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Comment by mritchie712 | Hacker News Reader

I might be over estimating, but I'd also think taking off and landing will tack on a few hours to the start and end of your trip. Fueling, safety checks, dealing with the control tower, etc. all seem like they'd effectively take your time savings to zero.

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once you get to wanting to travel about 150 miles, the time savings do start kicking in, even if you assume 30-45 minutes of getting to the airport, preflight, etc. The benefit of a small airplane is that at small airports, getting from walking up to the airplane and then into the air can be pretty quick. And part of our goal is the automate as much of the prelight process as possible, wherever we can do it safely

If you succeed in making this all easy, won’t these small airports fill up with planes?

We will eventually hit a limit to the current infrastructure, but based on where the GA market was in the 70s when a lot of the small airports were built, we estimate we can handle ~10x the number of planes we do today.

So we can go from half a million pilots to 5 million? Then what?

"dealing with the control tower"

I know little to nothing about GA, but... it only makes sense to take time if the procedures are still done somehow manually, like speaking with human operators out there. It true, the dependence on a fallible human attention for something that can be automated, that right there is a safety hazard to me.

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