The Buzz Posts

Still Time to Save Some Towers — Straight off the massive printing presses at the General Aviation Airport Coalition in Washington comes late word that a deal is in the works to pull some cash from one place and send it somewhere else. What…

Realizing that I wouldn’t be able to attend the annual Air Charter Safety Foundation’s Safety Symposium (ACSF) in Washington last week got me thinking about how little publiscize charter jets at a transportation assett. For those unfamil…

I was reading NATCA President Paul Rinaldi‘s remarks yesterday from his luncheon talk at the Washington Aero Club in advance of Friday’s “end of the world” or “no big deal” sequestration day depending on whom you …

Sometimes the best action is to take none, which is precisely the route I chose last week when many people were falling over themselves to tell outgoing Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood how much they appreciated his past four years on the job.…

Not long ago, I had a chance to visit some old friends here in Chicago when I took the family down to a few of the Chicago museums on the east edge of downtown. Having survived 12 years of the Chicago Public School system, I know the former field-tr…

At the risk of garnering the wrath of my buddy Scott Spangler who wondered here last week whether technology was really making us more goon-like than aviator, I present yet another piece of technology. This one functions much like a Swiss Army Knife…

One of the first things I learned as a graduate student at Northwestern’s Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program 20 years ago and years later as a teacher in that same program was the value of a brand. Managing a brand is so import…

There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that American Airlines axed the contracts of their pilots just a few hours past Labor Day last month. Kind of adds insult to injury. I feel for the pilots having been around to watch the ugliness of…

Thanks to my comrades at The Airplane Geeks Show for staying way ahead of me and posting my annual Labor Day message. In case you don’t listen to our show — impossible as that might be — do give this link a quick click. Promise I d…

Less than a decade ago, when the symptom’s of aviation’s decline were firmly manifested, a number of aviation’s alphabet organizations focused mostly on increasing their slice of a shrinking pie. With the number of active pilots an…

Until the other day, I thought a troll was one of those horrid little creatures living under bridges just waiting for the chance to reach up and scare the dickens out of some little kid. But lo and behold, as a reader told me, a troll in the Interne…

Every so often work becomes fun. OK, admittedly, not very often. When the folks at Aviation International News asked me to check out the new Brake-to-Vacate system Airbus had designed, they mentioned I’d have a chance to see it in action since…

I’ve been dreading this summer … for the first time in my life though actually. That’s because next month the final French BEA report on the Air France 447 crash will be released.Most professional pilots have a pretty good idea wh…

Thierry Dubois and I have known each other for many years although I can’t even recall how we met any longer. I just recall that we became friends years ago once we realized we were both hardcore aviation journalists. But in addition to his Eu…

I was trying to explain some of the subtleties behind the word altruism to my daughter this morning at breakfast, and it made me think about the fight against aviation user fees.And yes, we have a few truly interesting family meals around our house…

On April 24, the e-mail edition of Callback arrived in my in box. It proudly announced that the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System had processed its one millionth safety incident report on March 21, 2012. Three days later I received the NTSB rele…

I’ve been a movie geek since I was a kid. So how could I refuse Zac’s Colbert’s (relation to Stephen Colbert??) request to pontificate about which movies are his favorites during airline travel? I wonder if my friend Mary Kirby at …

As a Vietnam-Era veteran myself and someone who used the G.I. Bill to cover the cost of some of my early flight training, I was more than a little interested when June Olsen approached me about writing a story about today’s G.I. Bill (Actually…

Should passengers ever be afraid on an airplane? Let me think on that a second. Ah … nope. I don’t think so.I know it happens  sometimes when people fly on small airplanes piloted by some dumb-fool hot-rod aviator. We all pay the price …

Word of Mouth marketing (WOM) is a bit like the Superman of campaigns. Nothing can stop it. That’s because the company the campaign focuses on has little or nothing to do with the effort. It’s all customer driven. People recommending pro…

I’m made quite a career out of whining about the aviation industry, but even I need someone’s shoulder to moan on every so often. As I sit here in a hotel room in Bordeaux trying to get back to the states from France using an American/Ib…

Last Saturday was not a good day for transportation, but for once the bad news was not about aviation. An immense cruise ship — the Costa Concordia — capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the west coast of Italy where rocks near the sho…

A college professor of mine told me a story years ago — OK … MANY years ago — about how solving one problem often creates another. Boy … did our switch from Feedburner to Mail Chimp subscriber software — not to mention …

In case today’s title has you wondering, don’t worry. We haven’t decided to farm our content production out to a cheap, new labor source.In 5 and a half years of writing Jetwhine, the world has continued to evolve around us althou…