AVweb Insider

Late last week, on the heels of NBAA BACE in Orlando, a new show popped up a few miles up the road in Deland: The Sport Aviation Showcase. I think everyone who has mentioned this to me has said the same thing: Don’t we already have one of these in Sebring, the Sport Aviation Expo? […]

I was on my way into the static display at NBAA in Orlando yesterday when I bumped into a photographer friend. He had been sent out to grab some crowd shots at Orlando Executive but was heading home empty handed. “Couldn’t find any crowds,” he said. I wouldn’t exactly say the place is deserted; the […]

There are two ways to look at the ongoing FAA fuels testing project called the Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative. One is that no news is good news and things must be perking along as planned. The other is that no news is bad news and that things aren’t going as planned or else we would […]

While I genuinely appreciate the job FAA inspectors do, I rarely feel much empathy for them. But imagining what the inspector had to go through to witness the Yellville turkey drop, I’m empathetic to the point of tears. I’m sure you read the story, but if you didn’t, here it is. The upshot is that […]

Just before I hurt my foot, I was at the dropzone sitting across the lunch table from a friend who was filling in his logbook, complete with little stickman icons showing the jumps we’d done for the day. I couldn’t resist. “Dude, seriously?” He looked startled, not realizing that my comment was really a defensive […]

As a variation of the old and bold pilots clich, there’s an old Sicilian saying: You can be arrogant; you can be ignorant, but you can’t be both at the same time. It’s appropriate for flying in Alaska, where I live. Every year we revisit the world of midair collisions and year after year, they […]

Last week, I attended a briefing at the local town hall where airport officials briefed a new arrival at the airport, a skydiving operation. As I figured it would, that ignited a minor freakout among the local pilot community, but they listened politely and asked good questions of the operator, who intends to start selling […]

What makes training good? What makes it stick so that when you really need it, you can make the right decision and execute accordingly? Anyone who has earned a flight instructor certificate will remember the Six Laws of Learning as elucidated in the FAA’s dreary Aviation Instructor’s Handbook. My friend John Deakin once told me […]

For the past 10 days, I’ve been flogging the Cub around testing some new action cameras from Garmin and GoPro. Look for the video on that next week. While the Cub is fun to fly, it’s not like you’re going to take one on a trip, unless you’ve got calendar-scale time to burn and an […]

As aviation technology goes, nothing is quite so enduring as the steel cable or torque tube as a means of manipulating flight controls. Add hydraulics for big airplanes, but the basic idea has sustained for more than a century. Is it time to revisit the idea? That’s being done commonly in the automotive world, with […]