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People who sell things for a living—airplanes, cars, construction equipment, you name it—know that there’s a fine art to convincing a would-be buyer that a used thing is almost always a better value than a new thing. (Car dealers get this because they typically make more margin on used cars than on new.) Airplane buyers, […]

I’m pretty sure Florida pilots have a slightly different relationship with thunderstorms than do pilots in other regions. We get so many of them, especially between March and December, that they often don’t impact flying much. Last week, Sarasota Avionic’s Dan Gulandri and I launched in his Bonanza with the western horizon black and threatening. […]

This month’s doing-it-right mention goes to my friends at Skydive City, my home drop zone in Zephyrhills, Florida. Last week, in a sporting crosswind, the DZ’s Twin Otter had a runway excursion of the sort that happens every day in general aviation. The Otter is built like a locomotive so damage to the airplane was […]

When it comes to drones—talking about them, writing about them, filming them or considering them in almost any context—I think hysteria is still the standard condition. Even we reported last month that a million of the damn things could be given as Christmas gifts. The source of this was Rich Swayze, who told an Airlines […]

How can one not see the grim humor in last week’s confluence of events that seemed tailor made to tank Third Class medical reform? Hapless doesn’t even begin to describe general aviation’s fate before the fortunes of a callous world.The first turn of bad timing was obviously the untimely death of an American Airlines captain […]

Monday’s unfortunate on-duty death of an American Airlines captain en route to Boston from Phoenix ignited the usual talking-head idiocy on the cable channels. Well, maybe it wasn’t the usual idiocy, but extra-special idiocy in that some thick-headed broadcasters couldn’t seem to grasp that yes, the first officer—demoted to “copilot” by the less sophisticated news […]

When Andy Weir’s novel, The Martian, appeared in 2011, the concept was already going against the flow. In an age when smartphones and tablets have reduced the average attention span to 10 seconds or less, here was a story in which science—real, serious and plausible, if not entirely always accurate science—was the star vehicle to […]

Anyone who’s been watching the torturous progress—if it can even be called progress—of the Third Class medical revision can be forgiven for a certain amount of cynicism. Many of us, I think, have given up completely, so much so that earlier in the week, I demurred from even writing about it again. I figured I […]

In my lofty role as editorial director here at AVweb, I am also self-appointed Chief of Word Police. We all have our little foibles and sacred cows, no? I actually have only two. I sweep the copy for two things; one is a word, the other a phrase. The word is “upbeat,” the phrase is […]

A couple of weeks ago, the local paper ran a headline on the front of the inside section: Plane Lands on 301 … Safely. I look at such a head on two levels; one as a pilot and a second as an editor. In some ways, it’s the equivalent of a headline that says: No […]