateles, New York. I do not now plan to go to Skaneateles, although the brochures look nice. It has an airport and I know this because throughout the 1990s, at least once a month, I placed a revised approach plate for the Skaneateles VOR-A approach in my Jeppesen binder on […]

I’ve announced my last airshow. Yup, dropping the mic after too many years. And not because few can recall me ever announcing, and those who do, know me as, “That dope who still calls the CAF the Confederate Air Force, like it’s 1977 … and mispronounces Lomcovák.” True on both. Yes, it’s Commemorative Air Force, […]

These days, you can’t hardly open a Bonanza door without bumping into another miracle. This time, it’s Pilot, Passenger Miraculously  Survive Crash Into Pacific. And we know it’s a miracle, because of another headline that blares, Man Films Own Airplane Crash, Helicopter Rescue. (See the video here and here.) And try not to be discouraged […]

Reality is such a fungible thing in the modern world that when I first laid eyes on the photos of that Airbus A321 resting in a Russian cornfield last week, my BS alarm went off-scale high. I did a few minutes of online sleuthing before accepting that yes, this is real, and sending the link […]

Sometimes in this job you find a story that goes far beyond a love of airplanes and fascination with flight to connect on a personal level. Such was the case when I came across an article about Southwest pilot Bryan Knight, who flew his Vietnam veteran father’s remains home fifty-two years after Col. Roy Knight […]