AVweb Insider

In a first visit to Aero, it’s hard to escape this harsh reality — around every corner, there is another beautiful, stunning, interesting aircraft — but it’s difficult or next to impossible for an American to buy one. On my first day here, I visited the Risen sport plane, developed by Swiss Excellence Airplanes. For […]

Just as I was warming up to gyrocopters, along comes Doug Hughes who, overnight, has become the most famous—or notorious—mailman since Three Days of the Condor. As I was watching the coverage of Hughes’ bizarre stunt to deliver letters to Congress by plopping his gyrocopter on The Mall in front of the Capitol and listening […]

Viewed from over here in the cheap seats, Piper’s revelation this week that it’s retooling its M-Class line is more significant than it looks for two reasons I can think of: business/marketing savvy and for a clear signal on where general aviation autoflight might be going. I’ve been watching Piper’s sales numbers for 10 years […]

For what can be a long list of new product introductions, AEA has a great strategy: Give every company five minutes on the stage to make the elevator pitch, then on to the next one. Still, with 33 new products on Wednesday’s opening day, it was two-hour slog to sit through it all. I amused […]

My first experience with an autogyro was not auspicious. I was a newly minted private pilot waiting to take off from what was then Baltimore Airpark, north of Baltimore. Number one for the runway was a Bensen Gyrocopter of the sort I’d seen a million times in Popular Mechanics ads, but never in the flesh. […]

Are we asking the right questions with respect to the Germanwings tragedy? How do you teach a door to determine friend or foe? That is a tough one. Here is one that is not so tough; how do you teach an airplane not to fly into the ground? From the technical standpoint, that is easy. […]

In the wake of last week’s troubling indications that a trained First Officer intentionally crashed an Airbus A320 in the French Alps, I couldn’t help but wonder if passengers boarding airliners are suddenly giving the crews the fisheye. Truthfully, I can’t really say I wouldn’t, but I’m no more worried about a repeat of Germanwings […]

I should know the answer to this by now, but in a futile gesture, I flipped on the TV Thursday afternoon to see if CNN had dropped into 24/7 crash coverage of Germanwings 9525. Of course it had, and I have to concede, having honed its skills on MH370 a year ago, CNN is really […]

After reading your comments about the Me 262 in your review of Adolf Galland’s book earlier this week, I thought you would be interested in the history of a surviving example of an Me 262.This unique example is a night fighter version displayed at the South African National Museum of Military History in Johannesburg. How […]

Comedian Jon Stewart has humorously—and rightly—compared the press to squirrels chasing nuts. No sooner has one news story dropped than another falls and off reporters scamper to scoop it up. We do the same in the aviation press, but our nuts are ADS-B products. Look, there’s another one! Let’s get it! But we’re more discerning […]