AVweb Insider

A few weeks ago, I spewed for a few hundred words on gear-up landings and this month I’ve been continuing the research. Just ask me about gear-up landings. Ask anything. I’m about to write a book. You’ll be enthralled. As I was trudging through this, I finally got to the insurance angle and my colleague, […]

Canada Just Isn’t the Same as the U.S. by Mark Baker When Congress returns from summer recess in early September, they will consider a vote on H.R. 2997, the 21st Century AIRR Act, which would remove air traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and turn it over to the airlines. Supporters of the […]

In an interview in Time magazine about his new film, Dunkirk, director Christopher Nolan said there were very few “God shots” in the production. That may be true, but the one that will get pilots to sit up straight in their multiplex seats has a fuel-exhausted Spitfire gliding along the real Dunkirk beach, its prop […]

I’m just back from a few days at the Cirrus factory in Duluth, delivered back home via the company’s new SF50 Vision Jet, and I’ll immediately unpack this first impression: It’s no exaggeration to say that the Vision Jet is a fugitive from the law of averages. It’s not much to be impressed with how […]

Think how boring life would be without the starry-eyed dreamers, the unshakeable optimists and the grand visionaries who are utterly incapable of allowing even the slightest harsh reality to tarnish that bright future just over the hill. That would pretty much describe the people ushering in the next big thing in aviation: the on-demand urban […]

When I plopped my weary butt into a chair for Continental’s presser at AirVenture last month, what’s the first thing I see on the show-and-tell stand? A couple of Lycoming roller tappets and an angle-valve cylinder. Uh-oh, I thought, really bad timing for Lycoming. And it relates directly to what’s going on with the current […]

I heard a comment the other day from a researcher at one of the big flight academies: “Cessna competes with Cessna, not with Piper or Diamond.” He was directly referring to the $400,000-plus price tag for the new Skyhawks that still constitute the mainstay of the training fleet. Consider that stratospheric number against a good […]

An expert is a person who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. By that definition, I am an expert. As an expert, I am hereby declaring that this blog is absolutely the last thing I will ever write about ADS-B. As God is my witness, I will […]

Given the rules of idle conversation, I’ll be asked this week: How was AirVenture? Or, if by pilots, the universal shorthand that identifies the world’s most important airshow by its venue: Oshkosh. (The locals invariably call it “EAA,” with the vowels drawn out in that nasal Scandinavian-influenced lilt of Wisconsin.) I have an answer. It […]

At AirVenture, the din of airplanes starts early and builds to a deafening crescendo about the time Jeff Boerboon launches his Screamin’ Sasquatch jet-powered Waco. It’s just stupefyingly loud, to the point of causing minor trickles of blood out of exposed bodily openings. But I’m pretty sure the B-1 passes were even louder than that […]