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What are you trying that other companies have not tried? Ballistic parachutes are available on several aircraft.

If you load up on redundancy - well, electronics redundancy it seems, since the rest of the aircraft seems to be a Sling TSi - you increase cost and weight, decrease speed and useable load, and so on, and now your aircraft costs $800k-1m and $100-150/hr to operate. How many new clients that would not otherwise have gone into GA will you attract? Dual navigation is already commonly available. So what are you doing different that YC was interested in paying for?

The core innovation here is the fly-by-wire/simplified control scheme. This doesn't exist in any GA aircraft.

As our system has been developed so far, it has negligible impact on the speed and usable load of a base TSi, costing $500k for everything.

How do you deal with failures of the control scheme?

You mentioned elsewhere that redundancy means this is unlikely, but is there ever a reversion to "direct law"? Does the plane still have manual trim/rudder/throttle to deal with this, and are the pilots expected to periodically practice using the controls in "direct law"?

Do you have a working plane available for a test flight? :)

You can revert to a "direct law" in an emergency should multiple faults occur that reduce the capability of the flight controller. However, there's a question of is that the right move--if a pilot isn't regularly practiced in flying in a direct control, its probably more dangerous to revert to direct law than to say, pull the parachute, so it would be up to the pilot to determine the best course of action. The system would still be fully "by wire" though, there isn't a mechanical link between the pilot and surfaces/throttle. But, in such a mode, the flight controller is bypassed and the yoke directly commands the actuators, reducing the number of fault points between the pilot's input and the actuator.

We've flown early versions in an test aircraft that we have and are currently integrating the latest version of Airhart Assist (seen in the video) into the Airhart Sling prototype to be flying and giving demos by the end of the year.

Thanks for the reply. I'd love to try out the different modes at some point.

How do you make it easy to stay proficient? For example you say your plane will never stall, will your pilots train stall recognition and recovery regularly? How will prevent something like what happened to AF447?

We'll still encourage and require the same proficiency checks that pilots do today.

Our hope is that GA pilots will no longer need to do things like train stall recovery. We are moving into an era of aviation where aircraft (not just airplanes) will be complicated enough that computers have to be in the loop to handle things like that, because it allows us to create more interesting aerodynamic aircraft that are more efficient and have better performance.

regarding something like AF447, the immediate answer is we have the ballistic parachute as a final backup in case the pilot is unable to land the plane, for whatever reason. Realistically, it would depend entirely on the exact situation our plane was in, what systems have failed vs which haven't, and the pilots actual skill level

My point about AF447 was:

  - even with redundancy, there can be enough failures that the computer no longer has enough information to make the right decision, one thing humans seem to be good at.

  - people who had been trained in stall recognition and recovery, but probably had not kept proficient at it (unlike pilot of slow airplanes like GA and glider pilots) failed to recognize it (only 1 of the 3 pilot did) and did not recover from it.

> Our hope is that GA pilots will no longer need to do things like train stall recovery.

I hate everything about this thought process. Every pilot should know how to handle stall recovery, for the same reason that every driver should know how to handle loss of traction whether they have traction control or not. Driving the skill bar to the bottom intentionally will just result in more and more people flying without a clue what they're doing, just like we have on the roads today.

> proficiency is a fundamental issue

Have y'all considered that a fully digitized, fly-by-wire aircraft, of the type that you're proposing to build, would also essentially be a ridiculously high-fidelity flight simulator whenever and wherever it is sitting still with the engine off?

This could be part of your pitch—the pilot could program in a flight plan and then fly it in simulation, practice all the radio work etc., using the actual physical controls they would use to do it for real, then go do it for real all in the same chair.

we've definitely thought about that! the force-feedback fly by wire makes it really easy to replicate the feel of flying the real thing very well. What you see outside though will be fixed, so maybe for instrument training it would be good, though I'm not sure about using the actual plane vs recreating the cockpit in an indoor simulator

My aviation major roommates in college drilled for their upcoming flights with, I kid you not, a large poster depicting their instrument panel taped to the wall of our quad and a folding chair. Training does not require VR-like immersion to be supremely valuable. :)

Especially when it comes to practicing radio calls, it's the repetition that breeds competence and therefore confidence.

> ones who haven't flown in 3 years and jump into a plane for an IFR cross country to an airport they've never been to before

So, pilots who aren't legal to fly?