AVweb Insider

Instead of Christmas cards this year, I’m sending out a class-action apology to all those primary students I led so seriously astray with my misguided whiteboard talks. If you’re an instructor, you’ve surely done the same during the standard foreplay before committing lift. You’ve sketched the wing section, drawn in the airflow above and below […]

Time to quit worrying about flying inverted yield curves and stay awake long enough to reignite virtuous ire over the Piper Navajo pilotwho allegedly fell asleep on a November trip between Tasmania and King Island, two places that, if you’re like me, you had to Google. The backstory in a conch shell: The pilot drifted […]

It was a Wisconsin-warm, winter-to-spring day. Roads and runways were plowed, but the heavy rains from the previous night did little to diminish several feet of snow on lawns and fields. My friend (let’s call him Bill) and I drove to the airport at 12:30 p.m. to practice some aerobatics in a rentable Super Decathlon. […]

Cable television being the reiterative swamp that it is, you can count on some things being more or less evergreen. One of these is the 1992 classic, A Few Good Men. And yes, that was 26 years ago. When it scrolls by on the guide, I never fail to watch it. A good night is […]

If you’re among the aviation illuminati, you will know about the Swiss cheese theory of accident incidence. That’s where the holes in multiple slices of cheese line up to allow the determined accident to sail straight through to the bottom of that smoking hole where you find yourself picking shards of your iPad out of […]

When I swore the air traffic controller employment oath, I shed my civilian identity and for the rest of my FAA career was known by my operating initials. Controllers never said “Goodbye” to end a call to another controller. Instead, like a secret cult, we gave our initials. In my case, IE. Unfortunately, PB was […]

When I was a callow lad, private pilot ground school was interactive. It was interactive not in the sense of the Pavlovian clicking of choices on a webpage, but of having a human instructor who actually talked and answered questions. Chalk was a thing then. One of the instructors must have been an old school […]

It’s inevitable, unpleasant and recurs every two years. No, not elections. We’re all very proud of your I Voted And You Didn’t sticker that’s been on your kombucha-stained, Sporty’s flight suit since 2010, but did you renew something fundamental in your life? If you’re a pilot, you probably did. If you’re not a pilot … […]

If you ride around Seattle, where Boeing lives, you’ll occasionally see a blue-and-white bumper sticker that’s been around for decades, with variations of this wording: Unless it’s a Boeing, I’m not going. Following this week’s revelation that Boeing kept pilots in the dark about an autotrim system on the new 737 MAX, it took the […]

Although they’re relative rarities these days, as pilots, we all react to airline crashes just as we always have. We’re sober-minded and analytical so we don’t even allow ourselves a conversation inside our heads in speculation about potential causes because we’re waiting for the investigators, right? That’s ridiculous. Of course we speculate, forming snap opinions […]