Aviation Marketing Posts

Over the past quarter century I’ve read most of the Notices of Proposed Rulemaking that would affect general aviation. What separates the just released NPRM that introduces Part 107, Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Syste…

 Simply put, first-person view (FPV) is a smart phone perspective of flight. It gives the person in command of a remotely piloted aircraft a real-time look at where it is going. And it is the future of flying because it provides what people wa…

Sporty’s debut of its Cessna 172LITE Project has rightfully attracted the attention of a cannonball launched from the high dive at the deep end of the aviation pool. While most are paying attention to the splash made by the airplane’s re…

FAA rules alone won’t prevent a drone-jet collisionBy Robert P. Mark, reprinted from The Chicago Tribune, December 25, 2014(Photo -Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune)This holiday season, one of the hottest-selling toys has been the qua…

This past week the mailman delivered a reason to think about my unknown but rapidly approaching expiration date. Thanking me for my four decade membership tenure, EAA offered me a three-figure rebate if I bought a four-figure lifetime membership.T…

As the photo here shows, it looks like an old Aero Commander, and when I first saw this photo that was my initial identification. And then I noticed that the tail feathers were lower, and that the horizontal stab didn’t have the CommanderR…

The classroom was a 150 hp PA-12 Super Cruiser on floatsHow many times during an airline pre-takeoff briefing have you heard the flight attendant say, “In the event of a water landing …”Trust me, there ain’t no such thing a…

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.I wouldn’t be much of…

There are many ways to look at the recent spate of passenger confrontations resulting from one reclining into the knees and face of another. The confrontations have been occurring for years, ever since the airline MBAs started shrinking the seat pi…

Over the past century dreamers have invested in their vision of a flying car. There’s a good catalog of them in a recent New York Time article, “Why We’re Not Driving the Friendly Skies.”Expanding on the article’s head…

Idealists in 18th and 19th century America founded a number of utopian communities. Falling victim to their cultural and social ideals, they rarely lasted into the 20th century, and in the 21st century the Amana Colonies, Shakers, and Oneida Communi…

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. One obstacle to learning t…

“What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen at AirVenture this year?” For the past 15 or 20 years, this is the question I dread because I never have an answer for my interlocutors. Don’t get me wrong, I find many things inter…

If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, click here to listen to the program.____________________________I was working on a couple of a stories related to the Malaysian Airlines tragedy over the weekend when an idea popped into my head. The Nall Repor…

On a two-wheeled vagabondage adventure, I reunited with my riding buddy in Seattle, and he’s leading us east toward Oshkosh. For those unfamiliar, vagabondage has a direction of travel, like east, but no route or itinerary. Except for one must…

At American airports these days is hard to find a good word from pilots about their aviation future. After covering the 57th Sonex Aircraft Builder’s Workshop at the company’s Oshkosh, Wisconsin, hangars it seems clear I’ve been lo…

Recovered from his landing mishap in the Pacific Northwest, Richard Bach has resumed his online conversation, and he is as thought provoking as ever. In “Change of an Era” he reflects on the change progress has always brought to aviatio…

Memorial Day here in the United States is one of the days we remember all the men and women who served and perished in armed conflicts around the world since our own Civil War in the mid-1800s.The stories emerging about how poorly we treat these me…

A recent New York Times story, “Air Travel Economics Make Midsize Hubs Unprofitable“, explained why airline travel today often demands long drives to the nearest major airline hub. This withdrawal of service from outlying communities and…

I like hanging around with other flight instructors. Not only do they understand how an airplane flies, but they also know the intricacies of those dark corners of a flight envelope … things that can lead a new pilot down a rabbit hole of trou…

When my wife and I were married a long time ago, we promised ourselves that if we ever had kids and wanted to travel on an airplane, we’d just fork over the extra money for a ticket. To us, the risk of injury should they fly out of our hands d…

More than it has in the previous two years I’ve judged an airport writing contest, fear was a central theme in the nearly three dozen essays submitted by students in elementary, middle, and high school. Most of them addressed airline flights …

When the FAA tells you they’re changing the way they conduct business because they want to be more fair to someone, or that they want to save money, it’s probably time to duck. You can pretty much be sure that whatever they have in mind …

I can’t believe I’m going to say something nice about the TSA again. That’s twice in a couple of months.I do think it’s worth mentioning that the TSA has actually created a product with value in their new TSA PreCheck card, …