Video of the Week

Airplanes are clearly a passion for the Thomas family, and they're pretty handy with a video camera and editing software, too. Steve and his wife Tina own Poplar Grove Airmotive, a full-service maintenance shop at Poplar Grove Airport (which they also own) in Illinois. Their personal aircraft are a Waco SRE, a Beech 18 and a Brunner-Wingle Bird, and they paid tribute to their airplanes this way.

Chuck Aaron is an FAA-certified aerobatic helicopter pilot. And he flies for Red Bull. The helicopter is a modified Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm BO-105. Aaron can be seen flying at Red Bull events.

A group of University of Toronto students has just announced that a flight of their human-powered flapping-wing aircraft, The Snowbird, on August 2 may have set an FAI record with a "first ever" flight for its kind. The group believes that after being towed aloft, the aircraft maintained speed and altitude for 19.3 seconds and covered approximately 145 meters while flying at 25.6 km/h. During that time, it was powered solely by its pilot and designer, U of T engineering Ph.D. candidate Todd Reichert, who estimates he's capable of about 0.3 horsepower. Reichert believes his team's effort represents the first ever sustained flight of a human-powered ornithopter. The FAI ruling committee (the record keepers) is expected to offer its opinion in October.

AVweb visits the Airline History Museum in Kansas City.

Don't look now, but LED landing lights have gotten brighter and better over just the last year. In this video, AVweb takes a look at some of the current offerings and concludes they perform better than the old standby 5509 tractor bulb.

Glasair Aviation's Mikael Via introduces the new turbocharged, carbon-fiber-bodied Sportsman TC to Kitplanes editor-in-chief Mar Cook at EAA AirVenture 2010.

This video comes from an airport security camera, believed to be at New York's JFK, where a 747 got momentarily loose from the crew and pushed a tug across the ramp. Yeah, we know - it's supposed to work the other way around.

Wanna go fast and climb like hell? That's what the Silver Eagle Conversion of a P210 with a Rolls Royce turbine engine does. Aviation Consumer's Paul Bertorelli recently took a flight demo in the airplane.

We introduced you to 19-year-old James Wesley Perkins, who's gone by the nickname Slick since he can remember, just after the 2009 AirVenture Oshkosh via a video he put together of all the stuff we didn't get to see, or saw out of the corners of our eyes as we rushed from one assignment to another. Another AirVenture has come and gone and the routine was pretty much the same for AVweb staffers. Thankfully Slick had his video camera and talented eye at the show and recently posted his assembly of the highlights of AirVenture 2010. The young future naval aviator has also had a few highlights of his own in the past year.

Avidyne has a slide-in replacement for the STEC-55X autopilots common to Cirrus SR20s and SR22s. Aviation Consumer's Jeff Van West took it up for a flight to the claims of improved performance and new safety features.