AVweb Insider

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 […]

I’m pleased to report my record as an aviation seer—never much to brag about to begin with—is now even more tarnished. I was fully expecting this to be the year that electric aircraft would make a bigger splash at AirVenture. But, just ripples. We reported on the Opener BlackFly in this video and news story […]

For this week’s AirVenture coverage, we’ve been running daily AirVenture look backs reprising what we reported on in previous shows. When I was writing the 20-year installment—1998—I was struck by how many products and ideas were floated at AirVenture that just never potentiated. I left out a few because it was getting depressing and I […]

Wait. What? No. Who the ^%$# green lighted this? This being allowing Ford to set up a track half inside and half outside its big tent off Boeing square and park a couple of Mustang GTs in there. Except they aren’t parked, the cars are screeching around the track giving AirVenture attendees a real-world demonstration […]

Anyone who’s been to AirVenture in weather other than the crystalline blue skies that this show often enjoys knows—or should know—one overarching fact about Oshkosh air operations: IFR and AirVenture don’t mix very well. While some people insist on flying IFR into Oshkosh just because they file IFR to go everywhere, it’s really not a […]

For today’s blog, I was about to write that hardly a week goes by that we don’t report on some new electric aircraft initiative. Then I was suddenly seized by the impulse to, you know, actually check to see if that statement is correct. As is so often true of generalities, it’s not correct. Actually, […]

I had an instructor who had a teaching technique unlike any other instructor I’ve flown with. Let’s call it teaching by ambush. On this particular flight, we were in a non-pressurized twin, repositioning it to pick up our passengers. It was a cold morning, and I was a complete newbie to the multi-engine training. My […]

I’m one of those guys who believes that most people in government are trying to do a good job and trying to help the country, the state, the city or the local water board. I fear what many of them don’t understand is that they hold the common sense of the nation in their collective […]

My friend and fellow blogger Paul Berge revealed what a sheltered life he has led when he confessed in last week’s blog to not knowing the significance of Sidney, New York. At the expense of appearing a boorish know it all—as opposed to just a boor—I can say that I most certainly did know the […]

The fly (Musca domestica) appeared inside the Citabria’s cockpit ten minutes into what would be a 25-hour round-trip from Iowa to New York. I greeted the visitor the way Jimmy Stewart, as Charles Lindbergh, did in the 1953 film Spirit of St. Louis. And there the analogy to Lindy flying 3000 miles non-stop from a […]