AVweb Insider

James Baker famously called it “the worst ^%$&ing job in government.” He was referring to the job of White House chief of staff but he may as well have been talking about being FAA administrator. If it’s not the second-worst job in government, it’s surely in the top five. Now comes Steve Dickson, late of […]

The grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft has produced one of the most bizarre situations in the history of aviation. And what’s driving it, partly, is that modern airliners aren’t just airplanes, but veritable flying rivers spewing gigabytes of data on everything from cabin temperature to engine vibration, all of it recorded and quite a […]

Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I think long-term relationships in the workplace aren’t as common as they once were. Because of the work we do at AVweb and the predilection of our management, we tend to attract and retain marathoners rather than sprinters. One of those was our dear colleague Mary Grady, who died this […]

From the moment the Commerce Department got its governmental mitts on pilot licensing in 1926, politics and aviation have been inextricably entwined. But rarely is that on such naked display as it was Wednesday when the FAA announced that it was joining much of the rest of the world in grounding Boeing’s 737 MAX after […]

I suspect if you walked around the back of 800 Independence Ave. in Washington, you’d find a tanker truck of Maalox with two-inch lines running into the C-suites upstairs. The political pressure on the top echelon must be like nothing else we’ve seen in quite a while. While the rest of the world rushes to […]

In a world that’s polarized about everything from football teams to Lady Gaga’s lipstick shade, I have learned that when I write about Cirrus aircraft accidents, two things are predictable. One, I’ll get a little trickle of email claiming that I’m in the tank for Cirrus and covering up the brand’s scandalous accident rate. And […]

This week, AVweb’s blog space will feature a two-part story from James Belton, a Gen X pilot who has done what the previous generation of pilots could not: Evolved from pistons, to jets, to drones. Here’s part two, the author’s transition to drone pilot and unit commander. It’s one kind of flying to sit above […]

This week, AVweb’s blog space will feature a two-part story from James Belton, a Gen X pilot who has done what the previous generation of pilots could not: Evolved from pistons, to jets, to drones. Here’s part one. When I was a young man, I desperately wanted to fly. I wanted to fly fighter jets […]

In 2012, I won the grand prize during AirVenture: a fully restored 1941 Piper Cub. I was, of course, surprised, given that there were 865,000 entries that year. It was an honest, original Cub with no electrical system and a 65-HP Continental that cannot be modified with a starter. (Well, it can, but it involves […]

Given current affairs, St. Louis must be an island of calm in a troubled world, a place where things are so peaceful that the slightest deviation from whatever the norm is there, an emergency response is warranted. So, I think it was with a sense of amusement shared by many of our readers that we […]