Video of the Week

It’s tempting to decry the disappearance of the classic country airport. It’s also a myth. Sure, many have been plowed up for houses or shopping centers, but there are still plenty out there. One of the most storied is Van Sant Airport in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles north of Philadelphia and hard by […]

If there was anything good about three or four days of obsessing over unidentified balloons last weekend, it’s that we all learned about a fascinating niche of amateur radio that marries tiny radio transmitters to featherweight hydrogen balloons capable of sailing around the globe—sometimes many times. In this hour-long video—really a published Zoom conference—radio amateur […]

In the publishing biz—mainly broadcasting—we have something called a PSA, a public service announcement. You see these all the time when the station discharges its duty to keep the citizenry duly informed about stocking up on hurricane supplies, not driving through flood water and remembering to vote. Think of this week’s video as a PSA. […]

This week’s video, courtesy of VASAviation, is a brief and bright example of how things are not supposed to work, but sometimes do anyway. The setup is at Austin-Bergstrom airport early Saturday morning (Feb. 4) in weather that was just barely flyable.  The visibility was an eighth of a mile in freezing fog; what pilots […]

I’ve got a little stick time in a Twin Otter, throwing skydivers out the back door. I’ve got a lot more time sitting in the back waiting to be tossed out, a task for which the DH6 Twin Otter is perfect. And this humorous rap video by Buz and Dorothy Andrusiak show how perfectly DeHavilland […]

I got my introduction to how slick a rubber-contaminated runway can be at New York’s JFK airport one misty Saturday morning. I was based in Connecticut then and used to fly periodic charters for passengers catching flights out of the three New York airports. We usually used a Saratoga for this. The flight in was […]

If you’ve attended AirVenture or any of the other major airshows, you’ve heard it. You could identify its sound with your eyes closed. “It” is the incomparable Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the iconic 12-cylinder powerplant that powered many of the best fighters and bombers during World War II. Most of us in the U.S. will have […]

I think most people have a recurring dream or two. One of mine is that I’m able to fly by simply extending my arms and summoning some sort of mysterious force to levitate myself into flight. In my dreamy state, I always seem to conclude that mankind has always had this ability, it just took […]

Over the course of a typical news year, AVweb readers send us thousands of photos of airplanes, flight operations and airshows. Here’s a compendium of the best from the 2022 haul. And speaking of best, we wish all our reader and viewers a happy, safe and prosperous 2023.

When Time placed Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders on its cover as Men of the Year, it soon followed that the crew and the mission itself saved 1968 on that astonishing Christmas Eve 54 years ago. The mission itself had been a bold decision, leapfrogging several plodding test flights and […]