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Comment by throwaway859876 | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting link, and very interesting that these regulations are being litigated after decades of acceptance.

The big picture is that the FAA doesn't want the public to confuse the safety record of an airline with somebody flying a puddle-jumper (daily crashes in USA). The flying public just expects to get there without doing a risk evaluation, and puddle-jumpers are far riskier than airlines.

When you rideshare with Uber, there is a question of insurance.

When you rideshare a single-engine piston plane, there is a question of your life.

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> (daily crashes in USA)

I'm sorry, but a quick Google finds less than a dozen in the US this year. I couldn't find a definitive list, but searching "small plane crash 2015" found mostly the same events.

A puddle-jumper being flown by a certified commercial pilot shouldn't be a whole lot more dangerous than a commercial flight.

But yes, a small aircraft flown by someone who just got their license? You're taking your life into your hands, especially if there's a chance of poor weather.

to take that commercial license you have to fly hundreds of hours. with and without instructors.

guess how much those hours cost.

i lost count of how many times I've flown just for the hell of it with friends getting those hours for a few hundred bucks.

I think the point is ... With friends. Who almost always return to the same airfield as you both took off from.

But this is a fascinatingly grey area. If you were to fly from airfield A to B and back, taking a different passenger each time, how would you characterise the transaction?

I can see taking my kids up in an airplane of a friend of a friend, and handing over a hundred or whatever for fuel. But "some guy". Hard to imagine.

For a private pilot, unless the passengers share a common purpose for travel with the pilot, money isn't allowed to change hands, even if it is just "for fuel".

You would need at least a commercial pilot license for this type of transaction. (A CPL is a lesser license than an airline transport pilot license, which is what you need to work for an airline. The former only requires 100 hours of time.)

It's even more complicated and crazy than that.

* If I fly my friends with me to the beach for the weekend, they can chip in and cover their share of expenses. Legal for me to do as a PPL under FAR 61.113(c).

* If I fly myself to a conference for work, my employer can reimburse me for my expenses. Legal for me to do as a PPL under FAR 61.113(b)(1).

BUT.

* If I take a coworker with me to the conference, I can't be reimbursed as a PPL. I must either fund it out of my own pocket or must have a CPL under FAR 61.113(b)(2) as held by the Mangiamele opinion (which I can't find the original PDF of right now, unfortunately).

> You would need at least a commercial pilot license for this type of transaction.

And a class 2 medical certificate, which may be difficult to get.

Common purpose of travel seems a good phrase - but surely your Collegue and you have common purpose - or is that common, non commercial, purpose?

> common, non commercial, purpose?

This is, IIRC, what the Mangiamele opinion held. If our common purpose is business, even if it's non-aviation business, the second person is considered a paid passenger when the pilot is reimbursed.

I get what the FAA is trying to do - they're trying to keep PPLs from running charters, air taxis, under-the-radar airlines, etc. But some of the 61.113 rules and opinions are just silly, and that section really needs a complete rewrite.

I don't need a CDL to drive my coworker with me to the conference, even if I am reimbursed by my employer. I shouldn't need a CPL to make that same trip in an airplane.

Here is the document of the Mangiamele opinion: http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/agc...

Pilot here, I can assure you that a "puddle jumper" being flown by a certified commercial pilot is way more dangerous than a commercial flight. The certification necessary for an airliner is miles above (no pun intended) the certification for a GA (general aviation aircraft).

An airliner's resistance to weather, its ability to out-climb (it's pressurized) turbulence and ice, its ability to still fly with half of its engines destroyed, is something that doesn't exist in general aviation aircraft. An airliner can only be flown with 2 crew members, pilot and copilot, so that one being incapacitated doesn't end the flight right there. Such measures don't exist in general aviation.

Even airports are different. Big airports have control towers and radars to avoid midair collisions, excellent weather reports. The places I go to sometimes don't have either, I have to overfly the runway at 500 feet to look at the windsock and make an informed guess.

The NTSB maintains a database of all airline accidents that are recorded every year.. I did a basic search with the following parameters:

USA, 2014, Airplanes only, Fatal accidents only -- This returned 147 results of fatal accidents, the majority of which were Pipers / Cessnas / Beechcraft..

Expanding the list to include non-fatal accidents returns 310 results.. So not quite 1 per day, but still a lot of plane crashes.

http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/index.aspx

Is that 147 accidents with at least 1 fatality, or 147 fatalities?

I did a quick search, but there's more information there than I could sort through quickly.

The former, 147 with at least 1 fatality.

OK, point taken.

Small planes crashes are common enough that they don't often make it beyond local news. The NTSB recorded 1,471 accidents and 440 fatalities in general aviation for the year 2012: http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/data/Pages/2012%20Aviatio.... That's like one 747 going down each year.

The FAA has a lot of power to wield against private pilots and they don't want to lose it. They don't particularly care how much it stifles General Aviation.

>When you rideshare a single-engine piston plane, there is a question of your life.

And that's pretty obvious. People are adults they can make decisions for themselves.

The only legitimate (IMO) concern that the FAA has in this is that there will be some people who will try to operate their own little mini-illegal charter service. The path of least effort for the FAA is simply to prevent anything that has even the slightest whiff of commerce.

Which is a shame. In Belize I was able to get a kind of taxi service to an island for like $90, in a single engine plane, which was great fun. Obviously there is some danger but I'd much rather be able to make the choice than have the government ban such things.

You can do that in the US, too. But the FAA requires a commercial pilot license (and slightly higher standards for the plane) rather than a private pilot license. Belize, fwiw, also has private pilot and commercial pilot licenses.

> The only legitimate (IMO) concern that the FAA has in this is that there will be some people who will try to operate their own little mini-illegal charter service.

You just described flytenow.

Maybe, a little. When I look at Flytenow, I don't get the "we're mis-representing what we're selling" vibe. When I think "fly by night", I mainly think, uninsured.

Charter Flight Service: We have ATP rated pilots who will take you in our aircraft which are inspected and maintained per FAR Part 135 (at least as well as anyone else is); including carrying the right amount of insurance.

Flytenow: A brokering service for some dudes who have their own airplanes and will take you along for a ride if your schedules and destinations intersect, and if you pitch in a few bucks. Also probably has a bit of insurance, though I couldn't begin to imagine how they'd get it.

Most likely the plane is a rental. Rental costs can be split but if you own the plane, you cannot split maintenance, insurance, etc.

A single engine plane, I'd want to get to know the mechanic that last overhauled it and watch them work.

The pilot, has to in near-constant disaster-drilling mode and flying regularly.

Without those, which is most cases, I'm not stepping foot in said bug-smasher, because you're gambling with your life with someone whom may not be both experienced and competent enough to survive failure, no matter how well-intentioned or seemingly confident.

We ask verified pilots on Flytenow how often they have been flying, you can see their total hours and previous 30 & 90 day hours as well. We don't let pilots post who haven't flown regularly, recently.

On the other hand, nearly 100 people in the US die in car accidents every day... GA is definitely far riskier than commercial airlines, but driving also is.

If you look at the numbers of people that drive per day versus the number of people that fly in GA aircraft per day your perceptions of which option is riskiest might shift...

Either way, it's orders of magnitude more dangerous than commercial aviation (not something you can say for Uber vs buses) and one thing guaranteed to increase that risk is GA pilots trying to reach specific destinations at specific times to satisfy their paying customers.

Which reminds me, I've got a GA "flight experience" to pick a date for ;-)

Even after adjusting for miles (or hours) traveled?

Found an interesting answer on StackExchange; http://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/211

I don't think comparisons can be drawn there. It's impossible to do a 2000 mile drive in a day. I regular do two of those flights. Likewise, there are not many 20-minute flights.

It seems to me that the only relevant statistic is likelihood of death per embarkation.

Speaking of crash data - we made a viewer for it. It's pretty hacked together right now, but we'd love to get some feedback on it: https://github.com/flytenow/icarus

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