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There’s much to be said about the oblivious lifestyle. One can motor through the day—hell, an entire week—utterly carefree and with hardly a hint of the agita and chaos that so diminishes modern life. Alfred E. Neuman has, sadly, left us, but the mindset is immortal. Thus, in my closing observations on AirVenture, I actually […]

The video accompanying this blog made the rounds a couple of weeks ago. It’s a short clip of a Cessna Cutlass ditching off Ocean City, Maryland, on July 17. The pilot was lauded—rightly—for flying a textbook ditching. He emerged wet, but uninjured. That’s not the important part, however. The top takeaway is that the pilot—23-year-old […]

Ducking away from the near-endless press conferences, meetings, writing and story-hunting that define my usual Oshkosh schedule to go flying feels about like skipping class used to: I know I have more important things I should be doing but on some days, there’s just too much fun to be had elsewhere. Not, in case my […]

A persistent fantasy among those of us in aviation—or vintage cars, or motorcycles, or boats—is to find the pristine, never-used object of our passion stored away in a barn somewhere, just awaiting discovery and sale at a cheap price. It does happen from time to time, although the pristine part is a stretch. Tom Reilly […]

Back in the late 1950s, before there was a NASA there was a small group of young men at NACA’s Langley Research Center who were tinkering with rockets in order to probe the mysteries of high-speed flight. When the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik, this team was galvanized in to action to create the beginnings of […]

Many aerobatic teams and performers are sponsored and as part of their routine duties, they conduct press flights for hapless reporters looking for interesting aviation stories. The journalist gets a fun ride and the company sees its flag flown before the buying public. On Monday—the opening day here at AirVenture—AVweb got a twofer. Both Kate […]

“Everyone alive on July 20, 1969,” the radio commentator said with an intonation reserved for weekend filler copy, “remembers exactly where they were when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.” Except me. I was 15 when Michael Collins, alone in Columbia, the lunar command module, kept the motor running while Buzz and Neil descended for […]

We asked AVweb readers to write about their memories of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. We heard from dozens, each with a unique story to tell. Thanks to all for participating. –Paul Bertorelli I was in rural New Hampshire, working as an au pair for Charlotte Arner, a Jewish woman who had escaped Nazi Germany […]

Hondo, Texas, is on the edge of the Texas Hill Country about 40 miles due west of San Antonio. This time of year, it bakes under a summer sun that reliably drives the highs to more than 100 degrees. It’s not a place for delicate constitutions. I was in Hondo last week for reasons I’ll […]

On a hot July night 50 years ago this month, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were poised to make the most momentous landing in the history of aviation. Yet flying at 5300 feet per second 50,000 feet above the lunar surface, neither felt nor heard a thing, so gentle was the ignition of Eagle’s descent […]