The $20 an hour Cessna 172 experiment (2020)
airfactsjournal.com
airfactsjournal.com
(I'm not saying Trent Palmer is trying to run around any regulations, just that his videos are cool, and seem like a good entry point into experimental bushplanes)
I'd also encourage anyone here to check out Mike Patey: https://www.youtube.com/@MikePatey/videos
His current videos are about a really interesting and unique pool he is building at his house, but most of his stuff is about even cooler and even more unique airplanes he builds. He's an incredible engineer/hacker.
EDIT: To add to it, and even more remarkable: Mike has apparently got no formal education in engineering. His twin brother also wrote a book about the blessings and curses of ADHD, which both have.
There are two routes for those with ADHD who want medication and want to keep flying:
A) Get a regular or Special Issuance class 3 medical, ideally before treatment but it's possible while pausing it if you have $$$$. Immediately afterward, go get a BasicMed medical which prevents commercial operation but basically can't be denied. There's fairly limited data on ADHD medication and BasicMed but you can generally do this without fanfare, but if your regular doctor objects, find a temporary second one and just:
B) Lie (by omission). This is actually much easier than it sounds. Just go to the Aeronautical Medical Examiner's office, ask for a class 3 and Shut The Fuck Up. This is generally how the airline guys do it. If you're truly paranoid, pay for therapy and medication out of pocket. If even a minor accident occurs the FAA can and may elect to pull your insurance records. Nope, nothing is sacred to the government, not even HIPPA.
FWIW, you shouldn't have to do any of this. Mild to moderate ADHD has no impact on your ability to fly safely, ask me how I know :/
No meds needed.
Within these rules, there is a carve out for edge cases as one would expect. If you have one of a variety of issues that are well understood but would otherwise prevent you from getting a regular medical, you can petition for a special issuance. Usually stuff like past alcohol abuse, mild depression, various physical disabilities (frequently mild types of colorblindness), etc. Ultimately these are class 1, 2, or 3 medicals with an asterisk requiring more documentation. Notably however, they do not approve them for ADHD while medicated. Typically to get one you need enough psych assessments to show it was a misdiagnosis or is extremely mild, but you can shop around until you find a psychologist who will write whatever you want.
Somewhat more recently (2016) congress passed a bill adding a 4th type of medical called BasicMed. It's a program where you complete an online web powerpoint, take a document to your doctor to fill out, and then everything after that is a conversation between you and your doctor. It is not internationally recognized so breaks the ICAO dependence stated above, but means you can't fly outside the US, even to Canada/Mexico/Caribbean islands etc, among other restrictions. It also has an extremely random requirement to have held a class 3 or higher medical after July 14th, 2006. That ended up really neutering the bill from this perspective as ADHD isn't really a late onset disorder and most people who would want to use this with ADHD have already been denied or are incapable of obtaining a class 3 without some significant effort.
Just want to clarify something on this point. Doctor shopping doesn't really work well here. The FAA has a list of doctors it listens to, and anyone else's opinion is as good as useless.
An adult who wants to fly may be ill advised to pursue a formal diagnosis of ADHD along with prescription medications.
We all have our own particular mental quirks. If after the usual amount of flying lessons, your instructor decides you have become a competent pilot and the examiner agrees, you have demonstrated the required mental fitness. There is a drop out rate, often because of finance, but also lack of ability.
There are of course those enough affected by ADHD that they require medication to function in daily life, who unfortunately will be found unfit to fly.
Some decades down the road, aviation authorities may find a way to approve medical fitness for pilots on ADHD medication as has been done for diabetes, successfully treated alcoholism and depression treated by drugs. Most of this evolution is driven by pilot unions looking to get members back to flying status. Practically speaking, onset of ADHD is likely non-existent in airline pilots and therefore unlikely to attract the attention of pilot unions
Seemingly the author is still working at it:
Last update (2022):
https://airfactsjournal.com/2022/10/the-20-hour-cessna-172-e...
May they drive a revolution.
>> I am looking for emissions data for the 912 iSc powerplant. I am in need of data regarding VOC and NO emissions.
> I suspect you will have to measure this yourself. I cannot think of a reason why any user outside Rotax would know this, but good luck.
even harder to find emissions on an unknown road vehicle. Lead for autos was phased out in the US starting in the 1980s. I stopped using leaded gas my 1972 VW Beetle (designed to run leaded) in the late 80s. I know some piston A/C are running unleaded, but it is glacial progress compared to cars. Having been in the industry, I am well aware of the reasons (certification/safety requirements, politics and lobbyists). I just regret in my ignorance at the time I contributed to the problem.
(I would also assume you and your parents live next to airstrips, eliminating the need to get to one.)
I think our problem is more systemic. A better question than "Do I fly or drive?" might be "Why don't I live closer to my extended family and friends?"
In fact the computer industry uses more energy than the aviation industry [2]--cryptocurrency and AI are just going to add to it. When I design software, I try to keep efficiency and utility in mind--but the human mind is good at rationalizing what it needs to. Who needs software used to repair broken tech? Hopefully more people than need single engine aircraft or jets.
--
[1] https://www.rotax-owner.com/en/912is-technical-questions/653...
The "living closer" is not an option, the place where my grandparents lived and my father was born cannot be moved. Me moving closer to the middle of nowhere (village in the mountains) is not really an option. Flying or driving there once a year is not a big deal, it is a short flight in a straight line versus a long, slow drive around mountains. The airstrip is a few hundred meters away.
A modern piston plane can get the equivalent of 30 MPG, and fly directly to its destination. So there's no need to rag on it.
To be fair, my neighbors probably emit 10X the pollution running their backpack-mounted, gas-powered leaf blowers and open fire pits year round. I rag on them too, and display my rake in protest.
Many people are complaining about the ancient technology, but newer ones offer very few advantages.
An piston GA airplane runs basically at two speeds: flat-out for take-off and cruise. For both the fuel/air mixture is easily optimized to optimal, and the slow engines reduce waste. Benefits from EFI are decent but below 10%. Supercharging helps a lot at higher altitudes, but most planes aren't pressurized or carry oxygen, so even that has limited benefit.
The main benefit of the current engines are robustness: I know people who have even flown without oil or with a blown valve. Many experimental builders combine mechanical magnetos with electronic ignitions, partly for fuel efficiency but mainly to lower idle speed on the runway when landing.
The real difficulty is not technology but service. There are very few engine rebuilders, and they are happy with the current limited supply of engines keeping prices up.
And unless you built your own experimental plane, or you get an experimental where the FAA permits owner inspections, the main cost of flying is service on the plane.
Aside 1: many engines have STC's to run car avgas. All require there to be NO ethanol for its impact on the fuel system. The studies I've seen of those engines report bottom rebuild times more like 800-1000 hours rather than 2,000 hours, and of course a higher incidence of valve-related problems.
Aside 2: experimental planes are not a subculture. They form the largest number of new planes. The $200K+ alternates only go to the wealthy. And after 50 years of competing companies, only one has been the overwhelming success, in both popularity and numbers: Van's aircraft. They use old-style, simple designs and construction, and (mostly) old-style engines, preferring the Rotax for their RV-12.
As someone not familiar, can you explain? How have those engines failed and how does that impact credibility regarding this, rather than just being something that didn't work out?
> ...but newer ones offer very few advantages.
From the article, it seems like cost is the biggest advantage (70% cheaper to run), followed by ease of use. And then of course the lack of toxic lead, although I don't know how to quantify that.
What am I missing?
You make a lot of points, but it's not immediately clear to me how they refute the article.
Ultimately, how many new engines are getting certified to put the current ones out of business through lower prices?
There are still many other things in certificated aircraft that are changing regularly based on ADs. This means “we found something in this decades old design that shows up when the fleet is in its 30s.”
Aircraft have VERY long lifetimes in comparison to most things. I own a 1962 Cessna - it is on its second engine, the first having been overhauled once. Some Cessnas from the 70s are still running on their originally installed engine.
Defects and issues are still addressed ongoing, and maintaining the certification for things like modifications for improved power generation still means significant work. It’s definitely not a one-and-done thing - part of the value of certification is in the continuous future improvement that comes from NTSB findings or inspection reports sent to the FAA.
It’s like an engine fault light spread across the whole fleet. The certification keeps the light working.
It's not hard to see what certification costs, take an EAB kit, use all non-certified avionics, and even take an automotive engine and convert it for aircraft use if you want. If you spec that out equivalently* to a certified aircraft, taking labor costs into account (you don't get to count the 1500 hours in your garage as free), it's less than comparable certified aircraft, but not orders of magnitude less.
(By equivalent, I mean safety and redundancy -- ifr capable. Not talking about making my own AP with cheap servos and a raspberrypi and navigating with a handheld gps)
Curious if you have any thoughs on Sling for kit builds? I'm very serioulsy considering building their new HW (https://slingaircraft.com/aircraft/sling-hw/) that has the new Rotax 915 (turbocharged) in it in the next 12-18 months.
As the article points out, the writing was on the wall for leaded fuel decades ago. The GA industry killed itself by dragging ass on eliminating the need for it, abetted by the burdensome FAA certification process for any aviation advancements.
It may be too late to save GA. BasicMed was a big help, and the increased pace of STC approval has been a boon. But with the FAA derelict in its duty to protect airports (see the sellout of Santa Monica as an example) and corrupt local governments eager to destroy our public airports and sell their land to developers... the future looks grim indeed. Just as electric training aircraft, unleaded fuel, and less-polluting and more-efficient engines render the anti-aviation cabal's excuses moot.
But in my case, that same plane has a seat rail lock that fails during takeoff. Luckily I had an instructor with me who grabbed the yoke when I had to let go.
It's a weird world where you're confident to not rent a plane that will stall because of some aftermarket install, but you're on your own if that old seat fails.
Are cars cheaper today? How about all that construction equipment the Caterpillar sells?
Are the price of tanks and jets getting cheaper?
https://www.hotcars.com/these-are-the-cheapest-new-cars-you-...
I also didn't expect one to receive significant damage from a lightweight cardboard box.
There's "unsafe", and then there's this.
And roof rack damage is definitely not a safety issue.
At $1,000, it's probably safe to assume these aren't the only cheaply made parts of the vehicle.
> At $1,000, it's probably safe to assume these aren't the only cheaply made parts of the vehicle.
Sure but if you're doing that then you don't need the pinata test at all.
The cars in the 60s were rigid. This meant that, by and large, the car did damage to everything else until that threshold was passed.
The problem was two fold:
1) You tended to get thrown around inside the rigid box since internal restraints weren't very good (poor seatbelts, poor headrests, no airbags, etc.).
2) Once you finally had enough energy to get past the failure point, the car collapse was uncontrolled. This generally meant that the steering column got pushed into the driver.
GA airplane production collapsed from a peak production of 17k a year in the 1970s to a few thousand a year starting in the 90s continuing to today. Cars and tractors and tanks and even jets have all seen their markets grow, not disappear.
A new Model T in 1925 cost had fallen to 260$, that’s roughly $4,348 in todays money. Sure it’s missing a great deal of modern features, but it’s hard to get a new golf cart at that price.
People can afford much nicer cars now. Regulations also require decent crash safety. There's not much of a market for these kinds of super-cheap cars.
Though it'd be interesting to work out how much an exact clone of the Model T would cost today (mass produced using modern technology).
The model T was pretty simple, and you can buy engines with waaaay more power - and longer life, quieter, more efficient, etc. too for sub $500 at harbor freight and strap it to a frame, and off you go.
Assuming we’re talking ‘functional equivalent’, compared to ‘exact copy’.
Aside from that, there's the fact that if you can actually afford it, then it's likely better to finance than to pay cash because you can invest the full purchase price of the car for a higher return than the interest you would pay.
Anyway, that’s an unexpected 500$ expense. My point was people financing a 50+k new car could fairly easily buy a 17,600 car out of pocket by waiting a little longer before purchase. Large scale changes in purchasing habits would have significant knock on effects for the used car market, but that’s another story.
Holding off on a X$/month car payment on a 50k car can very quickly turn into a new 18k car. Continuing to put away that same car payment and you’re able to buy a 50k car out of pocket quite soon. Essentially financing doesn’t make expensive cars more affordable it simply allows people to buy them sooner.
There was a real nasty lawsuit against one of the GA manufacturers. I believe it was Cirrus but it could be Cessna. Basically, this person sued everyone because their relative died in a flight. I mean everyone, if your part could be installed in this aircraft, sued.
The result was that Cessna stopped making the 172 in 1986 because the legal liability was too high. The most popular aircraft ever made was not for sale because of the liability. Production has resumed but something like 50% of the cost is just liability insurance for the inevitable lawsuit.
But it’s still crazy because GA is a high income pursuit. So any lawsuit for lifetime earnings is going to be huge.
Cars are AVAILABLE for pretty much the same price.
People WANT more expensive cars.
The Volkswagen Beetle was pretty much the least expensive car on the market for its entire sales run in the United States.
The inflation-adjusted price of a Beetle in 1973 was around $12,000.
The price of a Chevrolet Spark in 2022? $13,000.
Nobody wants a Spark, though. They want an SUV. So Chevy killed the Spark.
Before Chevy discontinued the Spark you could walk onto a lot and drive away in one of the dozen or so Sparks they had rotting away in the corner for less than the price of a VW Beetle in 1973-- and the Spark was superior in every measurable way.
2023's cheapest car is the Nissan Versa. You can 100% find dealers who will part with one for less than the cost of a Beetle. It is also better than the Beetle.
Because it's very easy to get financing for a car, that's why. If they had to pay it out of pocket you bet they'd choose the cheaper car.
Back in the 1970s my dad had plenty of stories about how American car dealers had all kinds of excuses why they couldn't, wouldn't or shouldn't sell you a small car.
Now the Japanese car dealers do the same thing.
A few years I went to a Honda dealer looking for a new Fit, found they didn't have any because "the factory washed out in a flood" but they had 50 CR-Vs which are made in the same factory which were somehow not affected by the flood.
They really ought to put up or shut up: when they have a $7000 sales incentive on that monster vehicle that is not a sign that people want to buy a monster vehicle but it is a sign they want to sell you a monster vehicle.
>when they have a $7000 sales incentive on that monster vehicle that is not a sign that people want to buy a monster vehicle
What cars are you talking about? It's generally the "monster vehicles" that have the greatest markup (e.g. Bronco Raptor)
Manufacturer's can only increase prices (and thus keep ahead of inflation) by innovating the edge with new features, wanted or not.
Is Ford or Caterpillar really best positioned to design and deliver a mobile flat-panel touch screen device? Not likely, but putting one in their vehicles creates opportunities for higher prices and new innovations.
VERY LITTLE of this is available in the aircraft market where every new part number requires justification, testing, and approval.
The health-care market is very similar yet demand is so high and inelastic that it still justifies huge investments.
Aviation... not so much
I think the OP is complaining that they're paying "modern vehicle" prices to rent a plane that has had minimal changes since the 1960s. The vast majority of old cars (other than collectable ones with low mileage) are gonna be cheaper than they were new.
In the end I replaced it with a 5 year old low mileage Tacoma, but paid close to twice what the Ranger’s inflation-adjusted MSRP was, and that was before the used car market went crazy. If I’d wanted to I could have probably resold it and made a $10k profit on it 6 months later. Do I love this truck? Definitely. Would I have been perfectly happy with a 4WD no-frills manual transmission truck and a $300 aftermarket deck with Bluetooth? Definitely, but it wasn’t an option.
Tanks and jets are probably much more expensive. But some of that is because there is literately an arms race.
You need to pay for something that is much better than you had before or you service men will die because the enemy did get something that is better and more expensive.
I would love to own a classic sports car. I would happily pay for the extra fuels and take the risk of not having airbags, ABS brakes etc.
I am grateful that I do not have to go to war. But if I were, I would not want to do it a "classic" tank or fighter jet.
Now Ukraine is getting our old Leopard 1 tanks which have a lot of firepower and moves fast but have less armour than modern tanks, which might work because the Russians most have old tanks left.
But there is a good reason that European countries have bought Leopard 2 tanks that are much more expensive and 24 tonnes heavier.
The government doesn't. They artificially suppress inflation numbers by counting technological progress as deflation.
Is it just Cessnas though? Is this the way all small planes are?
Compared to the doctor owner pilot who flies 1 hour to get a hamburger once or twice a year, and keeps it hangared the rest of the time.
There's plenty of neat little planes out there, my favorite was basically the go cart equivalent of a jet that I saw at our club airport. Something like this https://www.esato.com/board/viewtopic.php?topic=92070
The only example in that class (sub $750k) I can think off the top of my head with a better engine is DA40 NG, which uses a modified Mercedes diesel engine.
Even the 172 went totally out of production for a decade. Cessna almost went under.
I have a feeling I'm perpetrating a certain angle to the truth (maybe that product-liability lawyers suck). I'm just passing on what I heard -- please don't shoot the messenger. A more comprehensive retelling would be appreciated.
Obviously an aviation application has other added constraints like elevation changes, inverted operation, packaging requirements, etc, but "runs at 75% max power for hours at a time" is certainly in common with the marine applications, and trivially demonstrated on a dyno stand.
Probably airplanes, even in GA situations, are able to operate under negative Gs far more often that a typical marine application.... A person adapting such an engine would ideally think about oil pickup under such scenarios.
Instruction in a 172 is more like $250/hr at the nearest airport to me in Massachusetts, with the plane being at least $200/hr of that. The gotcha is I think they are modern 172s, which are probably more than $500k each to buy at this point.
I took lessons in the early 1990s and it was $125/hr in a 152 which was a much smaller less capable airplane. People are too heavy now, the 152 sized plane is no longer used as much because 2x 200lb adults will put it over it's max takeoff weight if the gas is topped off or something.
Everything about all of it is super wacked. The leaded fuel, the way people cling to old planes cause the new ones are so stratospherically expensive, the ancient technology because the manufacturers need so much money to get anything approved, etc..
Why would you fly with full fuel tanks while taking lessons? However, your comment is correct that 152 is horribly underpowered
It's also dependent on what's being flown. Sometimes they will fly with less for weight and balance.
The main issue right now is that all the flight schools are booked up and you can't get a DPE booked less than two months out.
Why is this?
According to BLS.GOV - 1970 $45 == 2022 $353.
Makes sense that something like an airplane would drop in price, but I'm surprised that it is (after adjusting for inflation) 1/3 the price that it was in 1970.
Any advice welcome.
I love the A36TN. For a traveling over 300nm airplane, I don’t ever want a normally aspirated piston again. The next clear step better than an A36TN is 7-figures and burns Jet-A.
I have only a couple hours in an M20, so I can’t fairly compare it directly. A36 club seating is well-liked by the family. (Have owned it 9.5 years; wife has literally never sat up front.) Turbo and TKS well-liked by me. It’s not cheap, but it’s reasonably economical and fairly fast. 185 knots on 16-17 gph. Can climb 1000 fpm through 12-15K (but at 32-33 gph), which is nice for quickly getting above low-level bumps and out of the maelstrom of traffic.
Boeing field, next to SeaTac (but not in class b airspace) was my favorite place to land, and home field for me. Not too busy, but enough real air traffic to make good practice.
My favorite times were landing shortly after the last flight of the Concord before it went to park at the flight museum and watching it taxi off the runway from overhead.
And another time being told to extend downwind and look out the window to see a Blue Angel buzz the tower.
And some airports aren’t technically “bravo” but the most common method of getting there involves transiting bravo airspace.
Adapt the engines or ground them. There's no acceptable middle ground.
It's like secondhand smoke to the rest of the population.
No your "immune system" does not handle lead, it's forever and why it was banned in cars for 25 years
https://www.thedrive.com/news/42218/if-leaded-fuel-is-so-bad...
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
Not sure what the next step, regulation-wise, is. An official 100UL spec followed by the sunsetting of 100LL?
First, the GA fleet worldwide uses 500 tons of lead per year. Compared to 5,000,000 tons when leaded car gas was in use. That's a 99% reduction in lead pollution, so let's not be so dramatic.
Second, unleaded avgas is here so even that 99% reduction is about to be 100%. G100UL is fully approved for the GA fleet and is in the process of being rolled out this year with more widespread adoption to be seen next year. If you're going to spout unfounded fears at least be up to the date on the facts.
Not yet because we're just now finally rolling out the unleaded avgas. It's probably a safe bet that the EPA will move to ban leaded avgas as soon as it's feasible to do so once G100UL has more wide distribution (which, again, is in the process of happening this year and next year).
> Is it dramatically more expensive than leaded?
The manufacturer says it will cost about $1 more per gallon for unleaded. It may end up costing about the same when you consider the overhead that EPA regulations for leaded gas add to the final cost of 100LL.
> For how long should I look up and see a GA aircraft knowing it's some rich idiot spraying my neighborhood with lead?
Honestly, this statement shows a gross misunderstanding of GA. GA is far more than "rich people flying in their planes." For one, the really rich people are flying in jets or turboprops which burn jet fuel like airliners do. Second, GA with piston planes is training for future airline pilots, medical flights, law enforcement, aerial survey, and much more. The people that do fly GA for fun with piston planes are solidly middle or upper-middle class. Flying for a hobby is very similar to having a boat or RV with most GA pilots flying around in not-at-all-fancy 1970s-era Cessnas. In terms of lead contamination, you should be more concerned of lead pipes and paint than the tiny amount that comes from 100LL fuel.
Planes should cost 2-4 years average sallary, but stupid regulations prevent it.
If I recall correctly, Cessna was found infinitely liable for every plane manufactured, meaning that each new plane off the assembly line increased their potential overall liability without liability over decades-old planes expiring and decreasing it.
This was a problem in the 90s. And it was fixed! Back when the government still fixed things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...
Even the relatively modern SR20 uses a Lycoming engine: https://cirrusaircraft.com/aircraft/sr20/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_IO-390
That is essentially how any new industry works. EV's were too bad/impractical/expensive until Tesla decided to take the risk and put down the capital to make them mainstream. Why can't/doesn't someone do the same for GA?
It’s the doctor segment that is probably way down, or holding steady.
I wanted to be a pilot. I took lessons in the 1990s at a small field, relatively uncrowded, relatively low cost. I stopped due to weather/money.
When I tried again after I finished college where I lived things were more expensive and the airspace was so crowded you would run up costs waiting in line to take off, and the whole thing was much more stressful.
It has to be fun, in a busy enough environment it becomes stressful enough fewer people want to fly.
It's actually an aviation crises in the making with 1000's of SR-22s.
But that's a $2m aircraft vs a half-million one.
That's how silly it all is, and why it will stay stuck in Experimental.
There's a couple of companies working in this space:
Turbaero: https://turb.aero/ Turbotech: https://www.turbotech-aero.com/
The odds of a random stranger dying from a light aircraft falling on them are trivial, several orders of magnitude less than the odds of their being hit by a car or being killed by inactivity; the pilot is free to refuse to take off, so risk appraisal really is on them; it's time to dump safety bureaucrats into your nearest woodchipper and CHANGE. THE. LAW. if you want ANY interesting activities or skills to survive.
Insert the "who could have done this" meme with the FAA shooting interest in flying and # of pilots.
Can you explain this further?
Some conditions are uniformly disqualifying, for good reasons. But it results in a perverse situation where a regular person can choose to either get mental health care or fly, but not both.
https://www.faa.gov/pilot-mental-fitness
For me it's completely moot. I can't even have someone else fly me anymore--I have an (apparently untreatable) eustachian tube dysfunction.
...which is probably for the best given my bearish position on aviation.
Oh my sweet summer child.
If these things are that bad, those same people shoudn't be driving either. And this is probably true. However, if you applied these same restrictions to driving, people would absolutely go nuts on you.
Note that 'undiagnosed ADHD' holds as much weight as me saying you have bad energies. There are many conditions that masquerade as ADHD to a layperson, including some purely psychological ones (they are no less real, but are very different from a neurodivergent brain and require very different treatment).
If you are otherwise a high functioning adult (can function in society, operate vehicles safely, etc), get your third class medical, which should be no problem. You have to disclose diagnosed conditions. Do a discovery flight and ask for an opinion from the flight instructor. If he thinks you are fit, go start your training and enjoy.
If, one day, you do get diagnosed (with ADHD or some other disqualifying condition) AND require medication, then it's a problem. If you don't need medication (because most if not all ADHD medications are prohibited), don't try to renew your third class medical (because, if you get denied, it's a big problem) and get advice about BasicMed. It has far less requirements; my understanding is, unless there's something strictly prohibited, if a doctor signs you up you are good to go.
You won't be able to fly commercial or faster than 250knots but I suspect you don't care.
Failing all the above, there's light sports aircraft and gliders(no medical requirements, you just need judge yourself to be capable and unlikely to be incapacitated) – although I am not sure you can operate them while taking meds; some professional advice required here.
Disclaimer 2: Obviously the above assumes that whatever you have does not impair you. This is just to get around FAA's antiquated view on mental health while complying with the law. The most important thing is to be safe. If you really can't due to health issues, then don't, even if a doctor says you are fine.
Otherwise, don't give up!
We see the same with dinghy sailing. It used to be a big scene with hundreds of ordinary people showing up for regattas. It was killed by windsurfing (at least here in Europe) and just people moving on to other things ,not regulation of any sort.
People have plenty of expensive and time consuming hobbies. All hobbies are at least time-consuming, that's what a hobby is.
All certifications add to the expenses. It's the reason why one can't buy a headset off amazon and have to pay 1k for a used headset. Sure, safety requires certifications but I guess we went overboard. It's also the reason why GA aircraft are expensive to this day, even those build 40 years ago. It's pretty expensive to keep maintaining old tech at low volumes. I'm rooting for Diamond and their car-derived engines (as well as the Experimental aircraft scene).
Note that boats are also notoriously expensive.
There's a very good parallel to your example: gliders. You want to fly cheap (just to fly, not to go places)? Go soaring. Problem is, it's even more location-dependent.
Why is this worse than the 80s?
I know that paragliding and hang gliding exist, but those are a bit out of my comfort (and safety) zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikarus_C42
Technically it is a microlight but top speed and handling are much closer to a regular GA craft. I absolutely loved it and if my eyesight was better I'd definitely go for a license.
I suspect hybrids will be developed first. Basically an APU sending power to the main motor + a relatively small battery. The 'APU' can be relatively compact and deliver a lot of power, with less engineering requirements (can place it anywhere, doesn't need to interface with a prop). If it fails you have some emergency battery power. Electric motors are incredibly strong and have very few moving parts, so reliability is higher. They are also light.
Net net, there's some complexity and the combined equipment may be heavier (may! existing powerplants are some heavy beasts) but there's probably advantages.
Certification would be horrendous, I imagine.
In my vision a compact rotary (that inside-out rotary patent a few years ago looked even more promising) would recharge the battery subsystem. Or maybe a fuel cell.
The same would probably work for GA. Really, hybrids will work regardless of the battery tech for the next couple decades.
Hybrid planes would be quite attractive, but of course the certification bareer which might be too large
So you effectively electrify 5x the number of cars...
But, that opportunity has passed, at least we are moving towards electrification.
https://www.continental.aero/diesel/engines/cd155.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thielert_Centurion
I think these, combined with biofuel based Jet-A are a good solution to this problem, as electric tech is a long ways from having the range needed.
Maybe someone who knows more could chime in why these haven't already completely replaced the ancient air cooled leaded gas motors? My guess is that they're very expensive...
(There's also a company called Austro engines that makes aero diesel engines, AFAIU even based on the same MB car engines Continental/Thielert uses. I think Austro is a subsidiary or spinoff of Diamond, so that's where you see these engines used.)
Those Mercedes engines are found in small cars and delivery vans around the world, and are widely available and pretty cheap. For example, the Centurion 3.0 uses a Mercedes-Benz OM642 which is found in Freightliner/Sprinter vans, Jeeps, and tons of other very common cars. You can buy these engines straight from Mercedes for like $8k.
In this case, the author mentions using an aluminum marine GMC V8, but not which one exactly. This is most likely based on the LS V8s, which are fairly expensive motors, and a pretty ancient design (e.g. pushrods).
Bingo! Yeah, I was wondering the same while reading the article.
> a pretty ancient design (e.g. pushrods)
Does it matter? The engine is significantly derated vs. the original car engine, so max rpm is going to be much lower, thus no problem with valve float.
(As an aside, when aviation engines started going with 4V designs in the 30'ies, it wasn't only about breathing, but better cooling of the valves was an equally big motivation.)
Car engines today are much more efficient than they were 50-70 years ago, but that's because the difference between maximum power and cruise power for a car ranges from about 5x to 20x. Much of the efficiency gains come from devising ways to deliver short bursts of power from a small engine, such as variable valve lift and turbocharging.
General aviation aircraft cruise at about 75% power. There's much less to be gained by optimizing the engine to run efficiently at 10%, and running a small engine at high RPM and high boost continuously is a recipe for frequent service intervals.
That's ignoring improvements to transmissions, tires, and aerodynamics in cars that aren't relevant to planes. There's certainly room for improvement, but not to the dramatic degree we've seen with cars.
True, the BSFC numbers of these old school aero engines aren't that bad, actually.
> General aviation aircraft cruise at about 75% power. There's much less to be gained by optimizing the engine to run efficiently at 10%
I think the real advantage isn't a small efficiency gain in optimal conditions, but rather that with a modern FADEC there's less pilot workload, with a single lever for selecting the thrust the pilot wants, and the electronics takes care of selecting the optimal parameters (throttle position, amount of fuel, ignition timing etc.) for that thrust setting, taking into account input from a number of sensors (temperatures, pressure, etc.). And all those sensors provide data that can be logged and help with planning maintenance before something goes pear-shaped up in the air.
> running a small engine at high RPM and high boost continuously is a recipe for frequent service intervals.
The Rotax aero engines rev to a max of almost 6000 rpm, cruise is ~5000 rpm, and they have a normal(?) TBO of 2000 hours, including the turbocharged 914. (The turbocharged 915iS has a TBO of 1200 hours, but I suspect it's due to the engine being relatively new, probably the interval will be extended when more experience has been gained?). Of course, these engines are designed for that from the ground up, not saying you could take a random car engine off the street and run it at 5000 rpm for 2000 hours.
Deltahawk, Thielert, etc are the bigger projects I’ve followed. Getting an actual certified engine is…hard.
Seriously tho, cool idea. I’m also shocked that leaded gas is still the norm. These LS engines (I’m guessing by the shape of the headers and the hint that it’s an aluminum block) are insanely reliable and I would put my life behind one of those before a lot of other engines. I’ve beat my own into the ground several times now.
This is not true at all, unless one is only talking about small inboard boats.
The largest ships get custom built engines.
Our smallest truckable tug uses John Deere engines. Everything else uses engines that would never fit in any automotive application.
Regardless, the point is they're not bespoke for your industry.
I'm less familiar with outboard engines, and I don't know what is more common (I/O or outboards) for recreational boating. In the Great Lakes, I/Os appear to dominate, but I've noticed that videos of boating in Florida and the east coast show a lot of outboards even on the bigger boats.
So likely both you and the article author are correct.
Yanmar, AFAIU, is a big maker of various industrial and agricultural engines, so I guess the Yanmar marine engines are variants of those.
For Volvo Penta, I'm quite sure the bigger ones are marinized variants of Volvo car and truck engines, but for the smaller ones, they might sell them also as gensets or such, not sure.
Beyond Yanmar and Volvo Penta, there's a plethora of engine makers (Beta, Nanni, Westerbeke, etc. etc.), which make marinized versions of Kubota engines, which are AFAIU mostly used for agricultural and industrial equipment (e.g. those ubiquitous small Kubota tractors). These are generally well regarded, and sell for considerably less than Yanmar and Volvo Penta.
As another commenter suggested, I read the assertion about "the largest marine engine manufacturers use mass-produced automotive engines" as "largest engine" not as "largest manufacturer". Maybe the author intended the latter.
Why wouldn't he just bring a parachute?
"Experimental" is a legal designation, not an evaluation of an aircraft's safety.
Many of them do, but that certainly doesn't mean all of them do.
It's really hard to see how using decades old engine designs with leaded gas is necessary to prevent crashes, or how updating a proven airframe to newer engine designs that have a lot of operating time in cars needs to be an extremely onerous process to avoid crashes.
https://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft-do-car-engines-make-good-...
> Car engines are designed to provide quick bursts of relatively high power output for acceleration, and then only modest power output for steady-state cruising. It’s unusual for an auto engine to operate anywhere near its redline rpm or max-rated power output. Airplanes, on the other hand, usually take off and climb near 100 percent power output, followed by steady-state cruise often at 75 percent power. Aircraft engines are designed to sustain this punishment reliably over a typical 2,000-hour service life. Try running your car’s engine at or near redline rpm all the time and see what happens. Of course, we don’t know what will happen, and in an airplane we can’t pull over to the side of the road when it does.
And le Mans is not an oval track: engines don't run at 100% all the time.
And how many le Mans cars break down during the race?
Typically, of course, you're not seeing a lot of elevation changes in a marine application, but with modern fuel injection that's probably not such a big deal.
2000hr equates to, generously, like really generously, a 150-200k service life. It really drives me up the wall to see you acting like this is a big number when in any other context you'd be happy to pop in and tell us about how your you're so smart because you bought a Toyota and it's guaranteed to make it that far.
Those industrial uses don't crash into a random person's house if they fail, and "conservatively tune" means you've changed the engine's behavior. The FAA likes you to demonstrate safety when you change safety-critical things.
> 2000hr equates to, generously, a 150-200k service life.
At a much higher cruising RPM, which is the entire point of the article.
It is highly unlikely to crash into a random person’s home due to engine failure. Planes don’t drop out of the sky like stones when their engines fail. You can still fly them and pick a spot to attempt emergency landing or controlled crash.
For comparison, cars crash into people’s homes all the time, but i don’t believe it is ever a result of car engine failure. No reason to expect plane engine failures to cause these.
The argument I responded to was about negative externalities of potentially less safe new levels plane engines for third parties. I claim that these are negligible, because the risk of the worse engines is entirely internalized among the plane occupants: with less safe engines, more people will die, but these will almost certainly be plane occupants, not third parties. Third parties do die in plane crashes sometimes, but this is either caused by pilot error, or technical failure causing the plane to be uncontrollable, not failure of the engine. On piston GA planes, control is entirely independent of the engine.
FAA doesn't force them to use older tech, anyway. It's just that a lot of smaller planes coast on grandfathering of older engines. Believe me, a lot of CAAs would simply love it if they could force removal of carburator-based engines outside of museum planes, because carburators are one of the core causes for engine-related crashes in GA, and requiring injection based systems would reduce a whole subcategory of accidents.
Thing is, FAA and other CAA are only requiring that you do follow through sometimes ornerous but generally sane testing requirements if you want to bring a new design. This causes considerable up front issues for new designs, but there's a reason why there's much less complaint about it than one would imagine - the ornerous rules are for when you want full certification for the plane, not any of the lower classes. TFA author was trying for full certification, so that the resulting plane would be fully usable without special allowances for flight training for PPL(A), not any of the lower-category licenses. For just flying once you have a license, the requirements are less steep. [1]
[1] My father is currently rebuilding a crashed Cessna 152, question of how deeply tested the engine will be (and thus whether the resulting type certificate would allow PPL(A) training) were discussed a lot
Also, the real reason there's almost no new piston engines is that there's no real demand. Especially since you need to certify the plane with the engine as well. Thus we face mostly incremental changes, because any single development won't bring enough demand to justify the changes. Meanwhile there's not enough money in the market to actually try banning the old engines unless you want to cripple a whole sector.
Looking at their demo videos, they seem to be running the engine at something like 3000 RPM, which is not that far from cruising RPM on a car.
I bet they could have got the costs down more if they had used a Toroidal Propeller.
Here (already cued for you) https://youtu.be/s_J1OYcCPms?t=23 the footage shows less vortices generated with the Toroidal propeller seen in the top half of the frame of the two boat propeller underwater.
Its these vortices in water which generate cavitation on a traditional style propeller, which leave little pits on the surface of the propeller eventually leading to its replacement as its surface contributes to more friction and thus less fuel economy.
If the friction from the pitted surface is ignored, then it can lead to parts of a blade becoming more like swiss cheese with holes that results in parts of the blade breaking off.
Wind Turbines could generate more electricity if they used toroidal blades, but currently the engineering skill does not exists to scale these blades up in size, and have the ability to "detune" a blade in gale force/storm force winds to minimise damage to the generators and the unit itself.
However the use of these wind turbines also means, the state have a stealth population control mechanism as these wind turbine blades can also be altered to generate plenty of infrasound which can be used to make large parts of the population in the vicinity feel anxious, something that's documented in the Disney sound engineering labs in the 40's/50's when the sound engineers inadvertently made themselves all feel very ill for a few days. Ergo you will probably see less people striking in future!
When a crash happens, add a rule to prevent it from happening again.
Eventually however you have so many onerous rules that it becomes incredibly expensive to design a new aircraft engine and thus are suck with decades old tech that lacks modern innovation and safety features.
It's very rare to do a pass over regulations to try to simplify them. From a regulatory POV, there is little glory in that and lots of risk.
See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/fd... for example.
FAA overall has done a lot of good for the safety of the flyers (and I respect it much more than other regulatory agencies tasked with protecting us). The problem is that very often there is a trade off between safety and other things, and regulatory framework prohibits the people it is meant to serve from deciding on their own where exactly they want to be in terms of this trade off. For example, if motorcycles were invented today, they would almost certainly be banned as way too unsafe to operate. That would suck, because I love riding motorcycles.
The distance comparison also doesn't make sense because it's not like you could drive across the ocean even if you tried.
I guess it makes sense in terms of aggregate safety for a population for transport planning, but on an individual level it just doesn't communicate what I want to know.
Edit: for an analogy - imagine if someone invented faster than light space travel, but 25% of passengers don't survive the trip. The deaths per 100 miles statistic would be amazing compared to both car and air travel, but would you sign up for a ticket?
In US General Aviation, there were 332 deaths in 19,454,467 flight hours in the year 2020.
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...
Yes, it is.
Very similar to how dangerous motorcycle riding is. Work out approx. hours of operation from miles driven (say avg. 30-50mph) and from there use annual fatalities. [1] Given that, death-per-hour for 332 deaths/19M in flight hours is roughly comparable to the 6000 deaths seen in motorcycle accidents. Much higher than automobiles, much higher than commercial flight.
[1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...
I don't disagree that it is more dangerous than automobiles or commercial flight. But I wouldn't characterize it as "extremely dangerous." Nor would I characterize motorcycles as such.
Neither one is "extremely" dangerous but it's a far cry from "all these strict regulations make it extremely safe" like with commercial flight.
Compared to 85 million miles travelled per fatality on the roads in general, and about 4 million miles travelled per fatality on motorcycles.
2X better than motorcycles, 10X worse than road fatalities in general.
And that's being quite generous about the mileage.
Motorcycles are the same way, actually. An overwhelming amount of fatal motorcycle accidents involve alcohol at night, usually in combination with not wearing proper gear.
I can travel X minutes on a plane for Y cost to one set of destinations, or I can travel A minutes in a car for B cost to a different set of destinations. The actual distance between my current location and my destination means nothing to me, although the potential destinations do, which certainly are more varied with plane travel.
But I live in a pretty nice place, so travelling locally is pretty good too.
If you were to travel from point A to point B, and wanted to know whether driving or flying was safer, then the correct metric to look at is the "per distance" one.
Or to put it another way - comparing two different modes of travel to one specific destination doesn't make much sense when the destination is partially fungible. I want to know what the safest way to get to (any sufficiently nice place) is, not to (one specific nice place).
Someone told me that risk per unit distance was higher when walking than riding a motorcycle, which I thought sounded like it could be possible. Sadly it seems its not true [1].
Interesting how f/bnkm is so low for driving vs walking though.
[1]: https://www.normalizecycling.com/risk-in-cycling/units-of-ri...
Others have touched on the probability thing.
The issue with motorcycles is that a some of it is under your control (driving safely, protective gear, bike maintenance) but there's a lot that isn't: potholes, other drivers, animals and so on.
Flying, almost everything is under the pilot's control. That includes most plane failures. Good preflight and maintenance takes care of most issues. The rest is taken care of by the flight planning – for example, engine failures. You should always have a place to put down the plane at any moment if you lose an engine - and general aviation aircraft land pretty slow.
Newer advancements have made it even safer (see also, whole frame parachutes).
That basically leaves freak accidents; they are a minority. Go spelunk the NTSB database, you'll find most accidents were preventable.
In a nutshell, you are probably going to find the risk is very skewed by complacent or otherwise irresponsible pilots.
I don't say all this to disparage GA, or rock climbing. I rock climb and intend to do so well into the future. But saying these sorts of things mean you aren't treating your hobby with the seriousness it deserves imo. It could happen to you; thinking otherwise is self-deception.
It's almost entirely about protectionism of a massive industry of rebuilding and servicing companies for ancient engines and electromechanical systems, not safety or reliability.
Compare a modern electronic gyro to its electromechanical cousin. The electromechanical version is unreliable, power-hungry, and extremely expensive to service.
The modern electronic equivalent is ultra-reliable, can self-test, needs no servicing or repair, can contain its own battery to self-power in an emergency, and be networked with other devices in the cockpit.
Want to put the electronic version in your plane? Ooooo, sorry, no can do, Mr. Airplane Owner, says the FAA. Can't hurt the profits of an entire industry dedicated to emptying your wallet of thousands of dollars every time your gyro needs to be rebuilt.
A modern fuel-injected, water-cooled airplane engine can run constant self-diagnostics and logging, and provide highly useful, actionable information to both the pilot and mechanic. It's single-lever, increasing reliability and reducing task loading during the most critical phases of flight, and reducing emissions substantially, too. It doesn't have special considerations in terms of flight profiles; air-cooled piston airplane engines require a gentle descent profile or they will be "shock cooled" and undergo high wear or outright seize. There are no issues with carb freeze. Starting is a breeze, instead of a chore. The list goes on.
We should be encouraging the hell out of EFI conversions and EFI engine options...but instead the FAA buries them all under mountains of paperwork and regulations to protect Lycoming and the like.
No, I don't want to plug something into an OBD-2 and bluetooth to a phone/laptop. Put the FUCKING INFO ON THE SCREEN. Speaking of protectionism, don't want your customers knowing what is actually wrong with the car...
For VAG (Volkswagen, Audi etc.) there's a software shops can use called VAG-COM that sells officially for a few $thousands, but you can get it very cheap from aliexpress (I'm quite sure it's pirated, so..). I guess something similar exists for other brands too.
One family member was at breakfast that morning with several other pilots, all of whom had private aircraft except him (he is a voracious pilot, though). Every single one of them apparently had some extremely harrowing stories about engine failure, etc. Every one of them.
It's not a game, and the FAA is really sleeping on the private sector as far as I understand. Its dying under bureaucracy.
To respond to the parent comment as well -- I don't think this is a 'Republican', 'Democrat', or even a 'Libertarian' issue. All three of those parties have weaknesses that tend to screw over this kind of organization -- the first two with extremely bloated processes, and the second with perhaps far-too-little regulation.
This is the kind of org that just needs good leadership with integrity and funding that focuses on getting the little guys up and out there, as well as promoting development and having _very strict_ best practices for safety. It's a very hard blend to do right, I think. Sorta a combination of reducing bloat and inferred/accidental corruption, etc, I think.
(not to get terribly political, I do not like politics at all personally. Just talking through the technical points of the matter as much as I can. Much love! <3 <3 <3 <3 :)))))) :D :D :)))))) )
Weather exceeding pilot and/or airframe capability is the big killer. That includes black hole takeoffs where failure to use the instruments kills quickly.
There's a bunch of fatal loss of control accidents where the pilot stall/spins out of a low level turn to the runway - which can happen when the engine quits on takeoff. With urban development crowding runways, you might just have to land on a roof.
I have been fortunate in not needing to use such airports. Flying gliders I don't always make it back. I keep landable areas in reach. In one case a dark cloud over the hills blocked my way back and I had to retreat 30 km to an airport.
Yes, at least somewhat:
1) The safety record of flying is often cited but that safety record pertains to commercial aircraft, not private aircraft. For hours of travel, private aircraft are significantly more lethal commercial flight and even more than driving [1]
2) The article mentions having to jump through regulatory hoops in the same sentence as literally putting out engine fires. Maybe the two are unrelated but I can see a strong public to regulatory hoops on something that, if done wrong, amounts to a small homemade fuel air bomb with 1,000lb+ of cessna debris added in to the mix if things go wrong.
[1]https://www.wijet.com/private-jet-crash-statistics/#:~:text=....
it isn't going to happen by accident
right now lots of people are getting exposed to fumes from both leaded gasoline itself and the combustion products from the engines, which probably kills more people than faulty civil aviation engines ever will
As for the rest, I agree...? I'm not sure how that was related. I think a dislike for leaded fuel is not incompatible with my comments indicating that some regulatory hoops are reasonable when creating customized aircraft.
Do you think anyone is arguing against the existence of plane regulations?
compare progress in aviation from 01923 to 01973 with progress from 01973 to today. we could have ultra-efficient ornithopters, mass-produced gossamer condors (maybe electric), mars-pathfinder-style airbags, ejection seats in coach class, suborbital commuter rockets to anywhere in the world in 45 minutes, and things we can't even imagine yet or don't know to be feasible
instead we have slight variations on the 50-year-old 747 and the 85-year-old piper cub (still running grossly inefficiently on leaded avgas), dramatic regression in crewed spaceflight capabilities, plus interesting experiments in hang gliders, jetpacks, hoverboards, and more conventional ultralights that have been unable to reach mass adoption
oh and uncrewed quadcopters and stealth bombers because those were unregulated
It may catch on fire, though.
Very few people die in large commercial aviation crashes, but the hobbyist pilot space is a graveyard. ~400 deaths/year in the US, ~13 deaths/100M miles traveled. Meanwhile, commercial aviation is closer to 0.002 deaths/100M miles traveled.
Incidentally, the FAA rules around general aviation are a lot more relaxed than they are around commercial aviation. As a landlubber who occasionally spends a week geeking out about planes, but would never own one, their rules don't really seem to be ridiculous.
I'd say most of these deaths (for both motorcycles and GA) can be attributed to poor judgement outside the scope of FAA regulations or road rules.
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/06/16/revitalizing-th...
The current certification regime makes aircraft more dangerous by preventing modern technology from reaching or replacing the current fleet.