AVweb Insider

Have you ever sold an airplane? If so, you know it is a remarkably loose transaction. In the days before the internet, you got hold of the carbonless three-part form, wrote down a precious few details including the names of the buyer and seller, the buyer’s address, and the selling price (or $1.00 and OVC, […]

I think most aviation writers are bright-eyed, cheery kind of people just thrilled to spend their days writing breathless paeans to the wonder of flight. On a good day, I can sort of pump myself up to do that before I inevitably spin off into dark obsession about January 1, 2020. That date, you will […]

Here in Florida, September was the hottest month on record. Ever. So on Sunday, when the weather finally delivered the fall temperature break, I luxuriated in simply standing in front of the hangar for 10 minutes watching the world go by. And what went by, among others, was what I sometimes call the Cryin’ Shame. […]

In the late 1970s I began my checkered ATC career at Oakland Center, which I was disappointed to learn was not located at Oakland, California, or even at an airport but, instead, in not-so-nearby Fremont. The next letdown was the facility itself, which resembled a federal penitentiary, complete with barbed wire and security guards to […]

It’s easy to forget, as we move along through our busy lives day to day, that things used to be different. We didn’t always carry computers in our pockets, we didn’t always have seat belts in our cars, and flight planning once involved paper charts and rulers and E6-Bs. It makes me feel pretty old […]

Like moths attracted to the proverbial flame, some pilots can’t resist the urge to fly into Oshkosh during AirVenture. And why not? There’s nothing quite like it in all of aviation. You get an unrivaled opportunity to see everything under the sun related to aviation and to rub wings with thousands of like-minded people. Oh, […]

Not to paint with too maudlin a brush, but I mentally scanned the pilot’s lounge recently and noticed that almost everyone was gone. That happens when you turn your back on time, thinking you’ll get back to it and expecting things will be right where you left them. The missing pilots weren’t propped up with […]

The theme for this year’s NBAA-BACE convention was the future of aviation and a lot of the companies attending embraced that theme. There were lots of virtual reality gizmos in the displays and an overall sense that profound change, from technology through hardware to environmental realities, is all around us. Please, I know some of […]

Of all the stories told about Neil Armstrong—and there are many—my favorite was related by the lively Alan Bean, the lunar module pilot on Apollo 12 who died earlier this year. One morning in 1968, Bean had learned that Armstrong had just punched out of the notoriously twitchy Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, missing being incinerated […]

I’ve been wrong about so many things, so I’m announcing that I’ve seen the flashing lights at the bottleneck in the tunnel-of-irony and am changing my ways. Everything I thought I knew about leading a healthy pilot’s life is, apparently, wrong. This occurred to me while staring up at the ER’s fluorescent lights—one was flickering; […]