AVweb Insider

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 […]

If ever there were click bait for naysayers, it would be this week’s announcement by Boeing that it’s exploring a Mach 5 passenger jet capable of hopping the Atlantic Ocean in two hours and the Pacific in three. Boeing revealed the concept at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. As a more or less […]