Personal aviation is about to get interesting | Hacker News Reader

Personal aviation is about to get interesting

elidourado.com

141 pointsjseliger137 comments

> After all, pilots and passengers generally want, other things equal, to be safe, so an unfettered free market will deliver cost-effective safety-improving innovations over time.

Ah, such optimistic belief in the "unfettered free market"! That might be true, but aircraft operators mostly want to make as much money as possible, so if the choice is between a cost-effective safety-improving innovation and an even more cost-effective non-innovation (i.e. not doing anything), they will choose the latter.

Cars are significantly safer than they are required to be.

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement, given there are tens of thousands of auto fatalities every year. In fact, as I understand it, you are far more likely to die while driving to the airport than flying for any given trip you take.

The commercial aircraft vs. private equivalent of a car is probably a train.

Or perhaps a (non air) bus

Different kinds of miles.

You would be far more likely to die landing that 737 at my grocery store.

That isn't because of the cars, it's because of the drivers. If you get into a plane crash you pretty much die; safety rules are directed to preventing crashes.

Only 2% of car crashes are caused by mechanical failure and nearly all of those are from improper maintenance rather than vehicle design flaws.

probably true, the EU plans to require drivers for bigger cars to have a special drivers license to bring car crash fatalities to 0.

Only for new liscences, and that provisions seems unable to get a majority at the moment. Which kind of makes sense, why limit it to weight? EVs and most family cars are above the proposed 1.8 tons. Limiting it by power / speed (EVs have a ton of power but lower top speeds) would make more sense, similar to what we had for motorbikes in the past.

> If you get into a plane crash you pretty much die

If you're thinking about the scariest plane crashes, where the plane hits the ground at more or less cruise speed, you're right. But, when a crash occurs during take-off or landing (and that's most of the crashes, although they don't tend to capture the public's imagination as much as the others), the chances are much better. There are some photos of pretty badly broken up and/or burned planes (e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/emirates-jet-burns-runway...) where you would be surprised to hear that all or most passengers managed to get out...

> But, when a crash occurs during take-off or landing (and that's most of the crashes, although they don't tend to capture the public's imagination as much as the others), the chances are much better.

This is not really attributable to planes having great safety features though, it's just the type of event which is most survivable (and which they therefore spend fewer resources trying to minimize).

It's basically like saying that people rarely die in car accidents that occur in parking lots. That's neither the reason for nor the result of the modern safety features.

In particular, cars (like personal aircraft) are predominantly bought by the people who ride in them, so this is the kind of market where buyers will actually care about safety.

Compare this to a market where e.g. a government agency or health insurance company is choosing which product to buy for someone else to use.

For the drivers inside, but not for everyone else. In fact, they just had getting bigger and bigger, an arms race prompted by bad regulation but kicked into perpetual high gear by standard market and consumer forces.

Euro NCAP, for example, was a UK government initiative that was adopted continent-wide. Car makers used safety as marketing to prompt people to replace older cars with newer safer ones, and it worked in this context.

The single biggest design factors on whether a car will kill someone they hit, is its weight and height. And cars are significantly heavier and taller than they need to be.

I learned in Driver’s Ed that if I was ever in an accident I wanted to be in a head on collision at 45 mph in a 74 Lincoln Continental hitting a 72 Chevy Vega. I think you would be hard pressed to find a heavier passenger car.

I think they were talking about people walking or cycling.

Qantas markets quite effectively on being safe. People are pretty quick to react to markets without great regulation and it quickly becomes a key differentiator.

Ah, yes. The time before the FDA and USDA, where the food industry was famous for being easy to distinguish the safe options from the unsafe options…

Just try and differentiate snake oil (a petroleum distillate like baby oil) because no one likes a dry flaky snake and snake oil (from the first pressings of Tibetan mountain snakes) used in Dr MacGillacutty’s Genuine Snake Oil Restorative Tonic that cures gout, athlete’s foot, constipation, rickets, baldness, and 20 other diseases.

You write it sarcastically but this actually was why canned food became so popular, at the beginning stages it was practically a guarantee of the brand being as close to actually safe as possible.

There was no regulation that food manufacturers had to use sanitary canned containers, it was almost purely market forces that spurred the adoption.

Of course once the canning technology became cheap enough, even low quality brands could afford to can everything, so it stopped becoming a reliable differentiator. But that was decades later.

I can't remember the last time anyone I know chose an airline because it is "marketed on being safe".

When a choice is possible at all, price is always what makes the difference in my experience.

A decision made possible, in a sense, by the strong safety culture which is partially enforced by regulations. Even the cheap ones, in most markets, are save enough, meaning very save.

Unless you talk bush flying in Africa or Latin America, but that is a different market segment anyway.

I know, my point is that you can't count on "marketing" to ensure security.

Without safety regulations, or any other kond of regulation, the "free market" will optimize for the bare minimum of what it can away with. And if they have to do less than even that at times, then be it.

Aviation is the only true six sigm asave industry human kind created so far because of regulations and restrictions. And not because the free market magically worked...

Phrased differently: the free market will maximise the amount of unsafety.

Well, only in case safety is perceived as more expensive than unsafety.

I think this kind of belief in free markets should be treated as equivalent to beliefs in Santa or fairies at the bottom of the garden.

'Consumers don't want to die in plane crashes so if they are killed in a plane crash they will simply avoid doing business with that company in future' is certainly... A take and I guess actually correct taken literally but uhhh, nobody listen to free market maniacs please.

What do you mean? Is this argument not correct?

Much like any complicated system, free market capitalism tends to have some emergent properties in the absence of regulation. You can see monopolies, monopsonies, cartels, and fraud. These corporate forces often have disproportionate control over the markets and can engage in anti-competitive practices that result in sub-optimal practices.

Sub-optimal practices at 40,000 feet means people die in a way that would cost pennies to prevent. Lots of people.

But the original argument i still find convincing. As i would not fly with an airline, that has death priced in. Once the word is out, it is over.

I guess it depends on whether or not you think that an airline killing a plane full of people because they skimped on safety is just the "cost of innovation". Surely you can see how some people may think it would be better to have regulations about safety beforehand that airlines have to comply with, rather than letting them do whatever they want until they kill people, right? To me, regulation makes a lot more sense than just hoping for the best from people who care about profit above all else.

Yeah, but is never that cut and dried.

Suppose there are two airlines. Statistics on them state that first one has a crash every 100,000 flights, the other every one million. You need four tickets, and four again for the way back.

How much are you willing to spend more per ticket? $10? $50? $100? $1,000?

How would you know if an airline had death priced in? Oligarchies tend to diversify into media for this reason. Oh no that tragic plane crash was obviously pilot error!

Well, iam more afraid of government, where people are numbers, than private companies, where people are money. No people no money. Even the oligarch can lose a lot. So, i still find the argument convincing.

That accidents happen is priced in, you pay for insurance.

Literally the next sentence is “It’s possible by some lights that the market will not produce the optimal amount of safety at all relevant margins, and so regulation persists.”

The trap phrase there is "passengers .. want to be safe", when what it really means is "passengers . . want to feel safe". The vast majority of aviation consumers can't possibly make any sort of informed decision about safety or maintenance requirements, so what they're really buying is the experience of safety. Which of course is why regulation becomes necessary.

We could say a whole bunch of other things about when companies or people value the lives of other people - and when they decide not to - but that's tap dancing around other topics I'd rather not bump into on HN.

In personal aviation, the aircraft operator is the one who files the plane and the one who will die if something goes wrong, and that's a big reason why the rules are much more relaxed than for commercial aviation.

Those who have a personal aircraft care about safety, because of Darwinism, literally.

I'm a pilot, own aircraft and maintain them.

Everything the faa does boils down to limiting liability, and liability is asses occupying seats in aircraft. Want to fly without a medical? Great, you can do basic med but can't fly over 6 people. You want to import a foreign war bird? Awesome, you're going to have to register that restricted and or experimental and you can't do aerial tours or turn a profit. You own a vintage aircraft and are the owner / operator? You legally can fabricate your own parts if you follow certain guidelines.

I hate to burst the "hope" and optimism bubble, but we won't be seeing flying cars or anything crazy from the MOSAIC rules. While I think there will be a lot of positives that come from it, the faa more or less is laying out a set of rules and guidelines for new aircraft and tightening up definitions. LSA was a major failure, and the Feds are realizing that they can actually limit liability and increase safety by making a set of standards and guidelines for small aircraft.

Also, I don't see any "emerging markets" coming out of GA. Flying is expensive, takes a lot of time, and is hard. Real wages also haven't risen since the 80s, and the younger folks have other interests.

Well, at least there's always backyard ground effect builds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37964608

Pretty sure if you stay under 6 feet AGL you're considered a boat!

There's a vlog on his channel on "Is it a boat or a plane?".

I threw that in more as it's a fun build (that sadly had a bit of a mishap this last weekend).

My background's more in modified STOL for geophysics | heli mustering .. which was all rather seat of the pants back in the day.

That's crazy! There's actually currently a geophysics crew in my town doing a USGS project.

Which aircraft did you do STOL for?

I principally wrote geophysics software with some time spent in the hangers tag teaming with real mechanics while working for an Australian survey company that was ultimately sold to Fugro.

At time of sale we hade 14 airframes, mostly fixed wing aircraft, some helicopters, all modified for survey work (stinger tail booms, looped EM field detectors, under slung drones, etc) and a perfect 20+ year air saftey record which Fugro didn't maintain - they had two aircraft down and some loss of life within a few years of aquisition.

Many of the planes were older high wing twin engine types (Shrikes, etc) - my personal favorite that was bought and modified in my time there was a NZ Cresco 750 designed for crop dusting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MO5Wfomks

Sadly, -KPY got totalled kissing a powerline that (presumeably) hadn't been mapped ahead of time.

https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/89273

We surveyed all of Fiji, most of Mali, NorWest India | Pakistan during the Pokhran-II | Chagai-I test exchanges, along with a great deal of other work about the globe.

That is really neat! Thank you for sharing! Love hearing people's aviation stories.

You can have a dual mode vehicle, cruise on WIG effect at 10% throttle or crank it up and go to 3000.

> I hate to burst the "hope" and optimism bubble, but we won't be seeing flying cars or anything crazy from the MOSAIC rule

You can already buy a paramotor and learn how to fly it for roughly the price of a new Tesla. I can't imagine getting any closer to "flying cars" than that

I know ... there are already solutions for everything GA out there.

That's a huge improvement. Some existing aircraft will be able to convert to LSAs under MOSAIC, many existing manufacturers will switch to building LSAs, and we'll see many new developments as well.

The current crop of planes in general aviation is deteriorating with nothing to replace them. The average age of a GA aircraft is over 50 years old. They were never designed for this lifetime. Many people are flying aircraft that are closer to the Wright brothers in time than to today. The most popular engine, the Lycoming O-320 was designed in 1953.

50 years ago planes were affordable, maintenance was not prohibitive, and an upper middle class person could easily fly for fun if they wanted to. These rules are hopefully going to make general aviation dramatically cheaper.

The fact that electric engines are included, that you can install new experimental avionics, do some of your own maintenance, etc. while lifting the many restrictions on current LSAs is pretty amazing. Just getting past many of the certification requirements, which are overkill for GA applications, are going to make everything insanely cheaper.

MOSAIC will also give new companies a path into the market, now they can start in the LSA category, develop their product and sell it, and then eventually go for certification. Otherwise you have a massive startup cost with no idea about product-market fit.

I am strongly in favor of MOSAIC's aims and almost all of their choices. I do think that SLSA not having a better safety record than TC/Personal is a problem for the current SLSA grouping. Weather and fuel accidents factor prominently as contributing or primary factors in fatal accidents and an airplane that can only go 120 knots and can only weigh 1320 pounds is far less prone to tangle with unexpected en route weather. (It's not impossible, but contrast that with a 200 knot airplane carrying 700 pounds of fuel in terms of ability to cross multiple weather systems.)

I think it's great. I hope the losses remain low enough for the program to continue to be expanded. I'm not nearly as hopeful as you are that it's going to be transformational for the industry in the sense of returning to the 1960s heyday.

> The current crop of planes in general aviation is deteriorating with nothing to replace them.

In the ultralight world, you got a ton of new airframe designs - including electric ones such as the Pipistrel Velis Electro.

Agree on the engines though, there hasn't been much innovation there for decades, but IMHO that's also a factor of war planes switching over to jet engines and the GA market being too small to justify the investment into the development of piston engines and too poor to invest into jet engines.

Great I guess, but isn’t “personal aviation” (and 90% of general aviation) exactly the type of activity we should be discouraging? It’s incredibly carbon inefficient.

(I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much?

> is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much

I wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already. Yes, GA isn't exactly cheap, but there are many upper middle class families with RVs, boats, trucks, and vacation homes that are more expensive than a shitbox 1970's Cessna is and no one whines about how it's only the 1% that enjoy those pursuits. Not to mention the many more people in partnerships and flying clubs to split the fixed costs across multiple people.

The short of it is that GA is an expensive hobby just as many other upper middle class hobbies are, but an accessible one for many more than the 1%. The people that proclaim how it's only the ultra rich who enjoy aviation are admitting that they know absolutely nothing about the actual general aviation community.

"only the 1% fly" is not true, but "only the 11% fly" is a fact [1].

About the 1%: "1% of the population emits 50% of the commercial aviation's emission". You can keep going like that to show that it is indeed reserved to an upper-part of the society. Maybe the ultra-rich are not the only one flying, but they are responsible for a bigger part of the problem than the upper middle class.

Maybe the misunderstanding comes from the fact that we're looking at the global population. Global warming being a global problem, looking only at the population of your region is not a sufficient reasoning. I live in Switzerland, I guaranty that it's a lot more than 11% of the population that flies. At the end of the day, it's a question of moral and of fairness: do we want to live a life-style which can't be generated to the entire global population and which will ultimately lead to extreme conditions for future-generations and poorer social-classes than ours ? Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences ? My personal answer is that it should not be a personal decision, but that politicians should keep these numbers to start making laws such as taxing kerosene to the same level as cars' fuel.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

you aren’t going to foist those kinds of global limits on the rest of the world, especially not with billions of people in asia emerging from poverty for the first time. They’re going to consume, fly, eat meat and interact with power-hungry AIs. The only way forward is through engineering our way towards minimizing the impact of these activities. The CFC ban was only successful because it was easy to replace them.

Then we aren’t going to achieve it because there is no solution to emissions from air travel that doesn’t look like vapourware.

I've come around to believing this as well, but the problem is that that also means that humanity is most likely doomed. Yet another reason I'm glad I never wanted to have children, but now seeing them just makes me sad.

> Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences?

This isn't an aviation unique topic. You can replace "fly" in that sentence with countless other activities and the same tradeoff applies as virtually every activity currently involves carbon emissions at some point.

There is a massive difference between an airliner's emissions flying from US to Europe and your local GA pilot cruising to the next town over to get lunch on the weekend though. Does that person need to fly to do that? No, they could drive. But the guy that wants to go cruise around the lake all day on his boat or drive his semi-truck sized RV to go camping for the weekend doesn't need to do either of those activities yet no one here has a moral problem with that.

I’m working on getting my PPL now and it’s a lot of work. Claims of elitism are going to be thrown around for anything that is difficult and worthwhile.

Flying is not the issue. Carbon emissions are. That sounds like something that can be resolved to varying degrees of satisfaction one way or another.

> Flying is not the issue. Carbon emissions are.

Are you flying without carbon emissions? I believe this is possible now, and in fact the best use I've seen for electric planes is takeoff/landing training because their range is so limited.

GA involves spraying lead over and poisoning the (mostly low income) communities that live near airports. Probably the most evil hobby you could possibly take up in modern society.

No longer, there's a generally certified lead-free fuel available that's rolling out over the next years [1], and on top of that there's fully electric ultralights.

[1] https://www.flyingmag.com/g100ul-avgas-replacement-set-to-so...

the only reason it’s so hard to get rid of 100LL is because the regulations make it so. The automotive industry was able to get rid of lead 50 years ago.

Alright, here we go yet again with the "leaded gas from GA is going to kill us all!" scare mongering.

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 and claim that flying a piston GA plane is "evil" and that we're all going to die from it and how it's poisoning low income communities in particular. Last I checked there are many middle and upper middle class neighborhoods that exist near regional airports. I know this all too well because those are the same NIMBYs that move in next to an airport that has existed there for the past century and then try to close it because of noise complaints.

Second, since I'm sure you don't know, most GA planes can fly perfectly fine on unleaded gas. Some engines are diesel and some burn Jet A (the same as airliners), none of which have lead. Some small trainer aircraft are electric now too.

Third, unleaded G100UL exists, is certified, and is actively being rolled out. If only we could get the FAA to stop doing what they always do, which is move as slow as glaciers about anything related to GA. I'm not going to defend leaded gas, we all want to see it gone if for nothing else than to take away this ridiculous talking point from the ignorant. It should have been done 50 years ago if the FAA wasn't boneheaded, but I'm also not going to loose sleep over burning a minuscule amount of lead when natural lead sources and lead pipes/paint still exist in the world.

By the way, my home water source is a well 250ft from the end of a runway. I've had lab tests run on it for lead and it's well below the EPA limit. I put my health where my mouth is, I look forward to the day when it's all unleaded fuel being burned but until then it's not something that concerns me.

I feel your position should not be universal: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/

Maybe you should read a study before citing it:

> On the basis of distance to airport coefficients, children living within 500 m, 1,000 m, or 1,500 m of an airport had average blood lead levels that were 4.4, 3.8, or 2.1% higher, respectively, than other children.

> Based on the geospatial and statistical analysis presented above, lead from avgas may have a small (2.1–4.4%) but significant impact on blood lead levels in children who live in proximity to airports where avgas is used. The magnitude of the estimated effect of living near airports was largest for those children living within 500 m and decreased in a monotonic fashion out to 1,500 m.

2-4% higher doesn't exactly scream environmental crisis to me. Especially when it's limited to an area under a mile from known locations and can be easily avoided if one wishes.

> Although controlling for individual- and group-level confounders attenuated the association between logged blood lead levels and residential proximity to an airport, evidence of a deleterious relationship remained. In the adjusted models, control variables behaved as expected: Relative to being screened in the winter season, children tested in the spring, summer, or fall had increased blood lead levels, on average. Residence in poor and minority neighborhoods was also associated with elevated lead levels. In contrast, recently constructed housing units were associated with decreased mean lead levels.

Interesting how the correlation isn't as strong as one would imply and there's other factors at play too. If you close all of the airports it's not going to drop lead exposure to zero.

So let me re-iterate my original point again: Obviously 4.4% elevated lead levels (in the worst case, ~1,500ft from an airport) isn't something to accept as "this is fine." Instead of taking the burn it down approach, close all airports, ground the GA fleet, and destroy an entire industry, let's get the FAA off their butts and get G100UL rolled out across the board so we can stop this silly argument about a tiny percentage of lead exposure. Which, mind you, is peanuts compared to lead pipes still in use.

There are more recent papers than that. In any case, I've read enough medical papers to realise that they generally assume a unimodal distribution and force everything into that. Getting a measurable increase in blood lead level would be enough for me to never take my family to live near an airport. So the poor get stuck with such choices, which was the point of the GP.

There are also many studies demonstrating the negative health effects of living within a similar radius to a highway or any other major road, which encompasses most land in every major city. It's not like car emissions are perfectly clean because of unleaded gas and catalytic converters. They're cleaner than before the introduction of those things, but any emissions still carry health impacts so why are we demonizing the comparatively tiny GA fleet here? The only escape from any form of human pollution is to live far out in a rural area, but I'm willing to bet you've made a tradeoff of the convenience and economical benefits of being near a city/some town in exchange for exposure to some degree of pollution.

Indeed, that's why those that live near busy roads tend to be poor.

> wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already

It seems to be a European obsession. Generously, because intercontinental flights are super cheap compared to similarly-scheduled and more eco-friendly rail. (As well as to America. Our mandatory taxes are more than a budget European flight.)

Less generously, because it's a popular bogey bear.

but "upper middle class" in the US is the 1% ! I think it starts at something like 60k income per family member (so 120k for a couple)

You have a funny notion of "the 1%." Unless you're in a very low cost of living area $60k in the US is barely scraping by, even $120k/yr in high COL areas like the Bay Area is basically a poverty wage. At large, something like 12% of US households are over $200k/yr. The top 1% of income is considerably higher than that so I have no idea where you're getting $60-120k from unless you're comparing against global incomes, but that's not accounting for local cost of living levels making it an apples-to-oranges comparison.

yes I'm talking about the global 1%. i.e. us, who are polluting far far more than our fair share

No, it is too little.

Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction. And it makes you feel good because you're "sticking it to the rich". But that percent of a percent means nothing in terms of reducing real emissions and affecting climate change.

Stop doing "feel good" activism and start being effective. Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter. And publicly, loudly, denounce the carbon market.

I'm proudly driving an electric car powered by rooftop solar. And I am not rich. That solar install produces more power than my frugal home and driving habits use. Yes, I am aware that night charging uses energy produced from coal. My solar install more than offsets that during the day, when peak grid power is critical, and I am constantly pressuring the electric company to add storage to the grid. It's not viable yet due to base power loads at night being too low, but as more solar roofs are installed and more electric cars hit the road, it will become viable.

There is also no single catch-all solution to carbon emissions. There are 10,000 solutions that each only fix 0.01% of the problem. If we refuse to pursue any of the solutions because they only contribute a little to solving the problem in totality then we end up solving none of the problem.

not really, most of carbon emission is because either clean generation, storage or distribution of power is inadequate. Solar has been making strides in displacing daytime peak generation, batteries are ever improving, making zero carbon land vehicles viable. Distribution is top of mind for a lot of people these days. Carbon capture is getting closer to viable. Cutting single digit percentages of emissions here and there by banning things humanity actually needs is counterproductive at best

Your claim makes no sense. Any move towards reducing carbon will require many 1% improvements.

Personal aviation isn’t a problem because it’s the rich doing it, but because it’s extremely expensive, and in the vast majority of cases there is a much better alternative (flying commercial).

If there’s an easy way to knock out 0.1-0.5% of emissions you absolutely take it, even if in itself it doesn’t achieve everything we need, but it gets us closer.

And that’s before we consider the psychological/political impacts of telling a farmer to buy a new truck while not saying anything to a celebrity traveling in a private plane that will emit more carbon in a month than that farmer’s dirty truck would in its lifetime.

general aviation today is archaic specifically because of regulation making it impossible to innovate in the space. In the US leaded gas is still used. Relaxing the rules and allowing people to experiment with things such as hybrid electric propulsion gets us much closer to the ideal of carbon free aviation.

Regarding optimization, I always see this in software. People ruining the system chasing 1% improvements and locking in a local optimum by making it harder to perform the design level optimization that actually moves the needle. Imagine your CRUD system is full of selectN+1s and some well meaning engineer comes along and rewrites a bunch of code paths in raw SQL, making it harder to adopt automatic joining.

> Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction

A "percent of a percent" is of the order of scale of 0.01%. Airplanes account for 2.5% to 3.5% of all global emissions [1] and are emitted by only 11% of the population [2]. That's an error ratio of 300. If you're advocating for awareness in picking effective solutions, I think numbers should matter.

> Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter.

Yes,but all of these sources produce electricity, that's great for EVs, but planes don't run on electricity, they use carbon-energy (and this is not ready to change for commercial flying). Even if every country gets equipped with top quality nuclear plants, it will change anything for airplanes. Electrical and oxygen airplanes are very far from any real proposition.

I completely agree with you in being effective and very rational when picking solutions and advocating for them. I also think that we must be fair to future generations and to lower social classes. In this view, I think that we should (at least) stop encouraging flying and start encouraging trains, or just more local activities. Whether we must discourage it is another question, for which I have no answer.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-aviation [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...

> also think that we must be fair to future generations and to lower social classes

The people who fly most intensely are also in a prime position to fund meaningful carbon offsets, e.g. direct-air capture by Climeworks [1]. Railing against aviation in general is, in my opinion, pure virtue signaling. Arguing for taxing aviation to fund climate mitigation makes more sense.

[1] https://climeworks.com

Of course, I agree that taxing kerosene is what makes the more sense. There are so many great uses of airplanes ! I also really hope that one day, net-zero aviation will work, and for that to happen we must not discourage the research. I was just pointing out that it's false to say that aviation is not a problem.

God I absolutely despise direct air capture as any kind of argument for not doing something to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

It never, never makes sense in any realistic forseeable future scenario (ie not the pure fantasy that keeps getting thrown around) to capture and store CO2 at 500 or so ppm this way when it is far far far easier to not pull it out of the ground and emit it in the first place.

Atm it barely makes sense for easy industry CCS where it's done where the US gov subsidises it to reduce the price of co2 for enhanced oil recovery.

It's tantamount to arguing we should jump of the cliffs of dover because we can potentially climb back straight upwards fully disregarding the fact that if you survive no matter which way you turn it, whether you add stairs or elevators, it will always be more of a hassle getting back up than taking that one step of the ledge.

> when it is far far far easier to not pull it out of the ground

It is easier to not change how millions of people travel. If we aren’t doing direct air capture, we’ll still have the air travel. It’s a stupid place to try and optimise, and seems more a rhetorical tar pit than place where anyone seriously argues about carbon reduction.

Of the dozens of times I've flown, only once had it ever been urgent. From what I know of my colleagues and family, the vast majority of air travel is for pleasure. And we live in a country which does not afford us land travel to other countries of interest.

>It is easier to not change how millions of people travel.

Only if you assume we don't have to pull our co2 emissions down drastically in the first place.

>If we aren’t doing direct air capture, we’ll still have the air travel.

And if we'd account for the effort and cost of the direct air capture to offset it we'd have almost no air traffic and most of would remain would be less practical and fast. We'd have had so so much more runway on this issue if people were willing to go for even just the low hanging fruit. As it stands it appears we and you in particular don't even want to tacle the low hanging fruit wrt this part of the issue and so I presume in general.

My immediate thought was that they were describing non-commercial flights fyi. I imagine the numbers for that market are on the order of <0.1% but I'm curious if there are any hard numbers for it!

To drive this even further, you can solve the problem of inefficiencies by making energy consumption cheaper or energy cleaner.

Electric cars cause a ton of emissions through increased tire wear, road maintenance and by having much larger wheel-bases[1]. The US has 3x the per-capita emissions of comparable nations and cars are just part of the equation. [2]

A well designed city needs to be compact, use transit and promote walkability. If every Californian uses the $7500 carbon subsidy, then that's a $200 billion handout by the Govt. to promote electric vehicles. Even at American construction costs (which is its own nightmare), that should be enough to make the Bay Area and Los Angeles transit heaven. (with sufficient up zoning ofc).

My hot take is that electric cars & solar walls are the feel good moral-victories of those who refuse to make changes to the fundamentally unsustainable nature of their life-style. (I don't mean you. But a large enough cohort of Bay Area tech people fit this mold).

[1] https://dynomight.net/tires/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... _____________

A few genuine questions

> pressuring the electric company to add storage to the grid

My understanding was that grid-scale energy storage was a pipe dream, and that the base-load issue meant that gas/nuclear were essential to a fully renewable grid. Has anything changed over the last few years ? In the immediate future, electric cars will make the base load problem a LOT LOT worse.

> My solar install

What is the life-span of your solar wall ? Batteries don't seem to have great lifespans, and the use-and-throw nature of it makes me want to prefer a hybrid. At least with petroleum cars, most of it was metal that could be melted and recovered. Is that true with batteries as well ?

This completely overlooks the psychological aspect, which is that the 1% is perfectly happy to fly to Davos every year in their hundreds of private jets, where they all sit together in a large room and tell us to stop flying, damnit, because it is killing the planet!

Sure, their one flight doesn't change anything. _Neither does mine_, when I fly a few times per year to get to another part of the world. Yet somehow my flight is considered "part of a large group and therefore dangerous", and theirs is not?

If the 1% wants to have moral authority, they should lead from the front: they should stop flying altogether, and limit themselves to low-carbon activities they can reach by train. Either we are all in this together, or it is nothing more than yet another pathetic power grab by people that already have too much of it anyway.

I don't understand what you're asking for. Ban activities that aren't necessary which could have an impact on the environment?

This is an article about a new set of standards designed to shift the category of planes pilots fly away from homebuilt ones (done out of a cost/availability necessity) by allowing a wider range of accessible commercial ones to be certified. What does that have to do with the environment?

This change has been needed for a long time and is good to see

This is true only for planes that burn fuel. There are about to be a lot of new planes entering the market that don't burn fuel but have batteries and will charge from any usable power source. I.e. mostly renewables given the price of everything else.

Basically think flying bath tubs with batteries, propellers, and some fancy fly by wire logic. They are not that hard to build. There are already several flying and flight proven prototypes. Several are in advanced stages getting certified, and factories that will produce these things are being built and financed. The big bottleneck (in the US) for this is the FAA and its certification bureaucracy. This will go from very small volume production now to mass volume production by the tens/hundreds of thousands units in the space of a few decades.

That's the reason there's a lot of pressure on the FAA to adapt to new realities because they are suddenly in the business of certifying lots of planes that no longer fit their existing rules and are looking at a vast increase in the number of these things. Most of these things are either capable of flying autonomously or at least vastly simplify pilot workloads. You and I could learn to operate these things in an hour or so.

Another reason is that the world is bigger than the bit the FAA has jurisdiction over (the US). These new planes are going to be flying in China, Europe, Africa, and wherever and there's a world where the FAA adapts proactively in anticipation of these changes and where they adapt late reacting and responding to general public and politicians asking them WTF is keeping them in the stone age while the rest of the world gets to play George Jetson.

A smart policy maker would want to be conservative but not too late to the party here. And a smarter one smells the money and business potential and would want to be an enabler rather than an obstacle. So, right now is a good moment to let startups experiment a bit and and adapt existing rules. Waiting until these things are flying all over China would be too late. This btw. is not a hypothetical risk but actually starting to happen.

> I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much?

At least the ultralight world is beginning to change - Pipistrel has a fully electric model that Green Flight Academy in Sweden is using for instructions [1].

Even in the passenger aircraft world, there's progress - some startups did a full-electric conversion of a Cessna Caravan [2] as a prototype, and a from-scratch design [3]. Yes, these are only short hop capable, but hey - everything counts.

[1] https://greenflightacademy.com/fleet/

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/redmo...

[3] https://www.dw.com/en/are-electric-planes-ready-for-takeoff/...

GA is necessary for commercial aviation. Airline pilots first learn as GA pilots. GA is also essential throughout their career to complete their flying hours, become instructors, and acquire a large range of experience which are useful/necessary for the good stewardship of the pilot profession.

that's why i said 90% , there are also things like flying doctors etc.. i'm talking about the "american dentist flies around on the weekend for fun" usecase

If it's "recreational carbon emission categories" you want to ban, whether as a proportion of global carbon emissions or recreational carbon emissions per person, then I think there are much larger categories that would be banned first. If you just consider aviation, there's a really wide spread: people travelling the world in private jets cause orders of magnitude higher carbon emissions that someone enjoying the local area in a microlight. It seems odd to bundle them into a single bucket since this spectrum crosses so many other more typical non-aviation activities in magnitude of emissions that you don't seem to be suggesting banning.

If you want to be discussing recreational carbon emissions you should use the size of those emissions to discriminate, not some very broad arbitrary category that varies in emission magnitude across the entire spectrum of the emissions that you're simultaneously ignoring.

Yeah, a carbon tax sure would have been nice, but the failure to pass one in the 00's was one of the reasons I began to realize that the issue would never be solved.

This is a great summary of a complex topic, but I wouldn't put safety or experimentation as the primary driver. As you suggested, MOSAIC is likely a way to migrate people off experimentals to discontinue that little idealistic free-for-all.

The vast, vast majority of pilots are aging out. The vast majority of builders are retired. 30-50 years of experimentation has exhausted most people, who now just buy the tried-and-true design and kit from Van's. Many people wasted their lives on projects that never fly, and most deaths and injuries come in the first few flights.

Old airplanes are cheap and mostly just as functional as new planes, making it really, really hard to sell a lot of new planes. And there aren't enough numbers to justify selling avionics or engines, etc. unless you already have certificated products and want to reach the Van's customers. So not really enough market, notwithstanding the breathtaking improvements in electronics and composites.

The major costs in flying are gas, hangar, insurance, and maintenance, which is not going to change with these rules, particularly since they don't resolve the uncertainty around leaded aviation fuel. Those costs prohibit flying except for the wealthy or the super-motivated upper-middle class.

LSA's are safer because they're new and mostly Van's, and don't really invite scud-running or stupid fuel decisions. The push to MOSAIC is mostly the FAA trying to stay relevant, and eventually to kill experimental aviation.

I could see a new business model, where a company like Van's offers an all-in-one packages of long-term lease + insurance + maintenance, particularly to buyer's groups. Sharing a plane gets it flown more, and group members can come and go. The company gets the benefit of its own engineering effort in low maintenance and insurance costs. Rotax, Continental, or some new electric consortium et al could make deals with such companies guaranteeing enough new engines to justify new product lines. If there's a behind-the-scenes driver for MOSAIC, it might be some deal-making contingent on more sympathetic and predictable FAA regulation.

Private and experimental aviation is not stymied by product fit as much as market fit and transaction cost risks. If MOSAIC helps with that, it could be a game-changer.

Dumb question: how does insurance work? Like, I get it would be a good idea if a bunch of randoms collectively buy a plane or (can you do this:) want to rent it out to randoms. Or required if you get a secured loan for it.

But if you own your own (or a close group does), is insurance required? Or do airfields require it and good luck if you don't have a private strip? FAA requirement? Every hanger requires it? Mechanics will refuse work if it's uninsured?

Or is it cheap enough there's no point in foregoing it even if it's not required?

Insurance is not a legal requirement. Some individual airports will make you have a "on the ground policy" (couple hundred dollars a year) to cover movement and other people's property.

You can get liability only insurance, or full hull coverage (I.e. you crash you get a check). Your premium is based on your flight experience and your age (some insurance companies won't underwrite if over 70, some won't underwrite if they think your experience is low for the type of aircraft). I have a $150k hull value plane, and liability for me is $540 a year, and hull coverage is $3500. I do liability only.

Mechanics typically buy whatever insurance they feel they need to be "safe." My mechanic doesn't have insurance, but he also says "hell no" to a ton of folks because working on a flight school plane isn't worth the headaches and putting your name on it, since statistics say they will most likely crash.

Yes fractional ownership exists. Once renting is involved, insurance premiums triple to quadruple. There are also certain circumstances under which 100 hour inspections are required, which means maintenance costs go up. Some people get around this by forming a club, which means it isn't quite randos at that point.

There are several types of insurance (just like for cars), but public liability insurance is the most commonly required. Most states don't require it as far as I know, though. My understanding is that most FBOs do require it to use their facilities.

It isn't cheap, but no one that I've talked to has discussed insurance as though it were optional. I don't doubt for a moment they're out there though.

Disclaimer: I built, tested and now fly a Van's kit so I'm biased. I don't think the FAA is trying to "kill" experimental, at least not with MOSAIC. In fact, my understanding is that there was quite a bit of behind the scenes work between EAA and the FAA on MOSAIC.

MOSAIC doesn't add really enough to the LSA category that would change my mind and "push" me toward it. If I had to make the choice again, I'd still build and operate a kitplane. To me, the major benefits of the E/AB category are: 1. the builder's permission to perform his own annual condition inspections, 2. the owner's permission to perform major maintenance and make modifications, 3. access to bleeding edge avionics and safety systems not available on certified or LSA. I don't think the MOSAIC rulemaking adds any of this to the LSA category[1].

If anything, MOSAIC helps LSAs eat into the market of Part 23 personal aircraft. If I wanted a fairly beefy airplane, didn't want to build, and was trying to decide between a LSA and FAR23 aircraft, I would lean much farther towards the LSA post-MOSAIC.

1: EDIT: Actually, it looks like it's more complex than I thought, and I'm probably wrong. There are actually pathways for folks to obtain repairman certificates for both ELSA and SLSA aircraft. Interesting topic I'll have to dig more into!

> FAA trying to stay relevant, and eventually to kill experimental aviation.

They have recent relevant experience with remote controlled aircrafts. Which was an great hobby for many decades. And suddenly it's not.

Blame ubiquitous cheap drones for that one, or rather: way too many reckless drone pilots doing way WAY too much shit that ended up in the best case "just" violating people's privacy and in the worst case endangering passenger aviation by flying around airports. The eternal september of RC aviation.

No, registered sex offenders don't have to broadcast their location. Just register. Armed cops don't broadcast, because they understand it's not safe. FAA members don't put markers on themself or their family members for the same reason. They understand that would make them exposed. But they easily do it to hobbyists. For simple reason: to kill this hobby off. Who might be interested? This remind me that shill in FCC killing net neutrality.

Drones, by the way, didn't kill no one in US. RC aircrafts did kill 2 in US through the whole history. Last one was RC helicopter. Pilot killed himself. Legal guns kill illegally many more. Thousands per year? But owners aren't forced to put a target mark and broadcast their location. Obviously why, that would make them a target. But drone owners must. Don't you think it's disproportional?

Supersonic falling out of fashion is just economics, it's not a forgone conclusion that better technology and higher performance will always be more popular.

There really is a "peak comfort" or "good enough" for most people, the metrics of cost and convenience can trump objective quality and performance.

Moving the amount of people we want to move, for the cost at which people are willing to endure, shook out the way it did and supersonic lost out.

For general aviation you just have many more challenges to overcome than say driving. It takes really special circumstances before it makes sense.

We won't have flying cars for the same reason we don't all have planes. They aren't required, few need them and they would be more inconvenient to operate than a simple car.

> really is a "peak comfort" or "good enough" for most people

Most people are irrelevant for commercial aviation. And there are entire sections of the market for which most rich Americans are irrelevant.

An unsung part of the economic disadvantages of supersonic is how often the value of speed in the connection of two cities is not anywhere near even in both directions. Say we are looking at London-NY. The flight takes 3 hours, and the time difference is 5 hours. If you are leaving London, this means you can leave at a reasonable time, and have plenty of useful business meetings in New York: Much better the subsonic flight. But what happens when you fly in the other direction? In practice, it's 8 hours. So leave NYC at 8 am in the morning, and by the time you are at an office in London, the workday is over: Far less valuable for an executive than the other direction. Thus, the price differential over the regular flight in one direction is very different than in the other.

A supersonic jet with concorde-like economics in supersonic routes would be usable if it could fly subsonic at a competitive price on the way back, but that's not how physics works.

If they could get the cost differential down a lot, then paying a little extra for supersonic would be worth it to some people just so they don't have to sit in an airplane as long. Across the Atlantic it's not such a big deal, but routes across the Pacific take a really long time.

London to New York, New York to San Francisco, San Francisco to Tokyo, Tokyo to Mumbai, Mumbai to London. Send a subsonic plane in the other direction.

Sounds like a lot of that is over land, I hear people on the ground really don't like that.

You're just not being ambitious enough. You have to make it fly high enough they can't hear it. Use a scramjet accelerated from the ground with a railgun and get the thing nearly into orbit, something like that.

Or shape the plane like a Busemann Biplane, so it doesn't produce a boom at all. I am a fan of parabolic-arc travel though. ICBT (inter-continental ballistic transport)

An interesting side effect of that is the impact on ICBM defense protocols. If everything looks like an inbound missle you couldn't protect against them anymore, unless your protocol becomes "shoot down any ICBx trip not registered" but now you have a theoretical gun pointed at every passenger transport, ready to fire automatically for the sake of missing paperwork.

> Supersonic falling out of fashion is just economics, it's not a forgone conclusion that better technology and higher performance will always be more popular.

The regulatory environment is the economics. A majority of airline customers won't pay extra for supersonic flight, so whether it's worth having a separate model of supersonic plane that might represent 10-20% of plane sales for planes of that passenger capacity is down to how much it costs to certify a new model of plane.

It had nothing to do with economics. Congress banned it due to noise.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/nasa-50th-anniversary-us-comme...

I think what really killed "personal aviation" was the interstate highway system and the advent of extremely fast efficient cheap cars. In the 1950s, there was a dream that millions of average people would have their own personal planes for commutes and vacation because a 500 mile road trip was an epic days long journey to be made on unreliable roads with manual transmissions at 45 mph. But the equation just doesn't make sense anymore, even ignoring cost. A 500 mile trip in a private plane would take about 4 hours, or 7 on the highway today, with all the logistical savings of avoiding airports and having ground transportation at your destination.

When I look at my own goals in aviation, why I am pursuing my PPL. I want to avoid those 15 to 20 hour drives. I want to fly planes with 1200nm+ range and cruising speeds above 200 knots. And not have to avoid foggy/overcast weather.

I also want to be able to social distance a bit while traveling post-covid.

> The explicit safety target that FAA and other regulators have settled on is that catastrophic events should be “extremely improbable,” meaning one per billion flight-hours. The regulation of this kind of aviation is nothing short of maniacal.

Maniacal really? Is the author living in reality?

He is, airlines have been complaining about the paperwork involving anything that flies for decades - however given incidents like [1] with fake parts being spliced into legitimate supply chain, or how that paperwork enables accident investigation boards to quickly determine root causes often in a matter of weeks to months, the regulations do have merit.

On the other hand, you got a ton of Global South countries, particularly in Africa, with very lax enforcement of any kind of standards, and they don't end up with hundreds-of-pax-dead catastrophes every year, so either the regulations could be relaxed legitimately across the board or the lack of catastrophes is mostly because almost all planes flying out there are Western-built with considerable amounts of safety margins, redundancies and fail-safes built-in.

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/10/03/delta-fourth-major-us-airline...

Some companies in a regulated industry want less regulation. Big surprise.

But no, less regulation is not what we need in aviation, cars, food or medcine. Those regulations have litteraly been written in blood.

And guess how many of those lax airlines are allowed to land in e.g. the EU. Not that many, and those airlines from those regions that are allowed in European airpsace are adhering to EASA requirements, and thus are the opposite of lax.

No matter how you design an aircraft, and safety margins there are lower than for e.g. cars, with bad and lacking maintennace it becomes a safety hazard rather quickly.

> But no, less regulation is not what we need in aviation, cars, food or medcine. Those regulations have litteraly been written in blood.

For the record: I fully agree with you, I just wanted to provide some context.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I think it's important to keep in mind that these companies often want more regulation— especially regulation that they're already compliant with. Of course EASA compliant airlines don't want to open things up to airlines that can operate more cheaply. Whether or not that's solely a consideration of safety is less clear.

Age 67 is another example where unions do not want more competition. I imagine a hypothetical relaxation of CPL regs would be similarly opposed by airlines and unions alike as they certainly wouldn't welcome the resultant competition. Desire for regulation can have many motivations.

I'm gonna sound like a huge downer, but I actually like MOSAIC.

Couple observations though:

Overall thought: UAS BVR flight is now officially MORE regulated than light sport. Interesting.

The aviation consumer doesn't "pay for safety". They pay for the experience of safety, because they can't possibly make informed decisions about almost anything they're buying. Can they look up the maintenance inspection history of their aircraft? Can they google the bio of their pilot? Of course not. It's why regulations exist, Ayn. We can't all be Russian Superwomen with completely perfect comprehension and knowledge of the world around us, and we don't want to be executed if we're not.

The big, enormous, really huge contribution of distributed propulsion is not redundancy or noise but in lift assist. A fan in front of the airframe is not the optimal place to stick thrust for winged flight. You can do insane stuff putting thrust in weird places, and tiny little fans make that easy.

§ 22.180 is bananas without something like a SDER (software designated engineering rep) or SOMETHING to quantify what the FMU's electronic brain thinks is good control input. I guess that's part of the cert path.

§ 22.185 oh boy more government specs that send you to another spec you have to pay some rando third party to look at. YAAAAAAAAYYYYY

Too much regulation and safety enhancements don’t reach the fleet, is the thesis. Does the FDA believe this thesis for drugs? Clearly not. Or, more precisely, the benefits do not outweigh the harm. I don’t believe it applies to aircraft, either.

“the explicit goal here is to make the new category so attractive that many recreational pilots switch from more dangerous experimental amateur-built aircraft to light-sport aircraft that are designed according to consensus standards.”

Umm, that’s wishful thinking. It might work to some degree, but the real fix is to regulate the crackpots out of the experimental category. Flying a dangerous piece of shit through common airspace is not a right.

It sounds like the FAA has their hands tied by some law, and, absent Congressional reform, is trying to do the best they can with the constrained authority they have.

> Too much regulation and safety enhancements don’t reach the fleet, is the thesis. Does the FDA believe this thesis for drugs? Clearly not. Or, more precisely, the benefits do not outweigh the harm. I don’t believe it applies to aircraft, either.

What's the connection? Allowing drug use on planes does not increase technological innovation. Technological experimentation does.

> Umm, that’s wishful thinking. It might work to some degree, but the real fix is to regulate the crackpots out of the experimental category.

Source? The FAA seems to back their claims up with actual data.

> Flying a dangerous piece of shit through common airspace is not a right.

I did a little bit of googling, and the experimental aircraft are not allowed over densely populated areas or crowded airspace without the guidance of an ATC and sufficient altitude is there to glide away to safety. Even experimental aircraft must receive an airworthiness certificate.[0]

From what I've seen, they're only loosening the restrictions that seem to make no contribution to safety and will make it easier for more aircraft to adopt the restrictions that do make it safer. They're incentivized to be safe because they fly the planes, and a higher rating means more privileges(haven't verified this), crackpots who don't care about safety won't make it through the trial period before their plane is allowed out of limited airspace.

Why express strong opinions that are unresearched? Or if they are, provide some sources? Or provide some reasoning other than intuition? Especially in a world where we are increasingly not allowed to do things unless specifically allowed. (allowlist instead of denylist)

[0] https://www.eaa.org/eaa/aircraft-building/intro-to-aircraft-...

Once the initial shakedown period has passed, in practice E-AB airplanes can fly where certified aircraft can. In a certified airplane, you still have to comply with 91.119.

I’ve only flown in a couple experimental—amateur-built aircraft; I think the current regs are a good balance of keeping “dangerous piece of shit” airplanes away from populated areas (once it’s flown out the initial operating hours, it’s probably not one) and allowing access to the National airspace system by others.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.119

Experimental is a very broad category. On one hand we have $250k Rv-10s that are immaculate and built well from kits that thousands have used to shitty canard garage designed birds.

I will say, the crackpots are largely getting pushed out of experimental and the folks who love flying and want to see it succeed on a budget are stepping in. I'm not an experimental bro, but I am tempted with the crazy costs of mundane parts for 60 year old planes.

If you are arguing against overly stringent safety regulation by pointing out that they actually decrease safety, you have already lose the war against safetyism. We must reach the point where it is widely permissible to say "the safety benefits are not worth the costs".

And yet the FAA makes that argument explicitly in the article.

That's my point. The FAA makes the argument, and Eli Dourado should reject the framing (but doesn't). There are no flying cars in a future where the main arguments for reduced regulation is increasing safety. It doesn't take you remotely far enough.

Fair enough, but that argument was not "for all types of aircraft" right? Are you arguing for the FAA to remove all safety requirements that have a cost? How do you evaluate that cost? When I read it I saw the FAA describing a methodology and argument that counters the "safety at any cost" argument (is that what you call 'safetyism'?)

I read the article to say, "Sometimes our rules do not increase safety, sometimes our rules result in people choosing a less safe option because there isn't safer choice, and sometimes a new thing we haven't seen can be safer than what existing practice would expect." And MOSAIC was a response to addressing those observations in order to foster a more innovative and safer overall aviation industry.

When I read your original point I mistakenly thought you were criticizing the FAA for lowering the cost of safety regulation when doing so increased safety. So that is how I got confused by your comment.

(No worries about the miscommunication.)

> Are you arguing for the FAA to remove all safety requirements that have a cost?

No.

> How do you evaluate that cost?

Lots to say here, but let me lead with a general principle: If you can measure the benefits of a regulation but cannot measure the costs, you should err on the side of less regulation. The original sin of cost-benefit analysis is "I can't easily measure contribution Y, so let's assume it rounds to zero".

Here's one possible mechanism: Instead of banning an activity, either (a) put a tax on it equal to (say) 50% of dollar value of the safety harm (using, e.g., statistical value of life) or (b) require the consumer to pay for insurance that pays out a similar amount in case of accident. Then, even if we think the consumer is completely ignorant of the safety costs, they get to weigh the benefits to them of the activity against the financial costs from the tax/insurance, as determined by the regulators.

Remember, the general intellectual justification of safety regulation is "We, the expert regulators, know the safety risks, but the consumer doesn't have enough information. Also, by typical paternalism arguments, it would be insufficient to simply create a Would-have-banned label ( https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/wouldhavebanned.html ). It's very hard for us to estimate the cost of the regulation to the consumer, but based on eyeballing it, it seems smaller than the safety benefits." By taxing the activity at the level the regulators think, in their expertise, reflects the safety cost of the activity, they can let the consumer (who knows the benefits of the activity better) to decide whether the costs outweigh the benefits.

Now, maybe if you implement that mechanism in the real world it turns out to be good or it turns out to be bad. Complicated empirical question. But the over-arching point is that no one even brings things like that up as possibilities. Which is evidence that the alleged justifications for the rules are not the real motivations. (Needless to say, the above suggestion is not new or invented by me; the ideas are just lying out there.)

> When I read it I saw the FAA describing a methodology and argument that counters the "safety at any cost" argument

It doesn't! It accepts the "safety at any cost" argument and then argues that, counter-intuitively, increased regulation reduces safety in this particular case.

It's of course true that if a safety regulation both has costs and reduces safety then it should be removed -- it has no redeeming features. But we should be cognizant that this is an unusually easy situation.

> the "safety at any cost" argument (is that what you call 'safetyism'?)

Yes, that's basically what I mean (although it's of course a complicated social and psychological phenomena that can't be fully summarized in sentence).

"the safety benefits are not worth the costs" is a determination government agencies already make with many things[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbaVdge7kU

I'm very familiar with the idea discussed in that video, including the fact that it's in use by agencies like the NHTSA and the FAA. The problem is not that no one knows about these things, the problem is that (1) they can only be applied thoughtfully insofar as it's not part of public discussion (most people don't pay attention to NHTSA decisions) and (2) it's generally only applied when safety-at-any-cost is completely untenable.

By (2), I mean the fact that in certain regulatory sectors you really can spend (or force others to spend) arbitrary amounts of money. Since there will be backlash against, that, regulators are forced to come up with a principle. But in many cases, the feasible restrictions can feasibly be dialed up to the max (e.g., complete banning of some product) and no one had to do a CBA.

> This lack of space for experimentation, as I discussed with Last Energy CEO Bret Kugelmass recently, is one reason for stagnation in the nuclear industry.

And this is why nuclear innovation is thriving in third-world countries with little to no nuclear regulation, right?

it’s thriving in China seemingly, in third world countries you can’t get U233 so easily

You mean U235 I guess, but you don't even need enriched Uranium to have a nuclear reactor (natural uranium reactors are a thing).

Also, you're not really praising China for being a land of free enterprise fostering innovation are you?

Nuclear (but not necessarily nuclear innovation) works in China because there's strong political will (exactly like it was in France in the 70s and 80s btw).

this is excellent for the emerging evtol players. their economics get much better at 6+ passengers and 200+mph.

An interesting article, but I'd question a few things:

> This heavy regulation means that few new reactors are being built, which in turn means that if you are starting a new nuclear company, you’re going to have mostly engineers who have never built a nuclear reactor of any kind before. This lack of space for experimentation, as I discussed with Last Energy CEO Bret Kugelmass recently, is one reason for stagnation in the nuclear industry.

That is a problem, but on the other hand, the more people work in nuclear, the higher the likelihood is that someone ends up diverting nuclear material. It's already a huge issue with nuclear material in medical devices that ends up creating (sometimes fatal) dangers to the public ("orphan sources") [1].

> Under today’s light-sport rules, LSAs are limited to a single reciprocating (piston) engine. What this has meant in practice is that turboprops are not allowed.

Which is a good thing IMHO. Jet engines are orders of magnitude more complex to maintain with high requirements on precision (a must, given that these things spin at 100k RPM) than a piston engine is - effectively, maintenance on these can be done by any car mechanic specializing in oldtimer cars, as they're dating back to 1950s designs.

> Without the need for type certification, manufacturers can iterate on their designs more rapidly without going through the costly supplemental type certification process. They can include cheaper uncertified avionics. They can do over-the-air software updates.

It's one thing to allow certified legitimate manufacturers faster iteration speeds in design. But allowing people to use uncertified avionics? That's just asking for incidents to happen, be it because sun glare causes a pilot to not recognize something critical, or because Android's OOM killer crashing at the wrong time. When even the big names such as Samsung can't be arsed to put something out that doesn't crash the UI twice a week, I don't want to see that stuff on a vital plane system.

> If we can get LSAs into mass manufacturing, production costs of the airframe could go down further.

For that, there would need to be a market for these. But as urbanization is happening rapidly across the world, I'd question that - who wants to drive hours out in the country, just for a few flight hours? Even with you Americans not being required to use actual airfields (unlike us Germans), you can't sustain a large GA market... that's the problem IMHO.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incide...

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