It's not installed in the plane I fly, but Garmin's auto-landing system was recently certified for emergency use.
https://generalaviationnews.com/2020/05/19/garmin-autoland-c...
It's not installed in the plane I fly, but Garmin's auto-landing system was recently certified for emergency use.
https://generalaviationnews.com/2020/05/19/garmin-autoland-c...
Oh and you'll have to fuel the airplane with avgas which costs $5/gallon and contains lead, and you have to wonder WTF??
There's no technical reason aircraft engines cannot be turbocharged, fuel-injected, fueled with regular unleaded gas, and cheap. Aircraft engines should have followed the innovation advancements that have happened in car engines, but they haven't. This is probably because of regulation, monopoly power, liability, and a host of other reasons, but as an engineer I find the situation ridiculous.
A car engine has to be able to maintain peak power output for a few seconds while accelerating. maybe a few seconds, unless you're towing a load up a hill or something. On level ground you're using a small but variable amount of your available power.
An airplane engine has to maintain peak power for the entire climb-out, and a substantial fraction of that for cruising for hours at a time.
This reminds me of how a lot of people are surprised when they find out the engine of a typical semi-truck has "only" a few hundred HP but several times the displacement of a passenger car engine rated at almost the same power. The car engine will wear out quickly at continuous full load, whereas the semi engine is designed to run at full load continuously. Ditto for engines driving generators and pumps --- full load is normal load.
We pick up avgas (half the price) from the small airport near us if we’re doing strictly off-road activities in our vehicles (no fuel tax).
Less than $1.50 AUD across the ditch at the moment. And that's a bad day.
Petrol is/was always more expensive in NZ though, around ~70c/L from memory. On the flip side, registration and insurance is much cheaper.
In order to complete the phase-out you either need to: force people to put a new $30K+ engine into a <$50K plane, totally replace the fuel system, and get a supplemental type certificate or: Require that the new fuel is a drop in replacement. One would have to show that the new fuel is 100% compatible with 100LL without modifications to the aircraft.
The FAA has been attempting the second route for some years, but to date has not been terribly successful. The first route has been done successfully in other regions such as the EU, but I would suspect there is far less legacy general aviation aircraft. I personally look forward to the mainstream introduction of diesel engines into the US market that are able to run on Jet-A
Grandfather in current planes and mandate new models to use new fuel only. Over time, perhaps lot longer than cars(planes do have longer life) you will have changed all of them.
Had they started it in 80's and 90's same time as auto-mobiles, most planes would have changed by now.
Every industry faces the same challenges to transform technology, they are able to move forward without as much difficulty as aviation ?
You're underestimating the age of the fleet.
The average GA aircraft is 50 years old, and that is likely to increase in the near-medium term as production of GA aircraft is practically zero.
Source: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/20....
(Cirrus, mentioned above, produces about 300 aircraft a year - compare to the 100,000+ Ceessnas on GA fields, almost all of which are over 40 years old.
You could also speed it up by making costlier to run older ones over time . Keeps the industry more active too..
The cost difference between new and used is truly immense.
A new Cessna 172 starts at around $400,000, and that's before you start checking off things on the options list.
Used can be as low as $20,000 for examples for the 1960s. If you thought depreciation on luxury cars was bad...
The GA system is already frankly dieing due to ever increasing costs. Your suggestion would just kill it for good.
I quit for pretty much the reasons you give: while I could have afforded to finish my license, I realized owning my own airplane would have been prohibitive. Sure, I could get a Cessna 152 for around $20k at the time, but then hangar fees, maintenance, insurance, etc. were far more than I could afford.
There's a reason the average small plane owners at my airport drove Toyota rustbuckets with the bumper sticker "My other car is an airplane."
Bottom line, between more pollution and making a hobby cheap , pollution should win every time.
Seconded. 50 years ago diesel engines were too heavy for light aircraft, but the weight problem with diesels has been solved.
They're working on replacing leaded fuel. The challenge is mostly regulatory, since they won't certify any of the replacements until they're sure it's 100% safe. It's still a work in progress.
As for what you'd lose: Search and rescue, medical transport (both commercial and volunteer), transport of blood samples for lab testing, high resolution aerial photography on your smartphone, powerline inspection to prevent forest fires, crop dusting. I could go on...
Same is true of Medical Transport except possibly for Australia where light aircraft are used more frequently than turbine helicopters.
Same for powerline inspection, although there could be a couple of companies using Robinsons somewhere I guess.
The problem comes with flying in lower atmospheric pressure (high or hot environment) because the replacement chemical used in place of the lead-based additives makes fuel much quicker to evaporate.
BTW, the really rich don't use AVGAS 100LL except maybe for hobby flying - kerosene-based JET A-1 is used in all turbine engines, as well as the rare diesel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_carburetor
No autothrottle, no FADEC, and that plane new costs close to $1 mil. Short of the turbine world, its the best you can get but its still ancient tech. Following a magenta line on autopilot is not a hard problem to solve.
I don't think that's the reason we accept the higher death rate of cars. In cars, you feel like you have direct influence on whether you die, or at least you know the person in control. This might not be the actual case, but it's enough to make people save.
Compare this to planes: You're flown in big machines you don't understand by people you don't know and, if something goes wrong, you can do nothing but protect your head and hope for the best. Also, you have no way out - if an engine fails, prepare for quite some time of horror. Compared to a car, where you might have some unpleasant deceleration, but safety is always very near.
I'm pretty sure these factors are the main reason we are so wary of aviation deaths compared to car deaths.
No, it's the externalities. When you fly you don't just put yourself at risk, you put others at risk as well. Roads are designed to isolate faster-moving vehicles from people and property so the people who die are mostly the occupants of the vehicles and there is not much collateral damage. But it's not possible to isolate air traffic this way. So it's not just the occupants of aircraft who die, it's people sitting in their living rooms watching TV when a plane suddenly comes crashing through their roof.
Also, the limiting factor on air travel is not technology, it's takeoff and landing space. Even VTOL aircraft need a lot more room to takeoff and land than a car does because there's a blast zone.
They rely on a Continental that was developed in the 80s (so quite new) - but doN’t you still have to adjust the mixture manually (e.g., manually adjust the air to fuel ratio)?
I mean, the cool stuff you are describing can easily end up at 500k-2MM USD with a fully trained private pilot...
why not? the original post was that innovation can't happen in aviation because of regulation. if we're shifting the argument to innovation doesn't happen because it's expensive, that's a much more solveable problem.
And that innovation is “just” glass cockpit, and some more advanced avionics. Not changing the principles - you fly a bit faster, a bit safer but still need a license and do all the preparation and checks. But it’s a bit more fancy. From 200k to almost 1 MM.
The Garmin Autoland you described bumps up the sum to 3MM (https://www.piper.com/press-releases/piper-announces-new-m60...).
So factor 10 for something “that was already unreasonably expensive”...
My argument was around “innovation has a horrible ROI” in the aviation industry.
Building a startup in that space has to take costs into consideration... I mean, Musk initially didn’t shoot people into space, there was an inefficient market and the margins were enormous... That’s a different story...
This may be so, but I don't think you've really substantiated it; you're just talking about part of the "I", without any reference to the dollars of "R". Sure, $1m puts a plane out of almost everybody's recreation budget. But for a piece of transportation infrastructure with high utilization, it might not be prohibitive. (I mean, a jumbo jet costs hundreds of millions to build, involves significant R&D budgets on each new model, and is still positive ROI, just.)
You said "you fly a bit faster, a bit safer" in a dismissive way, but how much is this actually worth? I could easily believe that making flights slightly safer is worth an extra $1m of capex; I think your original claim would be much stronger if you provided some more concrete numbers/analysis here.
My comment was not dismissive of the innovation by Cirrus (which I think is great).
It’s about the costs getting it into the market and having it certified.
Imagine you buy a car for 50k USD. Now, you want an airbag and a better infotainment system. Not a problem. Price is now 250k. Is an airbag and a better Infotainment system worth that premium to you? I can’t answer that for you. But this is what we are dealing with in general aviation.
And it is not 1MM USD in Capex... It is 1 MM USD premium per PLANE.
And again: there is a reason why you have the B747 and 737 for like 40 years... Because exactly of that certification nightmare of new airplanes.
Now talk autonomous electric vehicles with passengers. How should the math ever add up?
Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes here; when talking about ROI, the numerator and denominator are usually both in dollars.
If I'm pitching Lilium to some VCs, I'd model out the cost of researching, developing, and building the fleet ("I"), and the revenue I hope to generate in a given timeframe ("R"). After adjusting for the risk of failure, if that ROI is higher than what you can get with other investments, the ROI is, in the relative sense "good". If it's worse than putting your dollars into treasury bonds, it's "bad".
Paraphrasing, your arguments earlier in this thread were that investing in aviation is brave, because the ROI on those investments is bad, because it's expensive to certify new inventions. I certainly agree that it's expensive to build a plane, or even add features to a plane, and even more expensive to build and certify a new plane. But that doesn't mean it's bad ROI. The return generated by building expensive things can be astronomical; see military and aerospace contractors taking in multi-billion dollar contracts with very healthy profits, for example. There should be clear numbers behind this; how many aviation startups succeeded in the last N years? How many folded? That would be the objective analysis I'm looking for when talking about ROI on investments in aviation companies.
Maybe that's not the point you were intending to make; perhaps you're just talking about the ROI for an individual buying a plane, rather than a business operating a fleet (like Lilium in the OP)? But if that's what you mean by ROI, then I don't think that is particularly relevant to investors; they are interested in ROI in the sense I outlined above.
You will also be in one of the most heavily regulated industries and push for a product that doesn’t even yet know its regulations...
You can’t compare it to the military because - well, they don’t have to certify the same way civil aviation has to. They can essentially say “it’s good enough”. And they aren’t bearing the “R” side risk of the investment for being expose a free market. Military contractors aren’t “paid by the price of a bomb dropped” in a competitive market.
The R is limited and known. We know helicopter taxi services don’t work. The I is a complete unknown and potentially magnitudes higher than expected. Why would I invest in this market that has historically had a bad track record for innovation?
E.g., you want an airbag in your car and better infotainment? Price for the car goes up from 50k to 250k. In the aviation industry, a Tesla would probably be closer to 500k-750k given all the innovation it has (and would need aviation certification) compared to a 50k “regular car”.
If you think this would not “make you think twice” - ok.
Cirrus: "new aircraft deliveries for the piston SR Series reached 380 in 2018"
By way of comparison, Ferrari delivered 9,200 cars in the same year.
Part of the problem with aviation has been that aircraft are boutique items and priced accordingly.
I'd imagine even a Toyota Camry would cost $150k if it was a one-off design.
It's the same with the first car you build. The first Tesla Roadster cost tens of millions to make. The second Tesla Roadster cost half that.
SpaceX is exactly the WORST example in this context: they just went ahead without all the bureaucratic overhead you find at NASA; they weren’t exactly transporting people at the beginning but cargo... And they had a pretty clear market with fat margins; those margins were fat due to the (unnecessary) overhead other agencies created.
You can’t do that in this case.
Put a bit differently: you can probably guess the magnitude of costs for a car to develop. In this case, I would be more than surprised if the get within a 10x magnitude in the end for their cost estimate and EVER get it certified. Again: there are currently NO guidelines how to certify that...
An example from Airbus and the A400 flagship:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europrop_TP400
“Several technical problems delayed the engine's certification test program and pushed the entire A400M aircraft program into further scheduling adjustments. The engine delays were primarily due to problems with completing the full authority digital engine control (FADEC) software to the satisfaction of the civil authorities. More specifically, Europrop determined in mid-2008 that the engine worked correctly, but the FADEC software still did not meet EASA requirements.[27] Since the A400M was intended for humanitarian missions, the aircraft also needed to have a civil certification. Europrop did not realize that this meant the FADEC also had to show traceability and accessibility, so EASA denied civil certification of the software. Because of this problem, the first A400M test aircraft, which was flight-ready by September 2008, was not permitted to fly. Europrop had to triple the size of its workforce to fix the issue,[28] resulting in a FADEC system consisting of over 275,000 lines of code, which was four times more complex than the FADEC software for the largest civil jet engine.[29] Other problems included numerous plane subsystems providing insufficient logging to the main aircraft computer.[30]”
I'm not saying this is doable but those numbers show nothing.
Pilots essentially work for free... It has become “almost industry standards” that young pilots PAY to fly. If I threw a wild guess at 30k USD salaries for these kind of “pilot jobs” with 1000h of flying per year, that puts labor costs to 30-50 USD/h. Maintenance and gas will by far outweigh that.
https://www.dw.com/en/being-a-pilot-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/...
I don’t want to “shame” anybody in particular, but look up your local charter airlines and what they offer...
This can of course vary if there are rather complex requirements (e.g., a certain type rating, experience level etc.) - but being a pilot isn’t cool financially anymore. A small fraction ends up with “the large airlines” - but if you don’t, you are not in for the big money...
If there is a factor 10 whatever uncertainty in this equation - you are essentially just gambling like an Options-Day-Trader on Reddit. I understand that investors see “the hockeystick” unlimited revenue upside and justify everything around that.
But I personally would not want to so business in the most over-regulated, slow-growing and low-margin industry with a “factor 10 investment uncertainty”; that uncertainty btw renders your investment null, void and lost if your plane doesn’t get certified. And you don’t even have certification guidelines.
Thanks for the discussion.
Nah. Avionics, etc, and what goes into a plane is cheap compared to the purchase price. Even when you talk about G1000, G3000, etc, they are not the primary cost drivers.
What's killed the price of general aviation aircraft is that very few units are purchased. In turn, prices go up; in turn more old planes are kept flying and fewer units are purchased.
Four seat aircraft without glass cockpits and without notable innovation are a few hundred K.
100+k is expensive, but even a 162 is likely to be flying for 40+ years.