AVweb Insider

While those of us in the cheap seats uniformly cheer for low oil prices because, well, we can buy more gas and fly more, what if the reverse were true? What if anemic oil prices are the cause of declining aircraft sales? Writing this week in Aviation Week, the Teal Group’s Richard Aboulafia made this […]

Last week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk promised that his plan to colonize Mars would be, if nothing else, entertaining. The man has a flair for understatement. As our news story reports today, Musk unveiled his Mars ambitions at the Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico. Ambitious hardly does it justice for if anyone other than […]

Further apropos of our slow flight yammering of last week, I put the skill to use on Thursday. After 119 days or so of not flying as I recover from an injury, I took the Cub up to knock off the rust. I flew down to a nice little county grass strip south of Venice […]

The Miracle on the Hudson is back in the news, with the big-budget flick Sully in theaters. For pilots, it’s a stark reminder that basic stick-and-rudder skills still come in handy sometimes. Those skills certainly helped Sullenberger, whose four decades of experience included glider flying. But in my work as an FAA aviation safety inspector […]

You have to hand it to the FAA. This is a government agency that’s gifted in its ability to tweak the rules in a way that makes we, the regulated, twist, dance, squirm and shimmy in the most creative ways. The latest example came last week when the FAA revised its standards for teaching that […]

Every once in a while, it’s fun to cast off the wispy tendrils connecting sanity to what passes for reality these days and consider a real crack pipe concept: What if Elon Musk made airplanes? This occurred to me this week when the news broke that tech billionaire Jeff Bezos plans to build a giant […]

Try this thought experiment: Before USAir 1549 splashed down in the Hudson, if you put 10 airline crews in a simulator and ran the same scenario, how many would achieve results identical to the real event? Hold that thought for a moment, I’ll get back to it. Of course, you can’t unknow the details of […]

From the unintended consequences file comes this: The Third Class medical exemption rips away the last vestiges of logic—if there ever was any—for retaining the weight limit for light sport aircraft. If you can fly a 6000-pound airplane without a medical, why are you limited to 1320 pounds under essentially the same conditions?The whole thing […]

As an aviation journalist, my job description isn’t exactly to cheer when a flying machine craters, runs amok, blows up or otherwise goes awry. Hey, two wings, one love, right? So it was with a little guilt when, like a beer burp you can’t quite keep down, I had this moment of so there, when […]

The late and much-celebrated fighter pilot General Robin Olds delighted in telling the story of sitting in the front seat of an F-4 headed into visual-range combat in Vietnam and telling his younger backseater that he had it on good authority that what they were seeing wasn’t actually happening. That is, the F-4 design brief […]