The Buzz Posts

Thoughts on United Airlines Latest PR Mess Seems that United Airlines, our home town airline here in Chicago, has managed again to create another PR mess for itself. When I was still teaching media and communications at NU, I could only hope for si…

I was really starting to like the FAA the past few years, what with the Part 23 rewrite and passage if 3rd Class Medical reform. I saw them as more of a kinder, gentler agency … more let’s all work together for the greater good and that sort of thin…

An Airplane Geek for All Seasons I’ve always found keeping up with the demands of social media to be work, quite a bit of it actually. But I think Scott and I also see the work as a necessary effort. Who else is going to dig between the cracks of th…

Malaysian Boeing 777 – @jetwhine There’s no small amount of irony in today’s announcement that the search for MH370 has officially been called off nearly three years after that Boeing 777 disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lampur to Beijing and the …

Dear Readers: One of the high points in my life this year at Oshkosh, was meeting Jen Adams, an aviation enthusiast I’ve come to know rather well. She’s not a pilot, but rather a person who found gainful employment at an airport and realized she was…

Don’t Let Santa Monica Airport Become Another Meigs Field In the pre-dawn darkness of March 31, 2003, former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s wrecking crews laid siege to Meigs Field, a single 3900-foot runway airport on the western shore of Lake Mi…

Eastwood Got It Right With Sully Complete NTSB Accident Report: US Airway 1549  (click here) Most pilots tend to take airplane movies with a grain of salt because they’re usually riddled with mistakes or enough exaggerations to quickly make us nuts.…

Ed. Note: While this article was originally written back in 2008 and while many of the names of the top folks at the organizations have changed, the issues by and large have not. That said, I believe this is worth a few minutes of your time to think…

Want to Fly at Airventure? Is there anything sadder than a bunch of pilots standing around watching a handful of other aviators fly past looking like they’re having all the fun? Ho hum. But it happens to all of us at AirVenture … every single year. …

I’d like to interrupt your afternoon for just a minute before you head out the door for the weekend. Congress is expected to vote next week on another FAA funding extension – H.R. 636 – and the industry’s hoping it’s all thumbs up … but not just bec…

Egyptair A-320 – Jetwhine.com Egyptair 804 Plus Aviation’s Dumb and Dumber It’s an old ATC trick … using the word “appears” that is. Whenever a pilot would ask us tower guys to give their landing gear the once over because of some odd cockpit indica…

Forget the Cost of Learning to Fly, Think Value You’ve obviously thought of learning to fly or you wouldn’t be here right now. Spend a little time reading Richard Bach’s classic Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I guarantee you’ll be putty in the hand…

MH370 Two Years Later: Has the Industry Changed? It’s anniversary time, but March 8 won’t be a happy day to reminisce. Two years ago, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370), a Boeing 777, disappeared from the night skies over the South China Sea on …

Publisher Note: I’ve known Jim Lara for some time since we work together on the NBAA Single Pilot Working Group trying to tackle the challenge of reducing the accident rate for people who fly business airplanes alone. Like me, Jim believes that our …

Call it what you like, privatizing, corporatizing, or commercializing the FAA air traffic control system will ruin the foundation of the world’s largest, safest, and most diverse and complex national airspace system. Oh, and unless we stand up and s…

Trying Something New Quite a few Jetwhine readers and listeners have asked what happened to The Aviation Minute, the editorial podcast series I began a couple of years ago using this neat logo. The simple answer is we’ve evolved a bit … from the ear…

Encouraging People to Replace Us Finding young people to grab the reins from us old guys in aviation is a bit like the weather … everyone talks about why we need to do something, but not everyone is clear about how to actually make that happen. Cert…

ATC and Pilots This sounds a bit pathetic, but most of the professional pilots I’ve known in my life have been smart alecks, me included … always ready with an opinion, whether anyone asked for it or not. We’re all control freaks to some degree I s…

Over the last 20 years, we all listened to one United CEO after another talk about how much they value their customers. Enough talk. United’s new CEO Oscar Munoz needs to stop the talking and start showing customers if the carrier ever really wants …

AirVenture Volunteers: One Lady’s Story Publisher Note: One of the best parts about Jetwhine is that Scott and I often receive stories from readers out of the blue. While we can’t use them all, there are some that simply jump to the top of the pile …

The team arrives at St. Barths I really don’t like traveling much any more. It’s usually way too much work on the airlines, efforts over which I usually have very little control other than complaining a bit on Twitter which doesn’t do much these day…

Jetwhine to AirVenture: Lunch for 20 Please One of the best parts of my annual trek to AirVenture is that happily, I have always found it next to impossible to sit anywhere on the grounds and NOT talk to the person next to me. Over the years I’ve ru…

Framed by the diagonal street that connects the main gate of EAA AirVenture to the forums area is a triangle of land that over the years has proven to be a prism that spotlights a newest member of the aviation community before it mixes invisibly int…

Here’s Tom Poberezny scooting around AirVenture in Red One VW that his dad Paul made famous decades ago. Ed Note: We’ve had such a great response to the story that I’m sad to say we’ve run out of slots for lunch. Do send along an e-mail if you’d sti…