AVweb Insider

The late Robin Olds used to tell a funny story about his experience commanding a fighter wing in Vietnam. Olds had been a World War II ace and, during the development of the F-4 Phantom II, had become a pain to the Air Force staff during the 1950s for his insistence that any new fighter […]

After I read the NTSB’s findings on glass cockpits and safety, I felt the urge to stifle a yawn. My initial reaction was, is this all there is? My next reaction was to try to recall if glass displays were ever pitched as significant safety enhancers. Maybe I missed school that day or perhaps the […]

Some years ago, when I was flying midnight charters, another pilot and I dropped off a bunch of machine parts at Detroit City Airport, gassed up and headed east at 5 a.m. As it frequently is during a Detroit winter, the weather was drizzly, cold and low.We climbed up through the overcast and broke out […]

A lot of the debate about how to handle the threat of terrorism, actual terrorism and the results of terrorism in the U.S. has been about whether it’s a military or justice issue.After apparently leaning the other way initially, President Obama now seems to think a military mindset is what is needed or, perhaps, is […]

I’ve found the reaction to last week’s kid controller fiasco nearly as interesting as the event itself. It’s kind of a popular case study in how people perceive and manage risk-not just physical risk, but the sociological kind, too.As pilots, we have a Pavlovian negative reaction when media outlets-mostly cable news-overplay a story, as they […]

Just as I think judgment in the world of aviation can’t get any more bizarre, along comes a story like the one that just trickled into my inbox. The headline on it: “Child Controls Air Traffic at Busy JFK.”The upshot of the story is that a JFK tower controller evidently brought his kid into the […]

Southwest Airlines continues to get pilloried for tossing director Kevin Smith-a self-confessed fat guy-off one of its 737s a couple of weeks ago. It has devolved into a mildly amusing public trading of insults and apologies.I would have found it a lot funnier if I hadn’t had the pleasure-maybe four or five times-of being seated […]

The degree to which the voting public will tolerate malfeasance and incompetence in government is one of the most astonishing aspects of modern life. I sometimes wonder if this tolerance is in inverse proportion to distance-we’ll suffer fools in local government more readily than we will at the state or federal level.And here in my […]

From the we-are-sometimes-our-own-worst-enemy file comes two tidbits, the stolen Cirrus story and the rise of the “informed expert source.”For some reason, when general aviation is under unfavorable scrutiny, as it certainly is this week in the wake of Austin, Texas crash, we tend to make a hash of things with a second or a third […]

As Thursday’s bizarre events in Austin were unfolding, we had a slightly urgent discussion around the office about how to spin our second-day coverage to minimize the impact on general aviation.About 10 minutes into that rumination, I asked myself: why? Our audience of pilots and aviation savvy readers knows exactly what and how to think […]