AVweb Insider

If a thing happens, say, 1000 times a year or about three times a day, is it worth reporting as news? That’s the calculus on aviation accidents, which we report on semi-regularly here on AVweb. We’re not especially consistent about it. We don’t report on all the fatal accidents, of which there about 200 a […]

“There are no ‘storm safe’ hangers. Requiring something that does not exist is laughable.” Embodied in this comment, which appeared in last week’s poll, is the sort of low-information that bedevils credible preparation for increasingly expensive weather disasters. The uninformed may enjoy a cynical laugh, but I can assure you a couple of hundred owners […]

Getting out of the way of a dangerous hurricane seems like a no-brainer, but it can be a nuanced, nerve-racking decision tree. As Ian bore down on the west coast of Florida Tuesday, it proved simpler for me than in the past. In 2017, we bugged out for Irma and I swore I’d never do […]

Could it be we are at the one-in-one-out phase of the budding eVTOL market? This week, the outtie is KittyHawk, an early and well-funded entrant into what is imagined as the Urban Air Mobility market. The closure is significant because the company was well along with a couple of designs and seemed to have investment […]

I doubt if there are many AVweb readers who, upon reading an accident report, don’t have one of two reactions. (a) Hey, I already knew this and I’d never do that or (b) I didn’t know this, I’ll be careful not to do it in the future. “This” is whatever happened in the accident being […]

Instructors know that student pilots teach us much more than we give in return, particularly when failure is involved. One student who showed me the meaning of dignity while floundering in the borscht of humiliation was Karl. But what’s in a name? Any veteran knows that if you do something outlandish, you’ll receive a nickname. […]

Pilots buy and sell aircraft and equipment with a passion, so it only made sense back in January of this year to undertake the daunting task of adding a classified advertising section to AVweb’s editorial package. The result is available here, and AVweb readers with something to sell can take advantage of free listings for […]

I could reach for metaphors involving dogs catching cars or irresistible forces encountering immovable objects, but I’ll just go with a simple fact: After nearly 13 years of trying, GAMI finally has a fleetwide STC for its 100-octane unleaded aviation fuel, G100UL. Mark the historic date as Sept. 1, 2022. Now comes the hard part. […]

Mike Collins, the late Apollo astronaut, famously said one of his great regrets was not saying something more epic when, as CAPCOM, he cleared Apollo 8 to reignite its Saturn IV-B to commence its historic voyage to the Moon on Dec. 21, 1968. In the dry parlance of NASA, it was “go for TLI”—translunar injection. […]

I don’t know about you, but I long ago gave up on the notion of the perfectibility of homo the sap. At this stage, I’m happy to settle for a modest majority case of veering away from the most lethal things in aviation and if you follow accident reporting, you’d be forgiven for believing we […]