AVweb Insider

That the death of John Glenn on Thursday came as no surprise made it no less sad. For my generation, Glenn was an indelible figure of towering accomplishment. Given his chosen profession and the risks that defined it, living to the age of 95 was itself a feat, never mind being launched into space twice. […]

I know it’s fashionable to decry flying on the airlines as the mass transportation equivalent of a slave ship, but I’ve trained myself to tune out the insults and degradations of airline travel. The airlines usually get you there at a fare less than you can fly yourself over the same distance. That’s just economic […]

It’s not often that a bad case of high winds aloft puts you on the beach for the day. But not often is not the same as never.

I think I’m about to be voted off the island. Or maybe I’ll just slip out on my own at the next high tide. The reason is that I’m going to go a little rogue here. I’m really starting to detest airport noise, if not necessarily airplane noise. I reached this conclusion awhile ago, but […]

Every year, just before Christmas joy descends upon on us like the shallow, weak excuse to buy yet more useless crap that the season has become, our sister publication, IFR, publishes its annual Stupid Pilot Tricks report. This is a summary of the most boneheaded, incomprehensible accidents and incidents that the skill-challenged among us manage […]

I hauled the Cub over to Sebring on Saturday—that takes most of the day, one way—and hung out at Tecnam’s big hangar there. I’d flown over to fly and shoot Tecnam’s latest light sport aircraft, the Astore. Nice airplane. I first saw it at Aero in 2013 and didn’t spend enough time with it to […]

Would a $5000 sales promotion make you think twice about exchanging your engine for a premium rebuilt RAM IO-550? If you are nearing TBO and a few weeks of airplane downtime will work out, it just might.For GA manufacturers and service providers of all kinds, sales promotions are the “call to action” that some companies […]

So now we have a Republican congress and a soon-to-take-office Republican president. What does this mean for general aviation’s interests? For the airlines? For aerospace in general? Probably about what it means for every other segment of the economy; no one seems to know enough to hazard a guess. Yet. In theory, the sacred project […]

In aviation, we are often steadfastly parochial in the way we try to understand the waning fortunes of the industry. We are stubbornly revanchist in viewing past glories as a template for tomorrow and we’re happy to blame FAA regulations and manufacturers who just don’t know to how to sell airplanes. While I’m sure those […]

At last week’s NBAA show in Orlando, I was having a little argument with myself in one of the press conferences. A staple of these things is what we used to call in the newspaper business “grip and grins.” The assembled people of import grip the certificate/plaque/award/trophy, face the camera and beam. Click. Two cols […]