Was that the same Gordon Baxter who used to do Tomorrow's World?
Don't think so but not sure. The Flying-mag-Baxter wrote for Flying from 1971-1998 or so (think he also was a radio voice) and eventually got a VOR named after him in USA. He was very popular but I think his health had already started to go down-hill when I started to read Flying in the early nineties. he passed away in 2005.
I have seen a change in the trade magazines I get at work e.g. Instrumentation or, to move to a really exciting example which is sure to get you an audience at any party, Building Services & Environmental Engineer...
Over the last decade they have turned into trash. Practically every written word that is not an advert is an "advertorial" i.e. paid for.
I also don't think anybody reads them, but they carry on because the vast majority of sales leads come via the internet so even if somebody saw the printed advert, you have no way to find out where they come from. And since the first contact tends to come from the purchasing office, you cannot grill the customer because the real customer is some engineer deep inside the company. I think most leads come from online sources.
The printed aviation mags have a problem in that they cannot carry the depth of online content. The US ones have the relative luxury of having a significantly aspirational audience (which is how Mac was able to write about jets and jets and jets in Flying, despite 99%+ of the readers never going that way. This insulates them from having to face reality which is relatively mundate, even in the USA. The UK is pretty well anti-aspirational so you can't do that, hence their much more bland content, trying to stick to day to day GA-renter and similar issues. Some years ago I was told to try to get some of my writeups printed in the UK mags but all turned them down, with the main one saying they are inundated with quality material so they can afford to be choosy. I am sure they know their market.
It was a different Baxter; apologies. I was thinking of this one.
I find the US magazines to be better than the UK ones. In the UK the focus is more on farm strips and fun VFR flying. That is fine and clearly the target market. Flying is still good in my view and a little more professional which I guess is where my interests lie.
And as a committee member of the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships I can assure you Raymond and Gordon Baxter were very different! Although both well known pilots!
Are Aviation Magazines corrupt?
Peter wrote:
The magazines will never print any such story because Garmin owns much of the avionics advertising revenue.
That’s not true, Peter. Magazines will always write about such stuff, and I did it for 20 years. What’s true: Sometimes somebody from the advertising department would come to the editorial office and ask me " do you really have to write that". And as and editor I answered: yes.
This happened to me when I reported about the lousy climb rate of the first Thielert Cessna 172. The Thielert company knew that I had not been so impressed with the test flight and called my boss and said “that they would stop all ads” in our magazine. The article was published as I wrote it.
The trick is: Once your magazine is your market leader they will think twice about only their competition having ads in your magazine. That’s how germn SPIEGEL news magazine can have a big article about corruption at some big company – AND their ad :-)
I think with all these “flight tests” you have to read really hard between the lines to figure out what they mean. It’s like you have to read all the article one person writes just to find out which positive adjectives he didn’t use on a particular article.
“Flight Tests” (as well as any review) can be very informative and genuine or they can be total garbage. Doesn’t even depend (mostly) on the connection the mag has with the manufacturer, if they are adverstisment dependent or not, it mostly depends on the author and if he knows what the heck he’s talking about.
A genuine review about an airplane (or any other technical device) should be done by someone who has to knowledge and experience to know what he’s doing. Otherwise it is as good as if you take a 10 year old to his first flight and let him write an essay about it. Of course he loved it, of course everything was lovely and he would like to do it again. Pilots who drool over every new airplane which comes along are quite unsuited to write such reviews, yet that is exactly how many of the current reviews get written.
Then there are reviews which look pretty much like the said essay, of the “I got to fly the new xxxx because I’m such a good journalist” followed by a rave and pretty pictures as well as a description of the “feel” it has. Well, quite a few of those got me throw the mag away and never look at them, as they miss the point. At least for those who are not reading mags for pilot porn but for information. Dreamers who will never buy their own airplane can dream over such pretty picture essays but for those who want to know what an airplane is all about, these kind of reviews are next to useless.
A good review should include a lot of things including pictures and a short debrief of the test flight they might have done, BUT the primary importance is on information. People who read reviews want to know-
- What the plane can and cannot do
- Performance
- Actual useful load
- quality of build
- Cabin comfort
- Pros and Cons.
I would even go so far that a review of a plane can theoretically be better even if there is no “test flight” at all. 99% of the content which is the real McCoy of any review is information which usually can be taken out of the POH. Speed, Range, Payload, Version guides, all that. The demo flight will eventually either confirm or disprove the POH values, but the homework on what the plane can actually do has to be done before even looking at the airplane. During the flight a skilled pilot reviewer can get an impression on how comfy the cabin is, how easy/difficult the pre-flight and in-flight operation is, whether the plane actually corresponds to the POH figures and so on. Even better reviews get written if the airplane tested is not a factory demonstrator with all bells and whistles but a “normal” production airplane.
Thirdly, there are reviews done by folks who know the airplanes in question inside out as they have operated them for a few years, were involved with building or testing them or have handled a few of them. The Bob Kromer Reviews for MAPALOG are prime examples for such reviews, written after he left the company but with a lot of actual data and pretty clear and honest opinions. In commercial magazines such reviews are quite rare, the one mag which has them is Pilot und Flugzeug in Germany, most other rags are quite useless for those who want to know information and not read about a journalist having a great time flying an airplane for free. Flyer59 has done some quite good reviews too in that mag he used to write for, within the possibilities that format offered. Since he left, that mag is not really worth reading anymore, unless you are interested in UL’s.
In the day and age of the internet and the forums around, fortunately reviews are no longer really a source of information one needs. One can download most POH’s from someplace or the other, one has a lot of information out there of people who fly the things and know them inside out, and, most importantly, one does not have to rely on the press. Most of the press today is just utter garbage and a senseless waste of trees.
I have seen that some magazines write mainly the good things while others say both good and bad. The american Flying magazine is in the first category (as far as flight tests are concerned), while the british Pilot magazine will write the bad things, too – I like how they nearly always find a flaw in the cockpit ergonomics. 
Has anyone subscribed to an GA-aviation specific magazine? What would you recommend? What are the prices? Do you choose an American or European magazine?
FLYER mag
I read the US AOPA mag (free to members) and used to read the US FLYER mag until it filled up with bizjet (and generally shoe-licking) reviews There are some other good ones; I recall one online mag to which Mac McLellan moved but I haven’t spent time on them; have enough to do already.
