AVweb Insider

Here’s an aerospace story that hasn’t generated much notice. The Trump White House is apparently pushing NASA to consider making the first flight of the new Orion manned space system a circumlunar flight, rather than an unmanned test mission. That has a nice, if somewhat melancholy, resonance to it. Fifty years after the fact, we […]

I mostly fly aircraft certificated under Part 23, but last month, I had five flights in a row in four different light sport aircraft. All this light sport flying got me thinking about an opinion piece I read years ago with the self-explanatory title: “The Skycatcher’s Death Proves the LSA Rule is a Failure.” That […]

What the camera and teleprompter giveth, it can just as rapidly take away. That would be my salient observation from Harrison Ford’s recent dust-up at the Orange County Airport in California. You will not have missed, I’m sure, the story that Ford flew his Husky over the top of a stopped American Airlines 737 and […]

General aviation pilots have several auto-fume modes. One of them is ADS-B and anything to do with medicals is a good way to get people spun up. So is the argument that the administrator of the FAA should be a pilot. This is a perennial and it came up last week when President Donald Trump […]

After a month on simmer, what do AVweb readers think aboutthe FAA’s new BasicMed Third-Class medical exemption rule? Our recently completed survey provides a glimpse and if I could characterize the overall mood, I’d call it disappointed resignation. Why the disappointment? If there’s any common theme in the responses we received on the survey it’s […]

In today’s Avweb VLOG, Paul Bertorelli asks President Trump to make good on his promise to reduce government regulation. view on YouTube

Now that it has been established that we live in a world of regular facts and alternative facts, the morass of confusion over the announced closing of the much-fought-over Santa Monica Airport comes into perfect focus. As far as this airport is concerned, there aren’t so much alternative facts as multiple parallel realities. I think […]

Sometime between mid-January and mid-February, the tourist hordes descend on Florida to escape the winter miseries of the northern tier. They’re often disappointed to learn how sporting a winter cold front can be in Florida, sometimes all the way to Key West. Great news this year, though: The 13thannual Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring had […]

I’ve done enough instruction in the Cub now to understand it’s the worst place in the world to do great flight instruction. Ever been in the front seat of one? Super Cubs don’t count and neither do any of the new-age Cub knockoffs. They’re as far from the 1930s ergonomic hell of a J-3 as […]

For the past week, we’ve been running a survey on what readers think about the just-announced BasicMed program from the FAA. I’m gonna guess here, but maybe I shouldn’t have dived into the data so soon because doing so caused me to have several revelations. One is what a largish crapshoot this whole thing is, […]