AVweb Insider

Back in the blissfully simple days of 1986, before cable news became the 24-hour din it is today, I recall watching some coverage of Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager landing the Voyager back at Edwards Air Force base, where they had begun their round-the-world flight nine days earlier. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff had been […]

I was listening to NPR on Saturday morning when a brief news item mentioning SpaceX’s planned Sunday launch said two previous launches to resupply the ISS had failed. I couldn’t help but wonder: what are the chances? Actually not that high—or low, depending on how you want to look at it. The SpaceX Falcon blew […]

During my long and colorless career as a flight instructor, I’ve been asked a few times to pencil whip a flight review. This I have never done and still would not do, although I am surprised to admit my reasons for not doing so have changed. I never believed that FAR 61.56’s requirement for a […]

I came, I saw, I flew. After three years of trying, frustrated by weather, schedules and airplanes that just weren’t ready, I flew my first electric airplane this week, Pipistrel’s Alpha Electro. And? From the inside the cabin, it was underwhelming. Listening to it whistle by on the ground was quite another thing, however. As […]

Does anybody not have a smartphone these days? Actually, some people don’t. I ran into a guy in an airport the other day using the old standby flip phone with what looked like a mono screen. Imagine! He’s probably better for it, not feeling the need to constantly fill every idle second fiddling with what’s […]

If ever we need a king in this country and someone put me in charge, somewhere on my to-do list would be getting rid of FAR 91.119. OK, so I wouldn’t eliminate it, but I’d amend it so that people would just worry about it less. I’ve been in more discussions than I care to […]

If doctors bury their mistakes and architects advise their clients to plant vines, what does the FAA do about its blunders? Existing as it seems to in its own alternate reality, the FAA simply pretends its mistakes never happened. Or it just refuses to acknowledge or answer legitimate questions about them. The mistake du jour […]

If it sometimes seems that the entire aerospace industry is given over to developing ways to plant cameras in the sky to spy on people and things, it’s probably because the entire aerospace industry is given over to developing ways to plant cameras in the sky to spy on people and things. Although the actual […]

When I tour around to report on airplane projects, I have basically two reactions and having the imagination of a turnip, these are consistent. The first is wide-eyed wonderment at the audacity of it all; building machines that lift and hurl themselves through the atmosphere with people in them. The second, upon realizing the staggering […]

Once again, it’s the season to talk about fixing the FAA, this time by moving the air traffic function out of the agency and into a separate agency or a privatized corporation of some sort. As we reported, Rep. John Mica has introduced a billin the House of Representatives that would turn ATC into an […]