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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

It's very hard to change anything in GA. Reliability is a much higher priority in aviation, if the engine in your car dies, you stop, if the engine in your plane dies, you fall out of the sky.

GA planes also generally last a lot longer than cars, you have Cessnas from the 70's still flying with their original engines from the 70's.

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> from the 70s

"But they still work!" is not a good excuse to pollute.

I agree, but it's a better reason than most excuses to pollute which tend to boil down to "because I want to". At least airlines are working (slowly) to fix the problem.

No, if the engine in your plane dies you glide.

Depends on the plane and your definition of gliding.

Which means you better have somewhere you can land in range of 200 kilometers if we are talking about passenger liners.

And if you’re over water, mountains or generally unfriendly land...you probably want to glide longer than you actually can.

Don't industries that require high levels of reliability schedule replacement of aging equipment, rather than continued repairs to keep old equipment running?

Not really in aviation. Even commercial airliners are often decades old (and as a passenger, you can't really tell unless you know what to look for). They do reach a point where replacement with newer technology makes economic sense, but they can basically be maintained indefinitely.

That's not entirely accurate. Pressurized aircraft hulls are limited by the total number of pressurization cycles they can be subjected to. Everything else is repaired, overhauled, or replaced, but a total overhaul of an airliner haul is just not economically feasible, so at that point the entire aircraft is basically scrapped.

You still have Cessnas from the 60s in my local club!

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