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.
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.
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.
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 current certification regime makes aircraft more dangerous by preventing modern technology from reaching or replacing the current fleet.
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.
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...