The Buzz Posts

Every time I hear someone use the words general aviation and China in the same sentence, I can’t help but think back a few years ago to the early days of the Cessna 162 Skycatcher.Remember the bombshell announcement, when Cessna told the wor…

A number of Republican governors have been pegging the media’s popularity meters the past few weeks with talk of pouncing on the collective bargaining rights of public service employees, one of the last havens of solid unionism left in Americ…

Flight instructor pay and benefits are an integral component in creating a flight school faculty that reliably provides an education consistent with the investment made by the students they serve. Unfortunately, flight training is at the bitter end …

Regular Jetwhine readers know that a story posted here relating to the FAA is not unusual, nor is the fact that I tend not to be terribly supportive of some of the people who work there. Regular readers should know that I try — note the word try — …

The FAA Safety Hotline is a no-brainer of a customer-service tool built to offer users and aviation industry employees a chance to spill the beans about issues that affect all areas of flying safety. People can leave a name and phone number or t…

By now, you’ve heard plenty from me on the DOT’s Future of Aviation Advisory Committee (FAAC). The FAAC was thankfully put to sleep last month. I still think it was a colossal waste of resources to bring so much talent together in one pl…

Sometimes I think we have only ourselves to blame for this kind of publicity. Business aviation seems to still enjoy that low profile, even since the chaos of the Big Three auto guys denying their companies actually owned airplanes, much less used t…

As part of the conversation on the AOPA survey on why students drop out of aviation, we got an e-mail from Dr. Penny Rafferty Hamilton,  Ph.D. She had recently  completed a two-year research project that led to Teaching Women to Fly, which shares th…

When Janelle from CNN called for my opinion of the latest aviation security boondoggle, I had to admit I knew very little about the incident.The story focused on the Sacramento-based airline pilot who secretly recorded a security door in the termin…

The service delivered by some ATC facilities today is just not what it used to be in the old days before the PATCO strike. There, I said it.Having been around in the old days — like the 70s – when traffic at most towers was insane by today&…

Don’t feel bad if you don’t find the acronym FAAC jumping right to the head of your aviation conversations these days. It’s not exactly front page news to anyone in the aviation industry, except perhaps the few dozen hand-picked p…

Editor Notes: Being based in the Midwest, Chicago in particular, makes the name Siskel and Ebert and the Movies legendary when it comes to chatter about film. While neither Scott nor I are will even attempt to compare ourselves to that dynamic cellu…

That title is what we call a grabber, intended only to make you read the rest of this short post. Without this disclaimer, some might believe that I think landing at any of these airports is a piece of cake … and I surely do not.My thanks to…

by Rob Mark — The fact that I grew up during the radical insanity of the 60’s is not going to come as any great surprise to some readers. It might actually explain quite a bit about my personality to a few in fact.But before any snap d…

Cessna’s new 162 Skycatcher has begun rolling out of the assembly hangar at Wichita’s Yingling Aviation across the ramp from Cessna’s mothership factory complex. Cessna expects to deliver about 50 of the Special Light Sport Aircraf…

For those skeptics who just a few years ago tore into Cessna Aircraft as the development of the Skycatcher began to move ahead, comes this photo of the mighty Cessna 162 going nose to nose with one of America’s finest F-18s in the ultimate st…

That Future of Flight Training session at AirVenture a few weeks ago left me feeling pretty cranky … whiny even.  Not because of the session itself. All the folks on the panel, including moderator Greg Laslo, couldn’t have been nicer.Bu…

Sometimes we bloggers simply talk too much trying to express how we feel about something like AirVenture when simply letting the story tell itself works much better. With that clever insight in mind, may I present for your review, a few photos that…

AirVenture 2010 will soon be home to thousands of airplanes, hundreds of thousands of people and dozens and dozens of great programs all designed to stimulate just about anyone’s curiosity about all things aviation. For the social-media curio…

Each year since 2006 as AirVenture approaches, I take a minute to look back on the new friends I’ve made through our social media contacts on Twitter as well as here at Jetwhine. The blog is almost four years old, while my “JetwhineR…

In an era when airlines report $2.7 Billion in fresh baggage-fee revenue from work they used to handle for free, is anything sacred? Probably not.In the U.S. though, Fixed Base Operators (FBO) still give away plenty for free and we all know it. Bu…

On October 11, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 48, the California Private Postsecondary Education Act of 2009. To summarize the act’s 57 pages of tiny type, it gives students a financial parachute should the priv…

With tens of thousands of travelers stranded all over much of the Western Hemisphere still trying to either get to or from major European destinations last week, airline management became understandably tense at what was indeed the worst travel cri…

The nice folks at Fox and Friends asked me to join a debate last Saturday morning about the new FAA rule allowing some pilots to fly while taking anti-depressant medications such as Prozac, Lexipro, Zoloft and Celexa, all designed to treat the symp…