AVweb Insider

Someone accused me of disliking Piper Cubs simply because I’m an Aeronca snob. Not true … mostly. I’ve adored Cubs since I first saw a J-3 levitate off Ramapo, New York Airport on an unstable spring morning when I was an unstable kid. Making little forward progress, it dangled as though suspended by a stray […]

I was thinking the other day that I’ve come to view social media as sort of like four busy Unicom frequencies continuously splattering each other until the occasional legible word breaks through. Then I realized I’ve always thought that, just more so now. But the legible word did break through last month on our YouTube […]

When it comes to taxes, there aren’t very many original thoughts on the subject. The same old methods, occasionally with a smear of lipstick, rise and fall with the same platitudes about why they work when they’re introduced and why they don’t work on the rare occasions when they’re pulled. For most of us, the […]

If I were more diligent about keeping logbooks, I could look up the date when my airplane partner and I flew up to meet John and Martha King in Jacksonville for some kind of event or another. When we got to the airport to depart, the weather was crap; probably ¼-mile and indefinite ceiling. It […]

I really should stop reading so many accident reports, but I am suffering from some sort of psychosis that prevents me from quitting. Just as soon as I think I’ve reached step two of the 10-step withdrawal process, I’m clicking on another one and plugging the details into my database. And just as soon as […]

In the early days of the space program, a famous quote was attributed to multiple astronauts, but Alan Shepard’s version was the most succinct. When he was asked what he was thinking about sitting atop the fueled Redstone rocket, he replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.” […]

I was never a whiz at doing math in my head, but I’m worse now. So I practically had to resort to my fingers to calculate how long it has been since I humped cameras, recorders and notebooks around to cover a show: 19 months. That’s right. The last show I did was AirVenture 2019. […]

In 2015, I flew the Fisk arrival into AirVenture with a friend. It was typically busy but, as often happens, turned manic when we neared the runway. We had been instructed to land on the orange dot, then in mid-flare, the controller changed the plan and said extend to the next dot. His elevated tone […]

In the depths of the 2008 downturn—I think it was probably 2009—something Jack Pelton, then CEO of Cessna, said at NBAA stuck with me. New aircraft sales had taken a nauseating plunge and bizjet inventories were as high as they had been in years. It wasn’t that nothing was selling, but not much was selling. […]

There must be something about spring that inspires new initiatives and confident moves to the future and U.S. military leaders are in fine fettle, designing their dream fleets of the latest and greatest to protect the country and many others. The Air Force and Navy have trotted out billions in plans for new aircraft to […]