AVweb Insider

Like a punch drunk fighter, I’ve grown accustomed to daily press stories about general aviation that either excoriate the industry-USA Today, for example-or cover the subject with such shallowness that it’s laughable. I think all of us have learned to roll with the blows and hope tomorrow brings better. On NBC News last night, it […]

Throughout my flying career, I’ve occasionally run into what I might generously call the Marlboro Man of aviation. That should probably be the plural form, men, because there’s more than just a small handful of these guys. You know the type. It’s the guy who has no use for any kind of regulation, even if […]

Watching the Orion launch on NASA’s splendid live feed on Friday, I was asking myself if it made me feel that old Apollo magic. The answer: it did. Even though the vehicle was unmanned, its ultimate purpose is to put the U.S. back into the manned spaceflight business. That’s on my short list of worthy […]

Transport Canada just released some proposed guidance on the commercial operation of light unmanned aerial systems. Drones. If you haven’t had a chance to look it over, here’s the link (PDF). I suggest at least skimming it. (I’ll wait while you do that.) Clearly, our friends north of the border have come adrift from reality […]

Late last month, I spent a day over in Miami at a company called Africair, checking out some of the company’s sales programs. They happen to have the Cessna territory for Africa and the Caribbean and they’ve established a steady trickle of business in converting Skyhawks to diesel propulsion. “Trickle” means about six to eight […]

While the romantic bloom toward aviation may be off the rose for the public at large, automobile companies have been smitten on and off with the idea that aircraft features can sell cars. Recall about a decade ago that several car makers–Subaru comes to mind–were flogging aircraft style dashboards. Basically, they turned the soft white […]

I’m quite certain my first encounter with the word “disruptive” was when Sister Claire used it in a note to my parents to describe my behavior in second grade phonics class. If only she knew the depth of her prescience, she could have made a killing in the stock market. Now, the word has taken […]

I can’t put a date on it exactly, but about 15 years ago I decided it was neither productive nor professional to get into snippy arguments and wise-ass comments on the Unicom frequency. Nothing useful ever comes of it and after the frequency quiets down, you feel like you need a shower. Over the weekend, […]

I’ve been pawing over some additional details on the specs for the new airplanes Mooney announced last week in Zhuhai. They truly are clean-sheet designs and the first we’ve seen from a major manufacturer in more than a decade. The airplanes are interesting less for what they have than what they don’t have: ballistic parachutes. […]

If you follow spaceflight much-and probably even if you don’t-you’ll recall the Mars probe that burned up during orbital insertion a few years ago. Actually, it was the Mars Climate Orbiter and that was 16 years ago, believe it or not. The problem was that instead of the newton-seconds specified in the contract, software writers […]