AVweb Insider

People own airplanes—or fly airplanes—for a handful of reasons and actually levitating them into the air may not be high on the list. The DNA chain that manifests itself in the urge to become a pilot probably started with those cave dwellers irresistibly attracted to bright, shiny objects. As a class, pilots like gadgets, complexity […]

Francis Gary Powers. I suspect that name lives astride a generational divide. If you were born much after the mid-1950s, it may not resonate at all. If you’re older, it likely has a more visceral connotation and for me, that’s an unhappy stew of cold war terror, shame and embarrassment. That this should be so […]

Lost in the noisy shuffle of last week’s NBAA show was a news story that I think is significant for buyers interested in ADS-B In. Bad Elf is launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of new ADS-B portables that will be cheaper than what’s on the market now; as little as half the price […]

Are New Airplanes Doomed? That’s probably a question with a self-evident answer, but the context is this: The volume of remanufacture and refurb in all segments of aviation continues to expand. At NBAA this week, I was seeing refurb projects at every turn. Two years ago, for instance, Nextant Aerospace was by itself with its […]

Industrial espionage being what it is, I suspect the execs at Pratt & Whitney knew about GE’s blockbuster announcement of a new engine at NBAA Monday before the press did. I was sort of suspecting something because I recently interviewed GE about the H-series engines of the sort Nextant Aerospace is using in the King […]

This much we can all agree on: Pilots are supposed to give their passengers a detailed, pre-takeoff safety briefing. But I have sleepwalked through more of these than I care to remember. I know, I’m a terrible person, but I’ve gotten used to myself. I urge others to do better. The pre-takeoff briefing topic caught […]

The neutering of Chicago O’Hare, once not only the busiest airport in the world, but also the baddest, is nearly complete: The 2015 version of ORD has three control towers, half a dozen east/west parallel runways … and no character whatsoever. While a couple of the old diagonal runways escaped the bulldozers, they might as […]

Somewhere in the not-that-distant past, the rollout of a new airliner morphed from a simple tow out of the hangar to polite applause into industrial theater with a cast of thousands. Give China’s COMAC—the government-owned consortium responsible for commercial aircraft—credit for nailing the theater part, albeit with a slight party twist not of the balloon […]

Our blog earlier this week about the UK’s easyJet’s plan to hire more women pilots ignited plenty of comments.I couldn’t help but think that anyone who wants to see women make up more than 12 percent of the pilot population — even more than 30 percent — must accept the idea that targeted hiring and […]

Watching the progress of this week’s Question of the Week, I was reminded that my attitude toward women in the workplace was pretty much crystalized all at once at 5:30 a.m. on February 10th,1969. Standing in the induction line at Fort Holabird, it occurred to me that if women were eligible for the then draft, […]