“Be indiscriminately more strict” obviously isn’t the thing to do. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a federal oversight organization be actually-effective at overseeing the industry it’s tasked with overseeing. Be strict enough in smart ways to catch real problems before they happen, might be one way to think of the ideal mandate.
I think this is basically what you're saying, too
There is an orthogonal dimension that comprises the quality of regulation (good and poor).
Would that more understand this idea.
The correct approach is to reward new things, reward changes and innovation, and punish massively anything that causes an accident putting lives at risk.
For example, make a fund that any aircraft manufacturer pays fines into. Fines for engine failures. Fines for oxygen mask deployments. Fines for crash landings. Massive fines for deaths. Aim to fine about 50% of the value of all aircraft sold.
Then give the pot of those fines back to aircraft designers and operators per passenger mile safely flown.
Overall, the industry gets the same amount of cash. But manufacturers and operators who manage to do it more safely will end up more profitable.
You also need a system of watchdogs who try to find 'coverups' - ie. times where a safety procedure is skipped to avoid the fine. A combination of whistleblower rewards and automatic data reporting from the plane should help with that issue.
Sometimes, 'move fast and break things' actually saves lives. Especially when you're moving fast on the development of new safety systems.
Not everything needs to have an economy created out of it.
When you have multiple layers of safety, having one or two fail is a 'close call' that should be engineered to happen less frequently, and ideally never.
In multi-engine turbine transport-category aircraft, an engine shutdown rarely results in a mishap. Extremely rarely. If the goal is safety, shutting down a possibly misbehaving engine is safety enhancing over an alternate system where an engine shutdown results in meaningful fines and so there would be pressure to not shutdown an engine that should be shutdown (or a delay in making the decision to do so).
I'll have to double-check this later, but I think if you took a 50 mile drive to the airport, got on a flight that had an engine failure at V1, and drove 50 miles back to your house that you were at a greater risk during the 100 miles of driving than during that worst-case single-engine shutdown flight. (They're order of magnitude the same I'm pretty sure. If safety is the goal, how much should each of the people who commuted to that flight be fined for their risk-assumption?)
FAA studies on the topic:
https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/engin...
https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/engin...
The real question should be why they were initially going to certify eVTOLs as light aircraft. That just seems like the entirely wrong category for them.
> developers of winged eVTOL aircraft including Joby Aviation, Archer and Beta Technologies have been proceeding on the assumption that their aircraft would be certified under the FAA’s overhaul of small airplane certification rules that took effect in 2017.
"developers...have been proceeding under the assumption" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence...
The USAF should instruct the FAA to pound sand. USAF has the primary spectrum allocation, and is the owner/operator for both systems.
(Aviation Week 2/7/2022 pg. 16)
No one serious would ask what was wrong with tetraethyllead in gasoline fueling automobiles in urban areas, but aviation is a completely different context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#Phase-out_of_leaded_avia...
> 70% of 100LL aviation fuel is used by the 30% of the aircraft in the general aviation fleet that cannot use any of the existing alternatives
On the second point: lead is specifically added to help increase the lifetime of components like spark plugs, since it decreases knocking.
"Knocking" is an antiquated term. Knocking = detonation, and any severe detonation would destroy an aircraft engine. For example, this is why we take off with our mixture so rich, to create a huge margin against detonation by lowering internal cylinder pressures.
A large part of this problem, AFAIU, is that "cannot use" can mean lack of type certification. IOW, as a practical matter many (most?) pre-existing engines could use new, unleaded fuels, but engine certifications haven't yet been updated by the FAA. Only leaded-fuel is legally permitted in most old engine types, and old engines dominate in general aviation.
See, for example, this blurb further down in that Wikipedia article,
> In 2022, Paul Bertorelli of AVweb reported that the FAA is dragging its feet on broadly certifying G100UL, delaying approval of the fuel for more engines and spending over $80 million on EAGLE to re-start a search for an unleaded fuel when G100UL has been under evaluation for over 10 years.
where G100UL is (I think) the only alternative replacement fuel actually approved so far, certified just last year, and only for one particular family of engines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
"What do you do to protect the environment in this case?"
"The planes fly outside the environment."
"Into another environment?"
"No, no, they fly beyond the environment. They're not in an environment."
"But it must be somewhere. What's out there?"
"Nothing's out there."
"There must be something out there."
"There's nothing out there. All there is is air, and clouds, and birds."
"And?"
"Twenty thousand tons of tetraethyllead."
"What else?"
"CO2 emissions, CFCs, and about seven hundred 737 Max's. The environment's perfectly safe."