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It’s a sometimes painful truth of aviation: If you want something done right you need to go to an expert. That goes for finding...

As the average age of general aviation pilots continues to climb—during a “hard” insurance market—we hear horror stories of pilots being unable to find...

Many of us have gone through the drill: the life insurancesales person extols the benefits of a policy and the attractive price. We consider it and recognize that the coverage is appropriate for us, so we say we’ll buy. Then comes the application, which asks if we engage in any “hazardous” activity. “No,” we think, “we declined the course in sword swallowing in college and quit juggling chain saws once we got out of our teens.”

It’s happened. You’ve dreamed of this forever. You can finally afford to step up from the piston-pounders you’ve been flying into the world of...

The market for aviation insurance continues to be soft-perhaps very soft. There are simply too many aviation insurance companies offering to sell policies, relative to the number of aircraft owners looking to buy them. And each of these too-many companies is trying to keep the customers it has, and to grow by taking customers away from one of the other companies.

Every few years we take a close look at the U.S. general aviation insurance market. During the research we speak with underwriters and brokers to get a feeling for what changes they see, what problems they are having and what they anticipate coming down the track for those of us who write premium checks. …

Over the past year or so we’ve been getting plenty of reports from pilots slapped by the sobering reality that the current insurance market...

The ongoing allure of tailwheel airplanes for pilots seeking backcountry adventure, flying aerobatics or simply owning one because it has a tailwheel means that...

Test your knowledge of aviation insurance practices. Which of the following statements is true? If you take off 250 pounds over gross, youre in violation of the FARs and your insurer wont pay any claim resulting from an accident related to the overgross condition. On a long cross country, you blithely forget a weather briefing and fly straight into the icing layer from hell. You end the flight (alive and scared) in a farmers muddy cornfield. Your insurer wont pay. Last, you forgot that your annual was due last week, but only after you landed gear up. Your insurer wont pay. The answers? Probably false, even though the fine print in your insurance contract clearly allows the insurer to deny a claim, in many circumstances-perhaps the majority-they pay the claim anyway. Why? Several reasons. One is that laws governing contracts like insurance policies from state to state and some regulators take a more customer friendly stance than do others. Second, the aviation insurance business is a small (and shrinking) segment. A company with a habit of denying claims will soon find its business going elsewhere.

If you fly for fun or for a living and you have shopped for life insurance, you probably heard the agent draw a breath when he learned you were a pilot. If you fly, you pay more for life insurance. A lot more. My own experience in buying life insurance is typical. After asking my age, weight, whether I smoked and a number of other health-related questions, the agent quoted me the companys most attractive rates, with all the appropriate disclaimers.

Interestingly, the number of U.S.-registered aircraft is increasing, while the number of pilots is decreasing. (Wikipedia says there were 609,306 licensed pilots and GAMA...

We’ve heard our share of horror stories from readers regarding their experiences in the “hard” insurance market that developed in the last two years....