AVweb Insider

Last month’s AirVenture broke the decade mark for me. It was my eleventh show. Perhaps my perspective is unusual because I’ve done all those shows as a journalist. This year was different because I brought my 13-year-old son with me. He’s aposter child for next-generation aviators: He’s a fanatic about all craft that fly, has […]

News reporting is often described as the first draft of history, but for events as momentous as World War II, there may never be a final draft. Decades after the fact, what my parents and my generation knew as simply “the war” continues to generate ever more detailed histories and analysis, as new records come […]

How many of us are interested in fun flying? We occasionally use our airplanes for transportation, but for the most part, don’t we fly for fun? Have you attended a grass-roots fly-in and done some fun flying? If not, you should. Here’s why. Get any group of pilots together and the topic invariably turns to […]

At least once a year, I try to take the temperature of the emerging aircraft diesel engine market. What’s selling? Who’s buying it? How are they doing with it?A recent sweep through this topic revealed that in new airplanes, not much is selling at all, diesel or otherwise. (See the most recent GAMA production and […]

In politics, the third rail—that thing you do not touch—is Social Security. Aviation journalism has its own third rail and it’s called aircraft emissions as a cause of global warming. The reason this subject is untouchable is because by and large, readers of aviation publications view flying airplanes as a quiet refuge away from the […]

I was on AVweb news watch last week when a bulletin on a balloon crash in Texas came pixeling into my inbox. The headline said, “All 16 believed dead.” That can’t be right, I thought. And that’s been the reaction of nearly everyone in aviation whom I’ve talked to or corresponded with about this accident. […]

When Los Angeles Times reporter Nigel Duara was fishing for a third-day lead on the tragic balloon crash in Texas Monday, the graph practically wrote itself: “The pilot of a hot-air balloon that crashed into a Texas pasture had four convictions for drunken driving on his record, but was not required to submit to the […]

Something every media organization tries to do at AirVenture and, to some degree, Sun ‘n Fun is gauge the health of the industry by observations gleaned at the big show. It’s an inexact science to be sure, especially since the goalposts not only change position, they change in height, diameter and the speed with which […]

I’ve always viewed competition in aviation as a relative thing. In new aircraft costing upward of $400,000, price breaks of a few percentage points don’t really amount to much and matter more to the big-box flight schools who now seem to be the main buyers of piston singles than to individual owners. In any case, […]

Maybe it was just the madhouse of arrivals Sunday afternoon when we landed, or maybe it’s that I skipped working the show last year, but this show feels busy—in a good way. Here’s an interesting observation: Jim Alpiser of Garmin told me how he usually gets to the show at 7:30 a.m. and expects a […]