AVweb Insider

No matter how much we who carp continue to carp, certain aviation themes will never change. It’s karma—what happens to pilots happens because we made it so. An unchangeable percentage of aircraft will run out of gas or slide sideways off runways in the mildest of crosswinds, and—unrelated to safety but irksome—82 percent of our […]

Swift Fuel’s announcement that it’s bailing out of the FAA’s troubled Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative had an inevitability about it. Following the FAA’s announcement in June that it was suspending work on finding suitable unleaded replacements for 100LL, a not-that-subtle whiff of a certain metaphor related to chairs on the deck of a doomed ocean […]

I’m not sure I know where to look when seeking wisdom about things aeronautical, but I know two places not to look: the YouTube comments section and the dreary carnage of the NTSB database. But wisdom is different than inspiration and the latter can be found in both those sources. Scrolling through the comment field […]

It was a Tuesday and, while stopped at a traffic light, I watched an average man step off the curb, unaware that Karma was about strike. The light was in his favor but entering the crosswalk he froze. “That average man has a problem,” my wife of 35 years, who understands men with problems, said. […]

The pace of technological change can be excruciatingly slow sometimes … we’ve been waiting eons now for battery-powered airplanes that never need maintenance … but it’s relentless. I’m reminded of the college classmate who told me, way back in the last century, that she was making a smart choice studying to be a keypunch operator, […]

There’s all kinds of shaking going on in the unleaded avgas sphere, as evidenced by revelations at Oshkosh this year. Those of us who expect the progress of science and commerce to be orderly and stately might be dismayed by the apparent confusion, indeterminacy, contradiction and flawed human behavior in the quest for a lead-free […]

Now that it has sunk below the fold—or will have by the time you read this—the most surprising thing about Friday’s bizarre stolen Q400 incident is that it wasn’t streamed live on Facebook. Now that I’ve typed that, I realize someone will send a link saying, oh, but it was. I’ve been scanning the domestic […]

It’s amazing how quickly a sunny day can turn to biblical mush with the flick of a wrist. Extreme weather events tease this watery planet’s skin as it heats up a few degrees, and we ants just walk faster in search of shade or higher ground. Firestorms, tornadoes, the New York Mets—all proof that our […]

Immersed in AirVenture This year marks the 30th Oshkosh trip for me, almost. I skipped a year or two in that 30-year run. The show has evolved so slowly that you often don’t notice how much it has changed since 1988. For me, the most significant changes are neither the grounds nor the airshow, but […]

To say that aviation development and market uptake moves glacially is an insult to glaciers everywhere, or at least the piles of dirty snow that pass for glaciers in a world where average summer temperatures make Venus look temperate. I can develop a fairly long list, but let’s consider diesel engines for the moment. These […]