The Buzz Posts

The most surprising aspect of Cessna’s decision to build its new model 162 Skycatcher in China is that anyone was at all surprised by the move. Now comes word that some people are shocked, shocked enough, in fact, that they might want their d…

I hope the folks in airplane towns like Wichita, Seattle and Duluth are prepared for what looks to be quite a few sleepless nights now that the world’s first flying machine constructed totally from recyclable materials has flown. Built in a c…

It may be difficult to imagine, but the airline industry was not always the focus of the intense scorn we see today. And as I dug a bit for this story, I found that those glory days of aviation – golden might be a stretch I think – were …

Just when I thought I’d never again need to worry about remembering more model numbers Cessna tonight announced not only that it was the successful bidder in the Columbia bankruptcy case, but that it would rename those two new airplanes the Ce…

I love offering my two cents on everything aviation here at Jetwhine. But every so often I also like to share a few stories about some of the cool people I’ve met along the way during my career.Since today is Thanksgiving and most everyone is…

Some of you might recall a post from a few months back in which I expressed disdain that former ALPA president Duane Woerth had in a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, signed on to the same old tired airline/FAA line about what’s wro…

There’s an interesting union story floating around that seemed worth sharing although it honestly made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Maybe some of you can add something to it.A story made the wires last night about a carpenterR…

Southwest Airlines has again proven that running an airline – at least from a customer’s perspective – doesn’t need to simply fluctuate between chaos and more chaos.On the way back from the Blog World Expo conference in Las …

The National Transportation Safety Board met Thursday to talk about an industry epidemic … pilot fatigue. It’s about time. The Air Line Pilots Association folks were nice enough to let me write an article about fatigue in their magazine …

Jim Ott wrote an interesting article in last week’s Aviation Week and Space Technology called Surly Skies about … what else, airline travel.He said, “Any adaptation airlines make to counter the negatives of air travel seem to be u…

I have to admit I never gave this a thought before I read the story in the Times Online.Singapore Airlines, the first carrier to operate the Airbus A380, seems to have gone to great lengths to be sure that no one on board the massive aircraft is u…

I wonder how surprised the people at Bombardier actually were this weekend that SAS decided to permanently ground its fleet of 27 Q400 turboprops after a third landing gear accident in a month. The decision was announced Sunday as confidence in the …

There’s pilot shortage brewing. It’s began churning on the regional airline side of the industry as pilots bail out of flying little airplanes – sorry, RJs are still big to me – headed for the majors who – so …

I heard an interesting interview on NPR last week with Richard Hurd from Cornell University. He said the use of labor strikes across the U.S. has declined by 90 percent since the 1970s.When Hurd began to focus on the Reagan Era, I expected to hear …

An airline pilot career has a few more thorns sticking out of it these days. Pay scales are down, duty days are longer, schedules stink and passengers are easily riled. But even with all that said, I still think it makes for a pretty incredible care…

News last week from the White House that even George Bush has finally run out of excuses to avoid admitting the U.S. aviation system is in need of serious reform should actually not come as much of a shock.The Business Travel Coalition’s chai…

Despite the private e-mail tongue lashing I took for my comments a few weeks back about the need to retire the Shuttle, I’m pretty fond of the concept of space flight. Even at my advanced age, I’d be at the Kennedy Space Center in a hear…

If you click on this link, you’ll find yourself sitting smack dab in front of a FlightAware screen all tuned up to Day Jet’s online identity. This gives you the tools to follow all DayJet trips in near real time.Personally, I hope these…

I wrote something here a few months back about the Air Line Pilots Association’s (ALPA) plan to start squeezing tighter on airline management as payback for the concessions pilots have delivered and how many airlines have failed to now re…

One of the really annoying problems inherent in writing books like my recently published McGraw Hill volume – a Professional Pilot Career Guide – designed to answer every imaginable question about landing the best flying job since I knew…

Most people counted PATCO out years ago. PATCO was the union that represented air traffic controllers during the infamous 1981 strike that cost 12,000 PATCO members their jobs.But PATCO never really disappeared. It just shrank to become a tiny inde…

I was thinking about blogging as I tend to do these days with the first anniversary of Jetwhine approaching. What makes blogging valuable to those of us in the aviation industry is the direct link we offer between the writer and the reader, somethin…

After the Koz Convention drew hundreds of political pundits to Chicago for a weekend’s blogging about the U.S. political climate last month, the Daily Koz, Markos Moulitsas’ blog of political intrigue and corruption, ran a piece about ou…

Today is Labor Day here in the states, a national holiday devoted to the men and women on the front lines, people responsible for building the industrial infrastructure of the U.S. economy.                                                           L…