AVweb Insider

When you cover aviation as we do at AVweb, a certain siege mentality sets in. The field is broad, literally and geographically, and as with every other aspect of journalism these days, we work with minimal resources and even less time. So when we venture afield to try a new airplane or shoot a video […]

While I was busy weaving my theory of evolving information technology and its impact on how we think about air crashes, the cause and effect was actually happening yesterday. In an unusual move-no doubt driven by the politics of smoking holes-the transportation department convened an urgent hearing to improve the oversight of pilot hiring.Said Transpo […]

In case you haven’t noticed, the way you receive and process information has undergone a fundamental revolution during the past decade. You now have stuff coming at you a mile a minute from dozens of sources-Web sites, e-mail, print, cellphone and texting, radio, cable. What you may not have noticed is that this has radically […]

Someone is lying or badly mistaken about what happened at Long Beach Airport on May 22 because the version of the events told by pilot David Perry and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency are both divergent and adamantly defended by both parties. But regardless of who held which weapons and for what purpose, […]

The tragic disappearance of Air France 447 over the South Atlantic this week has reignited the Thomas Aquinas approach to accident speculation. Aquinas’s famous proofs held that anything complex, mysterious or too beautiful for man to create was the work of God, therefore God existed. The “god” in this case is the Autoblame switch for […]

Nowhere is the heavy hand of government more evident than in aviation. But sometimes that’s not a bad thing, actually.First, the ugly side of government intrusion. All major aircraft crashes are painful, none more so than the crash of United Flight 93 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. In addition to all of […]

One reliable way of stirring up trouble around here is to connect politics with aviation. (I’m good at the trouble part.) The second best might be to discuss economics and aviation in the same sentence. Airline pilots are good at that because pay levels are a favorite topic.This should be obvious to anyone following our […]

As I was reading over the cockpit voice recorder from the Colgan 3407 crash in Buffalo, I had a sudden queasy feeling, as did my colleague Mary Grady in her blog last week. I don’t know enough about the state of airline training and pilot experience to have much of an opinion on whether both […]

Well, we don’t have the whole story yet but what we do know is disturbing at best and a threat to the individual freedoms the federal government should be trying to protect.According to Claude Hendrickson, of Bessemer, Ala., the feds simply seized his Douglas AD-4N Skyraider about six months after he flew it here from […]

This week’s NTSB hearings on the Colgan Air crash have been all over the mainstream news, which means that many of us who fly, and/or work in the aviation industry in whatever capacity, are addressing questions from our friends and relatives about the safety of flight. Most people don’t like riding on those “little” airplanes […]