Video of the Week

Even pilots with only a casual knowledge of World War II will know who Paul Tibbets was. We’ve all seen the famous photo, frozen in time by a flashbulb, of his departure from Tinian island in a B-29 named the Enola Gay. Twelve hours later, after bombing Hiroshima with the first nuclear weapon, Tibbets returned […]

The sands of time have all but buried one of the great aircraft saves of all time: Reeve Aleutian Flight 8. This week’s Best of the Web video by Mayday: Air Disaster reprises the accident, which one NTSB investigator described as one of the greatest feats of airmanship he had ever seen. Reeve 8 was […]

The Cirrus line of aircraft have been flying for 20 years and although most people in aviation know they have full aircraft parachutes, it’s fair to ask how effective these have been. With more than 90 uses of the so-called CAPS, has the system really saved lives? In this video, AVweb’s Paul Bertorelli analyzes the […]

A YouTube video widely derided as a pilot faking an engine failure so he could bail out of his stricken airplane was in fact caused by a little appreciated hazard of being accidentally sucked out of the airplane when a door comes open. In this week’s Best of the Web video, crack aviation investigator Bryan […]

Last November, Maxime Compagnon crashed his Zlin Aviation Savage Cruiser in the Austrian Alps after encountering an unseen cable at 9700 feet. In this video, he describes the circumstances of his accident with a focus on survival equipment that made a difference in difficult circumstances, including a flight helmet, vest and PLB. This week’s AVweb […]

Electric airplanes are coming at us a mile a minute with claims that seem to defy the laws of physics and maybe even Ohm’s Law. In this AVweb video, Paul Bertorelli takes a critical look at what most people in the industry consider to be a leading contender to own the urban air mobility market: […]

If all goes as planned, the world’s most ambitious telescope—not just space telescope but any telescope—will launch this week on an Arianspace booster from French Guiana. It will ultimately be deployed at what’s called an L2 Lagrange point about one million miles from Earth’s orbit and sufficiently close to the sun to require a tennis-court […]

Even if you’re not building an airplane, you probably have need to bore holes in metal from time to time. In this continuing series by our sister publication KITPLANES, Paul Dye explains the finer points of using a step drill, sometimes also called a UnitBit. Basically, it makes a big hole out of a smaller […]

Editor’s note: Last week, my friend David Shelton shot this spectacular video of mountain paragliding in Mexico. Tapalpa is in Mexico’s Sierra Madre region about 400 miles west of Mexico City. Here’s his report. –Paul Bertorelli Last week, I enjoyed a fine week of soaring in Mexico, along with 16 members of my paragliding family. […]