Video of the Week

AirVenture is back! Here’s AVweb’s golf cart preview of some of the things you might see at the show.

Autonomi is Garmin’s smart autonomous tech for GA airplanes and among other features includes emergency Autoland, and now a trickle-down feature called Smart Glide. During an engine power loss, Smart Glide is designed to navigate to the most suitable airfield after the pilot activates the function with a panel-mounted switch or with the Direct-To button […]

As it has with its SR piston line, Cirrus Aircraft has been making incremental upgrades to its SF-50 Vision Jet, which include the Safe Return emergency landing system and autothrottle. Ahead of AirVenture 2021, the company announced the Vision Jet G2+. It has more takeoff thrust, which puts shorter runways in the flight profile, plus […]

Avidyne has been quietly working on its next-generation flight displays it calls Vantage, which is a suite of 12.5-inch hybrid touch PFD and MFD screens. These are intended to replace—via STC—the Entegra displays in early-gen Cirrus models. It won’t be selling them until sometime in 2022, but it’s showing them at AirVenture 2021 at Oshkosh. […]

Five years ago, CubCrafters introduced the most sophisticated taildragger ever, the XCub. Now they’ve followed it up with a nosewheel version of the airplane called the NXCub and although AVweb’s Paul Bertorelli is a tailwheel kinda guy, in this detailed video review he explains the not-so-obvious reason why the NX could be a better backcountry […]

Paul Dye, a veteran aircraft builder and Editor at Large for our sister publication, KITPLANES, recently published a book on his long career as a NASA senior flight director. Dye was featured on the CBS This Morning: Saturday in this interview and profile. His NASA career spanned the entire Space Shuttle program and much of […]

Famed test pilot Chuck Yeager was a household name through much of his career. But not always. In his first book, “Across the High Frontier,” Yeager said his work during the X-1 project to exceed Mach 1 gave flight test pilots a profile—and respect—they never enjoyed before that. In 1949, he became instantly famous when […]

To say that electric airplanes are a hot item now is to give understatement a bad name. New ones appear almost weekly. In this interview video, AVweb talks to Miles O’Brien, who recently completed and aired an hourlong NOVA film on electric airplanes for PBS. O’Brien and AVweb’s Paul Bertorelli discuss why it’s so difficult […]

Light sport airplanes were supposed to be a cheaper alternative to certified aircraft and they are. But in this republication of AVweb’s analysis of the accident record of these airplanes, the data confirms what many skeptics worried about: They suffer more crashes than standard category aircraft. This video explains why.

The horrific crash of a Bonanza A36 in March due to a runway turnback attempt prompted AOPA Air Safety Institute to shoot this excellent video analyzing turnback results with four different types of aircraft. Bottom line: The turnback is viable for smaller, lightly wing-loaded aircraft flown by a proficient and prepared pilot. It’s unlikely—probably impossible—to […]