AVweb Insider

Earlier this month, the NTSB released findings on trends in general aviation accidents. The GA fatal rate, after an all time low of 1.12/100,000 hours in 2013 reversed its trend to 1.4. That’s the highest since 1998. The overall accident rate spiked slightly from 6.26 in 2013 to 6.74 in 2014. But do these numbers […]

On my office wall is a print of a photograph any pilot will—or should—know. Its title is The First Twelve Seconds of the Age of Powered Flight. It’s a riveting photograph snapped by Tom Daniels, a Kill Devil Hills surfman, the moment Orville Wright lifted off from the sands of Kitty Hawk on December 17, […]

In doing news reporting, if you hear certain things enough, you quite naturally begin to believe that accepted truths are, well, true. That’s certainly the case with the economics of airframe manufacturing. It’s accepted wisdom that one reason airplanes are so expensive—not the only reason, but one reason—is low volume. This is a basic tenet […]

NASA – which always has a cool setup at Oshkosh, space suits and all – quietly conducted research last month under the radar of the world’s biggest airshow. In the basement of EAA’s Air Academy Lodge, a team of NASA staffers had pilots fly an X-Plane sim to test a cellphone app designed to avoid […]

TV is a harsh and impatient mistress. (Just ask Donald Trump.) And so it was when I was blathering on in Friday’s VLOG about refurbs and airplane prices, I had to leave some material in the bit bucket in the service of shortening the video. But I think it’s worth mentioning in a follow-up. You […]

At AirVenture 2015, Yingling Aviation arrived with a spiffy, remanufactured Cessna 172. It’s the fifth such project to come out of the ground and in today’s video, a VLOG from Paul Bertorelli, AVweb examines what this means to the aircraft market.

I got a tidy little lesson in confirmation bias that I wasn’t quite expecting on Tuesday afternoon. The local airport manager held a meeting in the town hall to discuss a proposed skydiving operation that wants to start operations in Venice. Heretofore, when the city has been approached on this topic, it has rejected the […]

I have argued many times in the past that in order for commercial space operations to succeed, they need to be given the opportunity to fail. The truth is, aviation did not grow up in a bloodless environment. Many died learning the lessons that we take for granted today. Commercial spaceflight may indeed have to […]

Watching the last-minute machinations over legislative efforts to eliminate or at least curtail the Third Class medical requirement reminds me of arguments I used to have with my Dad when I was kid and wanted something forbidden. When all the logic a 10-year-old could summon seemed to be backing the old man into a canyon […]

Busy and Some Things With Legs This year marks my 27th or 28th Oshkosh tour—I can’t exactly remember which for sure. I would characterize the week as busy and moderately consequential. By consequential, I mean I saw things that made me believe they’ll have legs in the market and have some impact on sales and […]