Hacker News Reader

Oh, and we need more people to stand up for their local airports. Corrupt local politicians, developers, and fake-NIMBY land speculators are all arrayed to destroy our nation's aviation infrastructure for personal profit. Even airlines are in on it. Innovations like this unleaded fuel and electrification will cease if there's no place to deploy them.

So, I think GA is great in principle, and I use some products from it (mostly digital elevation data from airborne lidar, which is amazing). But it seems to have a very large component of taxpayers footing the bill for rich guys' toys/playgrounds (particularly for the infrastructure, not for planes themselves); this opinion has been influenced by talking with people I consider honest who have worked in municipal/county government, but I don't have any numbers. Can the many GA enthusiasts here give provide some insight into the public benefit from GA? Please note that I am sort of asking to be convinced and am not being antagonistic.

For one, there's no country in the world where the GA scene is like it is in the US. There's airports everywhere and flying is mostly accessible. As such, like US universities attract the world's students, the US GA airports attract a _ton_ of foreign pilot students.

That's just one angle. Another angle: the US is a lame duck in term of mass transit infrastructure like trains. So development and advancements in those fields occurs elsewhere, like in Europe and Asia. But in the case of aviation infrastructure, US is miles ahead. And as a result, a lot more aerospace stuff happens in the US than anywhere else. It's not as directly useful to the general public as inter-city trains, but it does have a lot of positive side effects for the economy and industries.

Perhaps one day, flying will simplify and become commonplace for the average person, like cars that were, as an industry, born in the US. And then on that day, it'll seem pretty smart to have nurtured general aviation and allowed aerospace to germinate.

GA looks like a rich people's hobby, and it sort of is. But it's not "10M$ in the bank" rich. The middle (as a treat) and upper class can afford to fly GA. In most other countries, that's just too out of reach for most people, it's not realistically in the cards unless you want to have a career in that field.

> But it seems to have a very large component of taxpayers footing the bill for rich guys' toys/playgrounds

Eh, most are not that rich. There's a wide range of plane prices. From Honda Civic money, to millions of dollars.

GA encompasses a whole bunch of activities. You do have the rich doctors flying in twins, yes. You also have Angel Flights, Pilots N Paws providing volunteer assistance for people and animals. You have flight training (we are going through a pilot shortage). Aero(photography/grammetry). Sightseeing flights (tourism industry). Transportation of people and cargo to remote areas. Etc.

In some cases the revenue generated doesn't pay for the infrastructure. That's why so many airports have closed in the last couple of decades.

There are also people just flying for fun. Usually in very cheap and economical planes burning single digit gallons per hour. Their gallon/mile figure can be pretty good even compared to cars (let alone SUVs).

Lot of the aerophotography stuff is switching to UAVs these days though, it's easier to obtain pilots and the capability of modern UAV platforms is just amazing.

AFAIK no privately available UAV system can match the range and flexibility for GA aircraft. For example photographing things that are dozens of miles from any road or airport. If I’m wrong I’d be interested to learn more.

A DJI Matrice 300 can fly for an hour, at a distance of up to 15km [1]. Agreed, it's not going to be useful in the extreme outback, but enough to cover a lot of use cases in areas near civilization.

[1] https://www.dji.com/uk/matrice-300/specs

Generally there are different classes of aerophoto ops and most UAVs so far seem about opening up markets that were previously closed due to high prices

In addition to air ambulance/medevac, aerial firefighting, overnight package intake and delivery, and medical lab test samples are all things that I think have fairly broad benefit if not widespread support and rely heavily on airports other than the 100 largest in the US.

In times of natural disaster, GA airplanes are often delivering support and supplies using these non-primary airports. This often happens before the larger agencies can spin up and post-hurricane can often reach areas before the roads are fully open.

In rural areas, like Alaska, they’re even more utilitarian.

Most of the commercial pilots now got a lot of their 1500 required hours in some of the activities around these small airfields.

And of course, there’s all the use of private aviation in support of businesses (logistics to prevent line shutdowns or move urgently needed repair crews to a factory).

It’s not just rich folks buzzing around to kill time or flying around in their private jets. (Neither is that zero of it.)

People from the lower 48 can't seem to conceive how important GA is to Alaska. If you grounded all GA planes in Alaska, thousands of people would start dying of starvation within a couple of weeks. There are simply no roads to most of rural Alaska.

At that point the question does arise: is it long-term sustainable to keep such communities artificially alive, or would it make more sense to pay off their residents to move somewhere where they can be supplied with resources way more efficiently?

GA in Alaska requires less public infrastructure than elsewhere because there are more planes that can land on and take off from water, snow, and unpaved surfaces.

Also Alaska can easily afford basic infrastructure, heck they pay an annual stipend to permanent residents.

> Also Alaska can easily afford basic infrastructure, heck they pay an annual stipend to permanent residents.

The question is not if they can afford it because they obviously can, the question is if this is long-term sustainable - not just from a CO2 emissions point, but you also need pilots, the planes or boats themselves, and all of that to supply cities that don't even manage to get 100 residents [per 1, at least 23 fall below that limit]?!

Maybe just accept for once that there are areas so remote it isn't worth the effort to supply them. We should return these areas to nature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Alaska

You’re not going to save the world by kicking a few hundred Alaskans off their property.

It's not (just) about saving the world. It's actually the ability to keep them supplied that is at question, given the current immense shortage on labor and fuel prices that are not going to go down.

Many of these communities have been there for hundreds of years. It was their homeland long before the United States existed. Do we force them off their land because it's more convenient for us? Do we force them to revert to a primitive lifestyle with no access to modern conveniences like medical care, a good education, food in lean times, electricity, or communication?

Or do we let them continue to have the best of both worlds at the cost of an airplane once a month? I vote for option 3.

What's "artificial" about using planes to transport food instead of trucks?

The people making these claims typically don't know anyone in GA or anything about their local airport. The taxpayers footing the bill for GA are GA USERS. GA pays way higher fuel taxes than the AIRLINES do.

A large proportion (the majority?) of the people in GA are not rich. They simply choose to spend their money on flying, instead of on leasing a new giant SUV every three years. My flight instructor had to SAVE UP to buy a crummy portable GPS... and 15 years later he still doesn't own a plane.

And that's not counting the entire industry's worth of people whose living depends on servicing aviation. Mechanics, painters, upholsterers, you name it. And this is a mostly DOMESTIC industry. It's despicable that GA doesn't enjoy more support from everyone, from legislators on down to Joe Plumber.

"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."

Oh yeah, Hacker News? Then WHY IS THE REPLY BUTTON ENABLED? Why do you allow people to waste their time typing out a question or comment and THEN say, OH NO YOU CAN'T POST? Then you jerks "shadow ban" people who point out your offensive behavior.

When I worked retail a long time ago, one of the assistant managers flew every weekend.

He wasn’t rich. Now he’s making a good living flying for Southwest iirc.

There are places in America that are a hundred or more miles away from the nearest hospital. These small airports are vital to rural healthcare.

Sure, all those people could move to more populated places, but then you'd have nothing to eat.

Source: The company I work for is slightly involved with air ambulances.

> Agreed, but sadly it's still a niche fuel. ... I think that unless a large number of GA airplanes can run on true automotive gas (which means gasohol now) in the near future, GA is doomed.

There are several problems with gasohol outside the core engine, from compatibility with fuel systems (bladders etc.), to phase separation, to vapor lock, to hygroscopicity. I'm sure that can be designed around, but it's not a drop-in replacement in planes designed for avgas.

If you want an abundant and affordable fuel, in the aviation world that's Jet A(-1). There's some limited success with Jet A burning diesel engines for the GA market (Thielert (or whatever they're called today) and Austro mainly).

Personally I think it would be cool if turbines suitable for GA would be developed. Currently turbines cost an arm and a leg, but I think partially that is an effect of development focused on power/weight and fuel efficiency, cost be damned. That might suit commercial and military use, but not GA. And yes, turbines don't scale down very well either. Still, a turbine that would have an upfront cost competitive with current GA engines would be very attractive, even if it would come at a cost in fuel efficiency. That would be, I think, more than compensated by the power/weight and safety advantages, as well as fuel availability and affordability. I think there are a couple of companies working in this space (TurbAero and Turbotech that I'm aware of, maybe others as well), we'll see if any of them ever come to fruition.

A big problem with turbines is overhauls and how they are calculated.

For piston engines, overhaul time is calculated from amount of hours operated. For turbine engines it is calculated from amount of hours and amount of start-stop cycles, whichever is reached first. And in GA, you have short flights and many cycles, which results in overhauls being much more common and expensive.

Yep, I wouldn't expect the transition to have occurred overnight. But after several decades of experience in automotive applications, I'd think the GA fleet could have been adapted by now if the industry had taken it seriously.

I also realize that the regulatory regime has stifled progress. It seems a bit better now, but it may be too late.

“George Braly, chief engineer at GAMI, said the fuel can be made with components “that are found inside the fence of any refinery.””

Now, that quote comes from the principal at GAMI and in a GAMI newsletter, but over the last decade and a half of following this, I’ve found him to be pretty damned straightforward.

https://gami.com/g100ul/AvGas0211.pdf

Lowering the financial barrier to entry would help. Idk how, but part of the industry's problem is that people who want to learn to fly can't afford to.

Fuel costs are a huge part of it.

I don’t want more incompetent people flying planes, so I’m content to keep it expensive enough to keep out people that aren’t going to take it deadly serious - because it is. Expense doesn’t guarantee that, of course, but it limits the collateral damage.

I've been flying for almost 25 years. I haven't seen much correlation between income/wealth and how seriously pilots take aviation.

I've seen rich people take it extremely seriously and with great attention to detail and safety, just the same as I've seen people who struggle to get the money together to go flying do the same.

I've also seen a lot of rich, successful, type-A people just not have the mindset of "Oh shit, this could easily kill me" because they've been successful at some other aspect of life.

You fly jets long enough, something like this happens.

There might be a correlation in the other direction. Successful and wealthy people have a propensity to buying more expensive and flashier planes, which generally equates to faster, which is something an inexperienced pilot should always try to avoid.

Wait until you hear how much eScooters cost

> Oh, and we need more people to stand up for their local airports. Corrupt local politicians, developers, and fake-NIMBY land speculators are all arrayed to destroy our nation's aviation infrastructure for personal profit.

I'm skeptical the public will stand up for GA. At least from my perspective, progressives and much of the left would prefer the industry fade away entirely. It's been in decline for decades and with the new trend of public carbon shaming I don't think you'll get many who come out in support of it beyond rural conservatives.

Not all of us are unknowing of how interconnected GA capability is to many other areas of economy, even if we live in countries with less such impact.

Now, landlords looking for more land (especially well communicated) for apartments are very happy to push for everything that removes airports so long as they can reuse the land afterwards...

Airports consume an awful lot of land directly, cause severe pollution issues for even more land (by noise, mostly) and severely limit land use in the flight paths due to safety concerns.

Building out actually capable high speed and regional rail infrastructure is the way forward.

GA doesn't handle mass transport that can switch to railways, so it's a bit moot point.

So GA infrastructure and railway infrastructure is effectively orthogonal and you need both (passenger/cargo airports also greatly benefit from having rail links!)

If you get high-speed rail to be competitive with flying a 175 knot piston airplane, piston GA travel will fall off a lot. I love flying, but I’d switch.

French TGV routinely has service speeds of 320 km/h [1] which is about the same as your plane, same for the Japanese Shinkansen [2]. Technically, speeds exceeding 500 km/h on close-to-stock rail are possible, the French have done that as well [3].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dhoku_Shinkansen

[3] https://www.hsrail.org/worlds-fastest-trains

I’ve ridden the TGV and Shinkansen. They don’t go to my kids’ grandparents’ house, but when they do (or hell, even something like the German ICE does), I’ll use them. I’m not anti-train; I am anti-impractical-train.

Today, Amtrak takes 22.5-27 hours to go 642 miles Boston to Columbus, OH. I can drive there in around half the time (likely less once you add the time to/from train stations) or fly there in 1/4 the time.

That’s a perfect distance for actual high-speed rail.

To the other grandparents, Amtrak can get me 657 miles in 18.5 hours to a place about 100 miles from their house. That leaves once per day at 9:30 PM and still leaves me 2 hours drive from their house (which is in a tourist area near the ocean, not some unpopulated area). Another perfect distance for HSR where I can drive there in less than half the time or fly there in around 1/4 the time Amtrak takes today.

> Today, Amtrak takes 22.5-27 hours to go 642 miles Boston to Columbus, OH.

Agreed, which is why I said that building out such infrastructure is the way forward. A lot of countries, particularly Spain, France, China and Japan, prove that this is possible and that people actually use this kind of rail service if they are provided and affordable, the US just doesn't manage to build the infrastructure required out of a toxic combination of NIMBYs, ignorance, incompetence and utterly absurd construction requirements.

I share your skepticism, but will still work to oppose what contributes to it.

And turbochargers. Cars benefit from turbos and they don't go from lean to rich to lean every day. Planes do that several times on every trip, and can benefit from turbos much more.

The logical conclusion of that argument is to scale up the turbo, rip out the big chunking reciprocating mass of metal and just inject fuel directly in a can ahead of the turbo. ;)

(Oh, and since your gas generator no longer has a prop shaft sticking out of it, you need to mount the shaft on the turbo instead. Possibly on a separate turbine wheel.)

Hey, I seem to recall somebody tried that :-)

The distinction of course is about reliability and cost. If a turbo quits, your piston engine can probably still limp along. But if your turbine quits, the houses are gonna get bigger...

I imagine the idea is now that it is approved for every piston engine then the EPA can ban 100LL and airports everywhere can switch to 100UL instead.

Ethanol free gas is widely available (In Michigan stations call it Rec fuel).

Are you concerned about cost, availability, some other factor?

I disagree. I haven't seen alcohol-free gas in decades, in Los Angeles, Chicago, or anywhere else that I can remember.

Availability is limited in many places. California, Massachusetts and New Jersey have very few stations.