AVweb Insider

Whether we accept it or not, it’s true that humans tend to worry, sometimes obsessively and irrationally, about things that might harm them. That’s how terrorism works. Unless you’re in, say, Aleppo or Mosul, the likelihood of being killed in a terrorist attack is close to zero. Yet we duly have our shoes X-rayed and […]

Lacking a better descriptor, I’ll call today’s blog an examination of confirmation bias. We all know this as the tendency to seek or select only that information which tends to confirm our own opinions and prejudices. I have it. You have it. We all have it, to some degree. A reader wrote yesterday to ask […]

Over the next week or 10 days, I’ll be writing a few blogs on aviation risk assessment—how people judge it and how they mitigate it. While I’m getting started on that, a reader wrote to challenge my assessment of the J-3 Cub’s safety and crashworthiness. I touched on this in the Aviation Consumer article that […]

I suppose it has ever been thus, but these days, we’re all appreciative and always looking for someone to wear the mantle of hero. That more than anything explains why that video of the incapacitated skydiver being saved by his instructor went viral over the weekend. I saw it on NBC news Sunday night as […]

Certainly the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 can be classified as the greatest mystery since Amelia Earhart. But after numerous conversations with airline colleagues, aviation friends, neighbors, workout buddies and bartenders, I’ve uncovered another mystery. Despite scientific evidence that proves otherwise, many of these educated people are emphatic in their belief that a 650,000-pound airplane […]

When Elaine Kauh and I were shooting the Cub vs. Champ shoot-out video (scroll to the bottom of this page), it was the first time I’d ever flown these two vintage taildraggers back-to-back in any kind of organized way. I’d flown the Cub plenty and the Champ a little less often, but with months or […]

Did you happen to catch the Super Bowl commercial that had a 20-years-younger Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric discussing “the little a with a circle around it” then asking their off-camera producer to explain what this thing, the internet, was? The spot was funny because anyone who sees it now will marvel that just two […]

The other night, I saw a video report-one of several, actually-about how some government agency was lit up because it’s beginning to look like 3-D printing will be capable of making parts for firearms. In passing, it mentioned that complex airplane parts would soon be producible by 3-D technology. Yeah, I thought, when pigs fly. […]

When I was reading over the draft small UAS regs and analysis that leaked out of the FAA over the weekend, I couldn’t help thinking … man, this feels like a breech birth assisted with a crowbar. For one thing, the timing caught the FAA off guard. Thanks to the wonders of the web, the […]

Has the ADS-B market finally been disrupted with the low-cost (under $3000 installed) box we’ve all been waiting for? It looks like it, more less validating the advice that waiting to purchase this technology was the right thing to do. I’m not sure waiting any longer is of much benefit, but more on that in […]