AVweb Insider

Iowa … you know, fly-over country, as in Minnesota pilots fly over us on their way to Sun ‘n Fun, and Sou’westerners cross when heading to Oshkosh. Unless you’re running for president—and who isn’t?—it’s perceived that there’s little reason to land in Iowa. But skip us at the risk of losing New Hampshire and, more […]

I’ve actually never bought a brand-new vehicle and my long-suffering wife will attest to the occasional discomfort and inconvenience that has resulted. Nevertheless, we’ve mostly been able to get where we wanted to go, do what we needed to do and do it safely and mostly reliably without ever having a car payment. Among the […]

By about the fifth day of the big U.S. air/trade shows—AirVenture and Sun ‘n Fun—a certain hollow-eyed exhaustion sets in. Vendors at the show can be heard to wonder if the thing will ever end and for us pixel-addled wretches covering the spectacle, we feel as run down as the batteries in our cameras and […]

The Chinese owners of western aviation infrastructure—Cirrus, Continental, Mooney, Diamond—generally remain low key, as in invisible. So, it was unusual yesterday when Diamond’s Austria CEO, Liquin (Frank) Zhang, conducted the company’s press conference at Aero. He gave a brisk overview of Diamond’s parent, Wanfeng Auto Holding, a $30 billion closely held Chinese conglomerate. Confident and […]

Sun ‘n Fun has come and gone once again, leaving me a little sunburned, a bit tired and quite content after a week spent surrounded by airplanes and the folks who hang around them. This was my third year dropping by Lakeland and it’s becoming clear that the more things change at these big airshows, […]

If Boeing wanted bad press for itself, it couldn’t have done any better than the unfolding drama of two hull losses of the 737 MAX 8 within five months and the slow drip of daily coverage on what crash investigators are learning. Overall, I give the daily press a B+ for its coverage. It has […]

Piper opened up Sun ‘n Fun with a bang this week when it announced two new aircraft models, the Piper Pilot 100 and 100i. See the details in Kate O’Connor’s news story and video. These are essentially retools to the venerable Piper PA-28 platform, of which Piper has sold about a gazillion. It’s also a […]

This being the year of the 50th anniversary of that one small step, you’ll be seeing a lot of nostalgic babble about how great it all was and what a shame it is that we sorta stopped serious space exploration in 1972. What you won’t hear as much is that the entire moon thing was […]

Non-fatal accident/incidents bring easy derision from those of us who’ve never been caught screwing up. Which is why each year IFR magazine runs Stupid Pilot Tricks, a jolly romp through NTSB accident reports, from which we present the best of the worst offenders for sanctimonious ridicule. If you think that’s sophomoric, it is. But I […]

I have no idea if this is how it works, but I imagine someone at Garmin must have said, “Hey, why don’t we just yank the radio out of the GTN navigator and stuff the rest of it into a standard rack-size panel box? Put a pretty display on it.” Maybe someone at an avionics […]