AVweb Insider

It’s unpronounceable so don’t even try. Palimpsest means something reused or altered but still bears traces of an earlier form.  Commonly applied to ancient manuscripts when Roman publishers were too stingy to buy new parchment and forced authors to write over Cicero’s remainders. Et mortuus est, et nos non petendam (he’s dead and won’t sue […]

If concrete could emote, several dozen acres of it in Sebring, Florida, must be sighing in relief. Now that the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo has passed into history, there’s no further need to perforate that historical ramp with expansion bolts for temporary tiedowns. Given the sparse attendance at this show, you could argue that its […]

Because I lack the common decency to avoid saying I told you so, this is an I-told-you-so blog. Well, sort of, because what I thought or maybe predicted would happen didn’t happen. At least not in the way I might have imagined. About five years ago, there appeared on the market a handful of angle-of-attack […]

We’ve all been there: Stabilized on final, gear and flaps down, passengers in their upright and locked positions, when out of the hemp rows pops a damn unicorn! And it doesn’t just run across the runway the way, say, a sensible dog might cross a freeway after computing the odds. Instead, it stops, turns and […]

Because it’s just not practical to call multirotor flying machines “those multirotor thingies” we’ve come up with two terms to describe them, one for the machine itself and one for the market we imagine they will serve, such that we can imagine anything accurately in the midst of what’s clearly a revolution in aviation. The […]

The temptation was to assume that balladeer Billy Joel was enforcing his star quality when news hit mainstream media that the Piano Man was fighting to keep his ability to land a helicopter at his New York home. It seemed he was yet another spoiled celebrity bothering his neighbors with frivolously obnoxious use of a […]

Weeks of critical coverage of Boeing’s 737 MAX program has dented Boeing’s stock price—although not much—and left the flying public with diminished confidence in the MAX, if not Boeing itself. For Boeing and the news-consuming public, the story has been an intermittent drip-drip of new revelations, none of them particularly dispositive for the airplane maker. […]

It’s difficult to share wistful reflections of my favorite coat hanger, but since it hangs inside my hangar, I suppose it has aeronautical cred. With that point about the most misused homonym in aviation properly bludgeoned, I now invite everyone into my hangar, a 42-foot 36-foot pole barn in central Iowa crammed with memories. Bring […]

I was sitting in a traffic jam Friday and getting ever more steamed because I was already 20 minutes late. Adding to my dismay was that the local NPR station was running its spring fundraising drive and interrupting the programming every five minutes. Piling on top of that and irritating me further is that they […]

When Boeing finally digs itself out of the self-inflicted PR disaster of the 737 MAX story—if it ever does—I wonder how it will be graded on handling the crisis. I wonder, but I’m kinda disposed to think it will become a textbook case of how not to behave in the searing glare of catastrophic bad […]