AVweb Insider

To remain a general aviation participant in good standing—or hell, just a participant of any standing—requires a certain resilience, an almost alien capacity to slough off disaster and munch gleefully on catastrophe. Rolling with the punches comes to mind, but somehow just doesn’t do justice to the gloom that pervades the aviation economy. Now that […]

Wrapping up a marathon 10 days of travel this week, I was happy to get my mitts on and actually fly a real airplane. Not a drone operated from some air-conditioned trailer a half a world away or something powered by batteries that lack capacity or, more likely, something that exists only in a PowerPoint […]

When I was listening to some of the presentations at the Sustainable Aviation Foundation symposium this week, it occurred to me that much of what I was hearing was simply an extension of the AUVSI event I covered earlier in the week. The lines between general aviation, manned aircraft in general and autonomous aircraft are […]

I wasn’t precisely counting, but at this year’s AUVSI event, there seemed to be more companies hawking a particular kind of software meant to integrate, analyze and order the oceans of data and imagery that all these flying eyes in the sky are pumping into various networks. And everything is tied into what’s commonly called […]

This week, it’s off to the drone aircraft show—AUVSI or the Association of Unmanned Vehicles International. They really need a better name for that. It doesn’t exactly slide off the tongue. The association is calling the show Exponential this year, clearly suggesting they think that’s the growth curve they expect drones will or already are […]

How did this whole “brand” thing come about, anyway? When Coca-Cola and General Motors became iconic American companies as far back as the 1920s, was anybody talking about the actual word “brand”? In college during the 1970s and in my early years in journalism, I hardly recall the word itself ever being used in normal […]

With another Aero behind us—the 24th for the show, I’m told—I continue to be impressed with how this event showcases what’s happening beyond what many of us believe to be the center of the GA universe. That’s the U.S., in case I’m being too subtle here. This turns out to be an impressive body of […]

In the early days of automotive diesels, stinky and slow were joined permanently to the concept of diesel cars. Not anymore. Driving on the autobahn yesterday in my crummy little rental Twingo, an Audi blew past me doing a buck and half and it was a turbodiesel that European drivers have come to love. I […]

One reason Aero is my favorite aviation show is that it’s more changeable than either Sun ‘n Fun or AirVenture. Those shows tend to put the same vendors in the same place every year, often with the same booth counters and display items. Given the effort and expense of mounting a show, I can’t really […]

I have always been baffled by the psychology of paying a company a tidy of sum of money to assure that I get one of the first new-and-improved widgets it proposes to make: the pre-production deposit or, as it’s popularly known, a “position.” This is quite common in the aircraft business as most recently demonstrated […]