AVweb Insider

What of Icon? One of the airplanes we hoped to cover here at AirVenture was the new Icon A5, an amphibious LSA that the company says has the potential to reset the entire market. Well, maybe. It’s sure a good-looking airplane. Icon promised us a trial flight then, without explanation, abruptly withdrew the invitation. This […]

Rutan Lays Hands on the 915 iS I was in the Rotax booth on Tuesday shooting avideo on the new 915 iS when Burt Rutan, towing a small entourage, popped in. He hadn’t heard about the new engine, but when Marc Becker rattled off the specs, Rutan pronounced it the perfect engine for his new […]

During his news conference Wednesday at Oshkosh about his work at One Aviation, Alan Klapmeier remarked in passing that in his experience, it’s not money that dissuades potential buyers from committing to aviation, it’s fear of complexity. When airplanes are designed to be intuitive and easy to fly, he went on, the market will grow, […]

Smashing First Day at OSH OK, so it wasn’t my imagination. The North 40 camping area at AirVenture really was hopping on Monday and if not filled to the point of closure, EAA did direct some campers into the overflow areas. I ran into Jack Pelton late in the day Monday and he said on […]

The core of the AirVenture airshow schedule tends to be somewhat predictable from year to year because popular acts are popular because people like to see them year after year. Still, every year brings something new and this year, one of the new things is a world record skydiving event, beginning on Wednesday and continuing […]

Ho-hum, another weekend, another engine-out landing at a beach resort. Like the one I wrote about last week, this one also made the evening news, albeit for a different reason. And it didn’t occur right on the beach, but on a busy highway choked with beach traffic. Here’s the story. It offers an opportunity to […]

Anyone who has been in the military—any military—will understand what a shock to the psyche it is merely to enter. Comfortable routine and the warm embrace of family and friends are suddenly displaced by harsh, at times abusive, discipline and an utter lack of even the slightest self determination. Life in the military is defined […]

When Louis Bleriot hopped across the English Channel from France in 1909, the Channel still represented a formidable, historic geographic and cultural divide that exists today only in the imagination; cross it on a ferry in a few hours or on commercial flight without even looking out the window. Or in an electric airplane with […]

The other day, I was sitting at the kitchen table doing a little remedial work on my quadcopter after an unfortunate encounter with a tree. A neighbor, who happens to own a Cessna 170, dropped by and after eyeballing the drone for a few seconds, said, “I’d win.” Say again? “I’d win if I hit […]

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 […]