AVweb Insider

Occasionally an aviation event jumps up to bite the oblivious pilot on the buttocks without warning. For example—and stop me if you’ve heard this—a seemingly healthy pilot of advancing age (you decide) walks into a medical office for a flight physical only to encounter the dreaded AME phrase, “Hmmm …” Felt upbeat entering the exam […]

Big shout-out here to Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly for clarifying for me why I’m not flying on his airline. Or any other. Kelly had to walk back a statement he made last week in a congressional hearing that masks on airliners don’t add much to passenger or crew safety. To be fair, he had […]

It was one of those absolutely clear days in central Montana where the sky seems to go on forever and the blue has a uniform deepness from horizon to horizon. I think it was in 1968 and my father finished knotting his tie and adjusted his hat and headed for the car with the briefcase […]

As daylight molts inside winter’s knickers, pilots well north of the equatorial belt adjust, perhaps begrudgingly. When the recumbent sun pumps Kodachrome schmaltz across your Bellanca 260 to highlight every splattered mosquito acquired last summer, think before clicking that InstaFame shot on your phone. If the light source is behind you, the photo will resemble […]

I have a love-hate relationship with the notion that we analyze and report on aviation accidents as a means of preventing more from happening. It’s apparently not working very well because the accident rate is more or less static and pilots keep digging smoking craters for the same reasons, most of which are related to […]

Every student pilot (and no, I am not going to call you a “learner”) is familiar with the forced landing exercise. The airplane is out in the practice area and the instructor pulls the throttle to idle and tells you the engine just failed. You then frantically look around for a field to land in, […]

I have a love/hate relationship with the month of October. I love the even-year Octobers because those are the ones I don’t have to drudge through a Flight Instructor Refresher Course—the dreaded FIRC. But this is an odd year, so I’ve just completed an online eFIRC and I’m feeling, once again, that I’ve expended a […]

Be suspicious of articles beginning with, “This is a true story.” Except, this is true: In 1925, Rose Budine, 21, wanted to fly. Like an opening scene from one of my forgotten novels, barnstormer Fred Kane arrived in Kansas City, KS, for a skydiving demonstration. When his regular jumper, Fallon Sashweight, quit, Rose stepped from […]

Presidential speechwriters have a term called “reaching for the marble.” When you understand that it refers to the pithy text on the friezes of the nation’s iconic monuments, the connotation is so clear that I needn’t waste pixels listing the qualifying words. This being an aviation blog, I’ll segue straight into the aviation version of […]

“Inflation” is the mot du jour spitteling from non-aviation lips to scare impressionable children into believing it’s a real threat lurking in Binkley’s closet of anxieties. It’s not. I lived the 1970’s real inflation, not Weimar real but pot prices just went up again, real. Tough times. Aviation commentators are giving inflation a snooze because […]