Opinion

Why the war hero, test pilot and airshow great means so much to us pilots Was Bob Hoover the greatest pilot ever? I don’t know. He surely needs to be in that conversation, but when all is said and done, the result is discovering that the question is unanswerable. Truth is, it’s impossible to say […]

By the time you read this, there might not be quite as much buzz surrounding the remarkable film by Academy Award®-winning director Clint Eastwood and starring Academy Award®-winning actor Tom Hanks, which chronicles the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson.” Then, again, with award season getting underway, the film might be generating a different kind of […]

A court ruling puts the principle of FAA control at risk. Why that’s something aviation can’t live with. When the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a liability suit by a pilot’s widow over an allegedly faulty engine that caused the crash that killed the woman’s husband, they opened a can of worms, angry, […]

Now that the new ACS testing standards are in effect, the good news is, it’s a whole new ballgame. This is a good thing, as the old ballgame, that is, the way the FAA administered tests, was, at best, useless, and, at worst, an abusive bureaucratic exercise that cost test applicants untold millions of dollars […]

Or!when really smart, successful aviation people propose really baffling things. When Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, the promising but challenged electric car company, and Space X, the promising but challenged commercial space company, unveiled at the International Astronautical Congress conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, his plans to go to Mars, well, really, for all of us […]

The passage into law of the 3rd class pilot medical certification just last week as I write has changed the way hundreds of thousands of pilots will get their medicals. It’s a fundamental change in regulations for private aviation that I’ve been pushing for these past 20 years, and it’s finally here. Victory for the […]

There’s nothing but bad and often disturbing news these days when it comes to the 2016 United States presidential race; neither major party candidate is exempt here. My question is at face value a simple one: What kind of effect will the election have on aircraft sales? The sales figures for the second quarter of […]

As a seeming parting shot in his tenure as chief executive, President Obama took a jab at aviation by singling out the segment for its contribution not to global commerce, understanding and progress, but, alas, pollution. The mechanism behind the move is a little convoluted. In essence, President Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) […]

The marketplace in aviation is in a strange place. We’re not in a depressed or even a recessed market, and while some trot out the “new normal” as commonplace, I don’t buy it. I think the name of the game is good old competition, though winning at the game takes a smarter approach than ever. […]

This is my 25th Oshkosh airshow event. By EAA standards, 25 isn’t a big number. I’m a relative newbie, in that regard. There are people wandering the show with jackets stitched with patches dating back to before I was born. Oh, to have been able to see all that they’ve seen. Oshkosh is aviation history […]