AVweb Insider

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 […]

People keep asking me what the big thing is at this year’s AirVenture and I keep not having an answer. From a news coverage point of view, it has been a very busy year for us, but I feel like we’re just doing a lot of wheel spinning without gaining much traction. I think part […]

Although I’m the walkin’ and talkin’ personification of jaded and hard-bitten, even I was dazzled by what I saw in Boeing Square at AirVenture on Monday afternoon. First, the place was jammed with humanity; more people than I ever remember seeing in the gazillion years I’ve been coming to this show. But it was the […]

For at least the last five years and probably longer than that, the retrofit autopilot market has been moribund. Autoflight systems have gotten so expensive that only the most dedicated buyers were willing to part with $20K or north to install one. AirVenture 2017 seems determined to turn that trend around in more or less […]

Sales in the bizjet sector declined substantially after the 2008 economic downturn and there are good reasons to believe they’ll stay that way for quite some time to come. Quite simply, the supply of business jets—or at least their capacity to fly people places—has exceeded demand. The issue becomes clear when the growth curves of […]

This week’s news feed produced the disturbing and surprising announcement that Missouri’s Rep. Sam Graves will vote in favor of ATC privatization, otherwise known as HR 2997, but in real terms the biggest public giveaway to the airlines since the depression. Graves, you probably know, is head of the House general aviation caucus and has […]

When I first saw the story yesterday in the Mercury News, that a jet had to execute a go-around at SFO after lining up on the taxiway instead of the runway, my first reaction was that the “disaster averted!” angle was overwrought. Really? I thought. Just like every day, when I tap the brakes to […]

Ever had a gear-up landing? I’ll tell you about mine in a moment, but first, when I was assembling today’s video it occurred to me that retractable landing gear systems are quite the test of human factors engineering. And the modern trend toward high-performance aircraft with fixed gear—Cirrus mainly—is basically genius at work. I swept […]

Today’s blog was going to be a PSA to set straight the horrible thrashing general aviation took at the hands of yet another misguided network news feature. But, damn it, foiled again. The piece in question ran Sunday night on NBC’s Dateline and chronicled the story of McKenzie Morgan, a plucky 17-year-old student pilot who […]

I’m wondering if we’re seeing a canary in the mineshaft moment here. This week, with the news that Seattle-based Horizon Air is cancelling more than 6 percent of its flights due to lack of pilots, the supposed true-or-not-true pilot shortage seems to be coming to a head. Actually, I think the canary has been dead […]