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Comment by sethkim | Hacker News Reader

Instrument-rated pilot (and engineer) here.

First - congrats on the launch! I think you're working on an interesting set of components that will prove useful to GA aircraft technology. Bringing fly-by-wire, and lowering the cost of maintenance/manufacturing are both great efforts.

That being said, my personal view is that stick-and-rudder control is one of the less critical components to improving GA safety. Everything else - flight planning, comms, automation, navigation, weather, inspections, procedures, regs, and most importantly - working in the federal airspace system - are the "hard" parts of flying and where problems tend to occur. It's common belief that single-pilot IFR is the most challenging type of flying, because of how much you have to do all at once.

It may sound snobby - but I'm not super excited about the idea of lowering the barrier to entry for GA on a foundational skill basis. Like the light-sport rating, it encourages more people to be in the (already congested) airspace system who haven't really gained all the other skills necessary or experience to be there.

To be clear - I think improving technology and lowering costs = good. Lowering early-skill requirements for pilots and pushing more people without all the other skills into federal airspace = very bad. In general, I'd frame this effort more as an effort to raise the bar for system technology, not lower the bar to become a pilot in the first place.

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Excellent points, it's really these other aspects that get pilots into trouble.

For example it's crazy that most pilots are still taught to calculate W&B using printed charts and approximate takeoff performance.

I think you could save more general aviation lives with a fairly minimal system.

A gas gauge sensor that calculates whether you have enough fuel to get to your destination + reserve. Avionics where you input your personal minimums like crosswinds and weather and it warns you if you're about to accept a landing or flight-plan that violates those. Encode that data and send it to ATC via transponder so valuable comm bandwidth is not lost asking for fuel status when emergencies occur.

A gear down warning. It's ridiculous that we still have so many belly landings and consider it a "good" to rely on training and human memory to prevent them. How much cheaper would complex airplanes be if we didn't have the crazy insurance rates due to this?

Angle-of-attack and spin warnings. It's ridiculous that even $1mil+ Cirrus planes can't detect when you're too slow in a base to final turn and sound a warning before you spin. We have the technology, it's foolish to depend on a decades old stall horn!

A system that parses all the hundreds of notams and filters out the important ones.

> For example it's crazy that most pilots are still taught to calculate W&B using printed charts and approximate takeoff performance.

We're taught that so we know what we're doing. Then we open our iPhone app (EFB or electronic flightbag) and do it there. In fact, part of the reason we do it there is because most of them phone home to their maker and log that we did it. So if there's an accident people can know "well they did their W&B"

> the rest of the things

Regulations have made aviation so expensive that it's ridiculous. A lot of airplanes flying today are flying with their same avionics from 60 years ago because upgrading is expensive. To get the gas calculation you mention would require a certified GPS (on the low end from Garmin that's $6,000) and an engine monitor ($5,500 from Garmin), plus installation costs of another few thousand dollars.

Most planes have a gear down warning (ie, 3 indicator lights) but their original "bitching betty" is hard to hear because we now wear ear protection when we fly and have noise cancelling headphones. You probably can't even integrate that with a new Garmin system because they've gone full encrypted CANBUS to lock out integrations.

re: spin warnings - not sure what to tell you there. Stall speed is based on weight and configuration (flaps) and 99% of GA planes have no idea what they weigh or if their flaps are deployed.

But again, it's not that we can't do those things, it's just that they're completely cost prohibitive. Getting anything certified today is a flippin' nightmare and at too high of a cost to ever break even.

Stall speed is a misnomer.

Stalls occur due to exceeding the critical angle of attack and can happen at ANY speed.

I think that was his point. To calculate if you are going to stall in a final, you need to know your weight and flap setting to see if you will exceed the critical angle of attack when doing the turn, exactly because the speed isn’t constant.

No, you just need an angle of attack sensor. These are increasingly available for small GA planes.

stall AoA depends on flaps though?

Yes, and some sensors do take flaps position into account (or you compromise and have it display the AoA with a typical approach setting).

You need an AoA sensor to see if you are currently stalling or are just about to stall. To predict if you will stall at a specific point in your approach before you’re there, you need to know your weight, too.

Whoever is downvoting this: Stop. It's the key point here. Planes don't need to know their weight to produce a stall warning; AoA is a great metric, and GA planes not having an indicator or warning based on it is astonishing.

I thought the point was predicting a stall by knowing the approach speed will be so low that you will stall, not detecting a stall just before it happens

You can't control the weather, if there's a micro burst during landing you are in trouble.

GA planes have a stall warning horn (based on AoA). They just generally don't have a AoA indicator (though that might be a good idea indeed), relying on indicated airspeed instead, which (for given airplane mass) has a one-to-one [1] mapping to AoA in unaccelerated flight. That's why the concept of stall speed exists.

That is the case since, in unaccelerated flight, we need weight == lift, so

   W := m g == L := 1/2 rho v^2 c_L S

with m = mass, g = earth gravitational acceleration, 1/2 rho v^2 = fluid dynamic pressure which is measured by the pitot tube and displayed as indicated airspeed (well, a function of it), c_L = the coefficient of lift, and S = wing area.

Now, weight is constant (for given airplane mass, in unaccelerated flight), and so is the wing area. The coefficient of lift depends on the AoA, and dynamic pressure has a monotonic one-to-one relationship to IAS. Thus you have the relationship between IAS and AoA.

[1] Unless you get to "the back of the power curve" (the coefficient of lift increases with AoA, then decreases again, until it drops off in a stall). Let's not go there.

it's a misnomer but airspeed is life. we're not talking about people stalling during air combat or aerobatics, we're talking about doing it in the pattern. simply keeping your speed up and knowing the speed you will stall at based on bank angle should be enough.

> But again, it's not that we can't do those things, it's just that they're completely cost prohibitive.

Isn’t this what the OP is referring to when he says the current market can’t support the necessary innovation? As I understand it the idea here is to expand the market and spread certification costs out over more planes.

I don't think he can get the required certifications and charge a reasonable price for this plane. There are not enough people interested in a personal airplane at any price to support the costs to bring a new one in the air. You can rebuild all current airplane's (most built before 1980) for much less than the costs to certify a modern replacement, and only then can you start asking what it costs to build that replacement. Which is why we rebuild old airplanes all the time - it is wouldn't pass modern regulations but since it already exists it is certified.

There's an interesting dynamic here--we (the industry today) are more okay with flying rickety airplanes from the 70s before flying something built with more modern engineering and production techniques.

> As I understand it the idea here is to expand the market and spread certification costs out over more planes.

exactly.

> There are not enough people interested in a personal airplane at any price to support the costs to bring a new one in the air.

our thesis is that this isn't true. we've seen glimpses of this in the past 10 years that haven't been successful, but have shown that there is a wave of people who would get into GA if it were safer and more affordable. our mission to make it so, and the Airhart Sling is just the first step

I'm not wishing you bad luck, but I remain pessimistic about your ability to get something certified and charge a reasonable price.

> There's an interesting dynamic here--we (the industry today) are more okay with flying rickety airplanes from the 70s before flying something built with more modern engineering and production techniques.

Any insights on why that is? My gut feeling is that it’s some combination of cost (there’s still a huge glut of old and cheap planes that basically work fine) and skepticism towards new, less proven models and technologies (i.e. the perception of Cirrus changed very slowly over a decade plus to where now the chute is generally accepted to be a good thing to have).

I think there's definitely a "tried and true" and "if it aint broke don't fix it" mentality. Combine that with the fear of trying something new in the face of the FAA and regulatory barrier, many will say it's better to just take the risk on older stuff than make something new and better

As much as I am excited about Airhart, I would be way more excited for all of these items than I would be for the fly by wire bit. These would be more likely keep me and my wallet in one piece and lower the cost of aviation. Unfortunately they're not terrifically sexy or super lucrative problems.

While some base to final stall accidents are as simple as you make it sound a good chunk of them happen when you try to come OUT of the turn at an already slow speed increasing the angle of attack on one wing alone. The stall and subsequent spin catches the pilot entirely surprised unaware of why they’re even stalling and with very little escape bandwidth.

The FAA has been trying for better angle of attack instrumentation but what I described above isn’t an easy fix with technology.

When you talk to pilots who inadvertently stall spin and lived to tell the tale most of them will tell you they didn’t even recognize that they were in a stall. That’s where the problem starts.

Right but I don't know of any GA stall/spin warning system that takes into account pilot input. Even simple sensors are lacking, for example accelerometers are nearly free yet GA planes give you no warning that you're in a skid.

Similarly given yoke input, bank angle and speed you could warn of an impending stall well before it actually happens with a few position encoder sensors. As you point out, the current system relies on pilots recognizing a stall which is a foolish thing to rely on and almost all GA stall warning sensors are only on one of the wings and require actual airflow disruption to work. In many cases that is already too late or the other wing could stall first. The calculation doesn't even have to be perfect since most pilots want plenty of margin of safety on a base to final turn. I'd much rather have a false alarm + go-around than an inadvertent spin.

The collision thing is also ridiculously irrational. The FAA requires drones over half a pound to continually transmit their location yet somehow considers it sufficiently safe for planes to fly without a radio nor transponder around most of the airports in the US relying only on pilots looking out the window.

It's just disappointing that the vast majority of GA accidents could be completely avoided with slightly better avionics.

Civilian drones are fairly new. There are century old GA aircraft still flying around. I'm sure the FAA would love to require them all to carry radios and transponders but it's technically and politically difficult to impose new requirements on old certified aircraft. Some owners can barely afford to fly as it is so they'll resist any new mandates.

This is a common argument but makes little sense because the accident and loss rates of GA is so incredibly high. The cost of an ADS-B receiver for example is only $200. Full transceivers are a few thousand.

Aircraft owners are already paying well over that as insurance rates yearly because of all the accidents, so total cost to fly would likely decrease by mandating things that actually move the needle on safety, especially ADS-B and fuel alerts.

> the vast majority of GA accidents could be completely avoided with slightly better avionics.

Reading accident reports or the annual summary McSpadden Report (previously called the Nall Report), I get a different view: if pilots would keep fuel in the airplane and flowing to the engine(s), not fly into weather beyond the capability of the airplane and crew, and divert or not takeoff at the onset of signs that an aircraft is not airworthy, would reduce serious accidents by half or more. Better avionics has relatively little to do with that (other than the proper use of a fuel totalizer or better).

Complacency kills more pilots than weak avionics.

Most cars give you significant warnings that you're about to run out of gas and as a result very few people do.

Improved avionics could warn you that you're flying into a storm or that the airplane is not airworthy or that you are converging with other traffic.

Complacency kills because it sneaks up on pilots, but it doesn't have to be that way. We should not accept that the FAA's answer is an IMSAFE checklist. Pilots should not have to die simply because they didn't realize they were feeling slightly stressed or emotional prior to takeoff and forgot to check a single one of the 40+ items on the preflight/runup/takeoff checklists.

Of course good pilots should check it all anyway but just as NHTSA requires safety warnings for cars, we could save many more lives if we required low fuel warnings, terrain warnings, gear warnings, speed warnings, etc. in aircraft avionics.

I agree there is room for improvement and smarter airplane equipment is undoubtedly part of that.

I do not believe that “slightly better avionics will completely avoid the vast majority of GA accidents.”

>Most cars give you significant warnings that you're about to run out of gas and as a result very few people do.

You will see accident reports where the problem is that the pilot just completely failed to put enough fuel in the airplane and then flew it until it ran out; but that's not the typical thing.

What's much more common is that the pilot takes off with what seems like ample fuel, gets halfway there, discovers weather that is worse than expected, has to fly lower than planned, burns a lot more fuel as a result, discovers that they will have to refuel, can't find an airport with good weather at which to land, and ends up flying a graveyard spiral into a fatal crash caused by disorientation in conditions for which they are not trained.

The majority of accidents are traceable to poor planning or decision-making once airborne; and I tend to agree with the other poster that improved avionics are not going to make a really big difference.

Improved avionics should help with all of those aspects:

1) Continually recalculate fuel remaining upon landing at destination based on ground speed and burn rate. Warn if getting anywhere near reserves.

2) Show nearest filtered airports (those with runways that satisfy both airplane and pilot requirements (max x-wind). If IFR, further filter by approach preferences and if available current wx data against approach minimums.

I agree with you that what you describe is a common accident scenario but imagine a PPL could just hit a single button if they inadvertently enter IMC and the avionics provides a route and vnav profile to make it safely to an airport with low minimums? The most difficult part of flying IFR is that it takes a ridiculous number of button presses on most systems to accomplish that all while trying to also keep the plane straight and level.

I'd be fairly surprised if most (say 75+%) GA airplanes regularly used for purposeful travel lack a moving map GPS and fuel-flow enabled engine monitor. (The moving map is probably well over 90% and it's the engine monitor equipment rate that may drag it down.)

In every airplane I've been in that is equipped with both of those, the pilot has access to both projected* fuel remaining at destination (in minutes and in gallons), has an ability to get a warning if configurable thresholds are violated, and with just the moving map GPS to have a filtered (usually by minimum length, paved vs soft, and sometimes lit vs unlit) and to have the nearest ("NRST") button present a list of airports, distance, and direction with a single button push.

There are things that could be done to make it better, but I wonder if you're imagining a lower/lesser level of equipment in typical GA traveling aircraft than is currently the case. (To the extent that equipment is already installed that provides 90-95% of the proposed functionality, providing that last 5-10% probably isn't going to be the missing piece of the puzzle.)

* Based on current groundspeed.

People run out of gas all the time (there are a lot of drivers, probably most never will in their lifetime, but that still leaves a lot that do). However in a car running out of gas is much easier to recover from - most of the time you can safely and easially coast to the side of the road. In an airplane there rarely is an airport nearby to coast into, so you end up looking for a place that might or might not be a good option - roads have power lines that you won't see until it is too late, fields sometimes have large holes (wet spots) that if you into at landing speed will flip the plane.

Low fuel warnings wouldn't really help in an airplane - from what I can tell most who run out of fuel know they are low for a while but are unable to get someplace to fill up.

If you’re about to run out of gas in a car it’s usually not a big deal - you find the nearest gas station and go there. Usually. There are exceptions like driving 100 miles of desert with no gas stations in sight and forgetting to put enough gas in. If that was the common driving scenario I’d bet way more people would run out of gas, and no warning light will help.

Flying a plane is often sort of like that - planning mistakes tend to become problems with large time windows where a warning light is way too late to affect the outcome. Flying into a long narrow canyon is another example where your fate can be sealed minutes before you actually fly into the mountain.

All of this can and should be made better with technology, but a lot of flying hazards are more complex than “warn the user about something happening in the next few seconds”.

Why does the warning have to happen in the next few seconds? Electric vehicles warn you at the start of your trip if you won't make it to your destination.

I used to have a super old handheld aviation GPS that would warn me something like 15 minutes out if my flight path was going to intersect either with terrain or B/C/D airspace. I guess foreflight somewhat recently added the feature but it still defaults to something like 3 min.

> Electric vehicles warn you at the start of your trip if you won't make it to your destination.

Road navigation is relatively simple and even then there are unexpected road closures and stuff like that. If running out of gas was an emergency in a car you’d never rely on this warning alone, you’d do more careful planning and fuel monitoring. And then cars don’t have to deal with unexpected headwinds, weather (maybe occasionally), closed runways, the list goes on. It’s just a much harder forecasting problem.

> GA planes give you no warning that you're in a skid.

"The ball" will show you that you're in a skid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_and_slip_indicator

That makes a lot of sense, interested to learn more about this, any statistics you’re aware of on this topic?

I don’t have those I’m sorry. Not that much into it.

If you need a better understanding look for a video of a pilot I think in South Africa or Australia who took a cameraman and his wife and stalled shortly after takeoff.

It’s interesting to see how many warning signs throughout the whole video are glaring at him yet he keeps flying all the way into the crash. What’s also interesting is that that’s it. Just warning signs but if you really try to put yourself in his shoes it’s entirely hard to accept the warnings as everything on surface level understanding seems normal, controlled and flat. Very very very flat.

I think the biggest problem with real life stalls as compared to training world ones are that they are either more benign or entirely out of left field and believing you’re about to go into one doesn’t even begin to enter the pilot’s mind let alone correct recovery techniques.

Thanks, by the way if that’s the same video I’m thinking of the problem there was gross incompetence - he tied the door wide open to the wing strut!

Another piece of statistics I recently learned is that most stalls occur on departure or go arounds, and classic base to final are relatively rare. Maybe those have been successfully trained out.

The FAA also has the NTSB investigate every crash and accident, and if it was something as simple as "change the airport patterns to be larger and faster" or "make more airports straight in" it would have already been done.

Fancier aeronautics has a way of letting the plane get ahead of the pilot even faster.

Agreed! Learning how to fly alone is the easy part. The hard part is all the rest.

Also, this is inconsistent:

> large commercial airplane technology has developed to the point that the planes practically fly themselves

> We think stick and rudder skills are definitely a necessity for airline pilots flying hundreds of people on board for the extremely rare cases where emergencies do happen and many people's lives are at risk

So which is it? Do modern airplanes fly themselves or not? Pilots need to be able to fly. All pilots. Otherwise everyone's at risk.

Some of the worst recent accidents happenend when under-trained (AF 447) or misinformed (737 MAX) pilots didn't have a clear mental picture of what the airplane was doing.

It would seem this is solving for the wrong problem.

And the whole paragraph about "sexyness", aluding to sports cars and iPhones, seems very wrong to me. What makes flying sexy is the nerdiness, the skills involved, not shiny control surfaces.

The airline design industry seriously needs some sexy

He ain’t wrong there

Take a look at older designs from the '60s and all the Experimental aircraft.

It's not that the industry doesn't know or can't do "sexy" (e.g. Cirrus custom leather and carbon fiber interiors and paint colors such Mykonos Blue), but that anything related to the airframe, avionics, or powerplant MUST be FAA certified so that exponentially (I'm not kidding) adds to its cost and time-to-market.

With such high fixed costs and high liability, manufacturers are forced be very conservative to earn very slim margins.

There is no inconsistency.

The first quote is meant to highlight that commercial planes have autopilot while e.g. Cessnas do not.

The second quote emphasizes the importance of training despite autopilot.

There is no inconsistency in pointing out that commercial planes have auto pilot while acknowledging that it would be nice for non-commercial planes to also have auto pilot even though training is important.

Most GA aircraft used for travel have autopilots. Even most flight school aircraft used for IFR training have them, at least in my experience in the northeast.

GA planes can’t land themselves, the autopilot they share in common is more like cruise control.

You can buy a full flight director autopilot on a G1000 Cessna 172.

The main reason it can't fully land itself is the lack of autothrottle and FADEC. But some GA planes do have even that. For example the Cirrus Vision (very light jet) is also a GA aircraft and has an emergency function where a passenger can trigger an emergency landing at the closest airport (as well as having a rescue parachute too)

> What makes flying sexy is the nerdiness, the skills involved, not shiny control surfaces.

Yaesu, Kenwood, and Icom 2-meter transceivers are not more desirable than an iPhone, and an iPhone generates far more economic value. Yes, some of the "wonder of radio" is lost when communicating over modern cell networks.

Similarly, sexy, easy to use planes and the resulting influx of new pilots could result in an "eternal september" for the community. "Flying cars" sounds amazing to most, but they do represent a death of what aviation was before.

These objections are largely emotional... progress happens.

> I'm not super excited about the idea of lowering the barrier to entry for GA on a foundational skill basis. Like the light-sport rating, it encourages more people to be in the (already congested) airspace system who haven't really gained all the other skills necessary or experience to be there

The entire history of aviation has shown that increasing redundancy and reducing pilot load increases safety.

> It may sound snobby - but I'm not super excited about the idea of lowering the barrier to entry for GA on a foundational skill basis. Like the light-sport rating, it encourages more people to be in the (already congested) airspace system who haven't really gained all the other skills necessary or experience to be there.

I'm not a pilot, but I've always wanted to go down the path. In theory - this should be rather exciting to a person like myself so as to lower the barrier to entry and allow me to just start. In fact I don't really like the idea of this and my first thought was: "this seems like the plane that other pilots hate" simply because of a lowered barrier to entry and new breed of "lazy" pilots. I could be 100% wrong.

The thing that turns me off from this is that when I do chart the path I want to learn and be able to do - the traditional way. And in fact I don't want to rely on software or inconsistent controls vs the norm. I'm all for the idea of making the cockpit easier to navigate and have situational awareness, but I'm not a fan of abstractions as much as I used to be.

So as a non-pilot who aspires to become one in the next decade I agree with the parent comment in that I do really hope the goal is not to lower the bar to become a pilot.

we won't want to lower the bar in terms of the pilot's ability to stay safe. But we do want to lower the barrier to entry so that more people can learn to do it, do it safely, and enjoy all it's benefits.

The barrier to entry is not learning how to fly. That is the easiest thing for most people.

One of the biggest barriers at this point is probably getting a medical. There are tons of perverse incentives there - getting one if you've ever been prescribed mental health meds, for instance, can be at best a ton of red tape.

I’m willing to bet the major barriers are money and time.

A $500k aircraft that still requires a PPL solves neither of those, and getting the PPL is contingent on passing the medical, both inititally and at regular intervals thereafter.

I was not saying the plane proposed here will lower the barrier, I’m just stating what I think the barrier is.

I think 90% people who aren’t older than 60 or so would get the medical without a problem. If you would remove the medical requirement, you wouldn’t suddenly have double the private pilots. If planes were 1/10th of the price they currently are (both in purchase and operation), you would. Medical isn’t the main blocker to private aviation.

Why do you misrepresent what I said? “One of” != the absolute most single thing

Sorry for that, I didn’t read the thread again when writing the reply. I’m still not sure if I would even call the medical one of the major barriers, but of course I don’t have a statistic on how many people wouldn’t pass a medical.

I wanted to do this too and was in a financial position to start lessons. Had raced cars in the past, rebuilt cars, mechanically savvy, fiddled around a whole heap with flight simulars, got excited about it. Paid my money for the initial 3 flights.

First time up (in a Cessna) beautiful clear day, low wind. Once we had done the safety checks I was instructed to taxi the plane. It was about as complicated as a ride-on mower and the throttle pull I swear is identical. No problem.

Instructor took over and punted the plane into the air. I was terrified. As I've written here before, a Cessna is like a Volkswagen Bug that somebody has thrown into the air. They shudder and shake and dip and every tiny pocket of turbulence throws them around. I completed the lesson without conveying my terror, did the turns, was able to identify stuff on the ground. Instructor landed the Cessna and I thanked him and told him I wouldn't be back.

I bought a motorcycle instead. They feel safer.

> Instructor took over and punted the plane into the air.

Sounds like you told the instructor about your car-racing experience.

I remember feeling the same way the first time I went up in a small plane (Cessna 150). I had a tourist ride in a small helicopter later (R44) and it was so much smoother. But I was probably safer in the Cessna.

The barrier to entry for learning to fly is literally a few hundred dollars for a discovery flight. You don't need to do any preparation and you will actually fly the plane the first time up. A discovery flight is flight training, and it goes in your log book.

I live in a suburb near a county airport. I cannot fathom a life with Tesla owners flying over where my kids and I bbq. This idea is great, but people should still be licensed for the real safety protocols e.g. radio and not crashing into others.

A CIWS maybe be the next standard feature on premium grills, ammo not included.

A CIWS probably doesn’t have enough stopping power for a GA aircraft so the burning wreckage will still crash into you. Need to go full AA gun, 12 DD stamps included with your purchase.

A DShK mounted in the bed of a Toyota truck and call it a day.

That sounds rather technical.

I cannot fathom a life with Tesla owners flying over where my kids and I bbq.

The same kinds of people who speed, watch videos, and do dangerous stunts while they drive are going to speed, watch videos, and do dangerous stunts while they fly.

Uber made everyone an amateur taxi driver. AirBnb made everyone an amateur innkeeper. Now the "tech" industry wants to make everyone an amateur pilot?

No thanks.

The better of the amateurs are as good as professionals.

I’ve been very well-taken care of in AirBnb’s, and I’ve been driven around well in Ubers.

I don’t think their concern is the ceiling of any of those domains, but the floor.

If someone's a bad amateur innkeeper, what's the worst that could happen? Their guests might have a poor experience, or at worst get bedbugs or something (which happens commonly at real hotels a lot these days anyway). At the very worst, their "inn" could burn down, but that's a risk with any building, including whatever home the guests normally live in.

Amateurs flying aircraft have the potential to cause far more havoc than this, or even the havoc that a bad driver could cause.

No smoke alarms is an obvious issue in my experience.

Wasn’t the point that there’s so many small aircraft currently crashing (at a rate 28x higher than cars)?

This is such a common argument for everything NIMBY. Your point remains valid, but the argument you've presented comes across uninspired.

What if you had no way to stop or from happening; what do you think might be reasonable mitigation steps that regulators could take to minimize the risk to your BBQ?

If something becomes an inevitability, you probably should be prepared with an argument that is accepting of that inevitability while still addressing your worries/concerns.

Just because the argument is "common" or "uninspired" doesn't make it wrong.

Certainly different "NIMBY" complaints can have differing levels consequences based on whether we're talking about sweeping changes to the skill level of most GA pilots vs. do we build this new apartment building here or not.

There’s a world of difference between NIMBYism about housing/zoning versus GA pilot experience.

"No fatal airplane crashes in my back yard" is probably the easiest NIMBY to justify of all time.

light-sport rating, it encourages more people to be in the (already congested) airspace system who haven't really gained all the other skills necessary or experience to be there.

LSA pilot here. I'm curious to know what skills or experience I haven't gained which allow me to be in the airspace system? I passed the exact same checkride a private pilot would, minus flying at night and VORs. I also have class B,C,D airspace endorsements, and I fly in the DFW Bravo all the time.

I figured this comment would get me in trouble :)

I recommend doing some instrument lessons if you haven't already. When I got my instrument rating I questioned whether the private requirements are actually enough. The skills that the instrument rating teaches in terms of preparation, workload management, and emergency weather scenarios make me question whether I was really ready to fly before I had it.

With the private or sport license you'll be fine in the majority of cases. I think my comment comes more from the edge and corner cases that more skills and experience help with, not your ability to work in the system at all.

ATPL here, couldn't agree more with both of your comments.

It's not to say recreational/LS pilots are necessarily inexperienced or hazardous but the odds are certainly higher than someone trained to an IFR standard.

Like you said, raising the systems standards and improving affordability is fantastic. Lowering the barrier to entry in the complex world of aviation would require fundamental changes on so many levels I don't see this project completely achieving it but good luck to them, I think theres more to gain than lose.

There is a decent argument to be made that LSA pilots are kept to a safer regime. I only fly in excellent weather and during the day, which eliminates a large majority of the risk profile in aviation. The LSA that I fly, while not IFR certified, has an autopilot, ADSB in, 2 radios, and a Garmin 430 which can be slaved to the autopilot. The plane will essentially VNAV fly itself to the numbers if I load the approach.

For all intents and purposes, LSA pilots really only fly in 10SM vis and excellent weather. Nothing less.

A lot of people look at the 20 hour minimum training for LSA pilots and scoff at that, but I've never met a LSA pilot that didn't follow the exact same training trajectory as a PPL. It took me about 65 hours to get my ticket, and I trained out of the 6th busiest airport in Texas which is nestled under DFW's Bravo.

thanks!

Yes, it's that entire helmet-fire that makes flying hard and often dangerous. But what the accident data shows is that these kinds of problems that you mention occur, and then the pilot loses control of the plane. If we give them the ability to relax, think through their situation, and make a good decision because at least the airplane will continue to descend safely towards the runway, we make safer pilots.

I just want to say I love what you are doing, you are solving a problem close to my heart. This is the sort of hard tech company that YC (and SV) should invest more in, not silly SaaS and ChatGPT wrappers. That being said, after fly by wire, would you be interested in tackling the GA engine economics problem? They are closely linked. If you solve that, the TAM for your product expands massively, and your exit opportunities are no longer limited to just being acquihired by Garmin.

https://airfactsjournal.com/2022/10/the-20-hour-cessna-172-e...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34728405

Yes, lowering all operating expenses by moving to more efficient engines and greener propulsion systems is on our roadmap as "the next problem"

Will those that purchase your highly polluting engine get a free on-the-house upgrade to this nebulous green future that likely won't happen?

How are you planning to offset the enormous amount of pollution you want to create in the mean time? Are you purchasing carbon credits? Planting trees?

Do you plan to increase your plane's range by the way? The current range is lower than most Skyhawks and DA-40s.

Also you should offer radio altimeters and ring laser gyros as an upgrade.

In single pilot IFR, an autopilot is often your best friend. It's exactly like you say - when you're busy with everything else you want the plane to fly itself. Isn't that problem already somewhat solved in a sense? Or are you referring to Garmin Autoland (or similar) in emergencies?

By the way - I can totally see how a great GA fly-by-wire system is an improvement to maintain positive control of an aircraft at all times. I'd personally love to give it a try and see how it reduces pilot effort while flying.

It's solved for the "cruise in a straight line" sense, but for emergencies or much more dynamic situations like a final approach, autopilots don't really help all that much. We can set up our VNAV and everything, but the second we get an unexpected clearance because something changed or we need to be diverted for a faster airplane or something, you need to be a real pro at using the autopilot to quickly adjust, or hand fly. We're offering a third solution--blend the two into one unified control interface.

> but I'm not super excited about the idea of lowering the barrier to entry for GA on a foundational skill basis. Like the light-sport rating, it encourages more people to be in the (already congested) airspace system who haven't really gained all the other skills necessary or experience to be there

By that logic, shouldn't we make driving cars as dangerous, complicated, inaccesible, and confusing as possible?

its pretty easy to drive a car. press pedal car go vroom turn wheel car go right

not the same for flying a plane

But presumably you're talking about a modern automatic car?

What about a manual car, where you need more understanding of the mechanics, and will stall or roll back on a hill if you don't? Or a manual car without synchromesh, where you have to double de-clutch to match the input and output shaft RPMs? Or a car without antilock brakes? Or without tire pressure sensors? Or automatic headlights? Or automatic wipers? Or lane assist? Or auto braking? Or cruise control? Or indicator blinkers that auto cancel? Or auto dimming headlights? Or warning messages that tell you about everything from seat belts to service warnings or blown bulbs?

All these are driver safety and convenience innovations that people take for granted so it is as simple as "press pedal car go vroom"...

Also, think about drones and model planes. With computer aided support they now have full autopilot, return to base, auto land etc. and can be operated by a kid! Why can't some of these types of support, safety and convenience make it over to light aircraft?

Most of the time none of those are doing anything. Shifting a manual is a minority of time, non-synchromesh makes shifting harder but it doesn't add much time. Most of the time when you stop the anti-lock brakes don't kick in and so again you lose nothing. TMPS makes your care safer if you have a lot tire - but tires these days are good enough that they rarely go flat. Same with the others - they are rarely used - not useless but only small factors taken all together - I've driven without each from time to time.

Only manual transmissions would really cut down on texting and driving.

I doubt it. I drive a manual and find that I spend very little time shifting. Each time I shift it would cost me the time to write one word (I'm guessing - for obvious reasons I'm not about to try this to see). The vast majority of the time I'm not doing anything different than when I drive an automatic.

Depends... Is it a good thing for the world that there are so many cars everywhere?

as someone trained in usability design, it was a nightmare learning to use those maps and learning the minefield thats is to talk to a tower about approach and such.

indeed you are extremely correct. i never broke a sweat with stick and rudder (i did read THE book before classes!) even on first touch and go landings! but everything else that involved towers, weather, other planes, radio, and those damn maps!

so much room for improvement just ignored for the past 30 years with everyone blind digital technology. Heck a freaking lame gps with waypoints is lauded as the greates invention in avionics in the last half century!

For me it was the opposite. Learning the stick & rudder stuff was much harder for me. All the VOR navigation and patterns not so much. Probably because I've been using flightsims since I was very young and knew what it was all about, all the while learning bad flying habits (chasing the instruments etc) :P

The current systems seem to be all designed around there only being minimal air traffic, as it was in the past. People talking one on one with ATC, everything being done on a plane by plane basis. Can that really continue to function if traffic increases a few orders of magnitude?

I mean hell, imagine everyone having to ask the city car controller for permission to back their car out of their driveway, state their route and get for approval to drive all over the place without any regard for traffic and let the controller make sure there's nobody in your way.

In the 70s when a lot of this system was designed, the industry was selling 10x the number of GA planes it does today, so I imagine 10x more were flying as well. So we have the capability for an order of magnitude increase. We'll need more controllers, sure.

But, you are totally right, we need to move away from voice based ATC to more digital systems that allow a management of more aircraft, and allow the GA aircraft to manage themselves through a "peer to peer" type ATC system, but like we have with our cars.

> the industry was selling 10x the number of GA planes it does today, so I imagine 10x more were flying as well.

I'm pretty sure most of these planes from the 1970s are still merrily flying around!

The wikipedia article on the 1994 General Aviation Revitalization Act has a graph showing the astonishing drop in shipped aircraft (and the rise in unit cost!) since around 1980:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...

yep--we want to reverse that trend. And you are probably right, a lot of those 70s planes still fly today. hopefully we can replace them with better alternatives

Minimal traffic? An ATPL pilot here. Fly into any major airport and you'll see that it can be REALLY BUSY. The system is based around separation down to about 1 minute. Major airfields are all traffic limited (hence "slots").

1 minute might seem like a lot when you're walking or driving, but when coming in at 200mph in something that weights hundreds of tons ... I want that guy 1 minute ahead of me off the runway ;)

And that's considering that existing traffic is of similar speed and ability. Adding slow, small, low-performance aircraft to the mix makes things very interesting ;( Then add low-experience pilots who have to stop and think about procedures, actions, radio calls ...

permission to back their car out of their driveway - It might be different if those cars cost $100M-$300M. A tiny bingle is very expensive.

True I suppose, and it's not like we're on the verge of any new energy density tech that would make personal VTOLs viable either so runways might be the bottleneck that keeps throughput constrained for the foreseeable future I guess. Although you can always build more of them :)

Whilst I entirely agree with your overearching argument here, perhaps you are being a little bit snobby when it comes to SPLs.

Can you please be more specific with regards to the necessary skills that sport pilots haven't gained that you believe makes them a liability in the skies?

Lets be real: plenty of VFR private pilots are threats in the air & garbage on the radio - especially at untowered fields. You should be judging pilots on an individual basis, rather than broadly assuming a lack of knowledge based on their certificate type, given that the syallabus (61.105 & 61.309 + 61.325) is more-or-less identical.

edit 2 min later: I see your response to another user now.

Out of curiosity, do you think those things are intrinsically hard, or is there a mutual escalation at play in some of these? Like I can imagine inspections are as hard as they are because you need to be prepared if weather becomes difficult to manage (for example). And then I imagine comms is hard/demanding because you can't assume that planning and inspections were done correctly. Etc.

I do wonder if reducing human error in some parts of this challenge stack would make it possible to lighten some of the other imposed burdens.

I find it really hard to understand how we have solved this problem on the ground (e.g. roads), when in the sky we have nearly 100x more space (assuming 100m altitude bands), but we manage to have so many issues.

There's a lot less space when you consider how many airstrips there are in the world. Imagine if everyone on the highway in a city had to get on and off on the same exit ramp.

We haven't solved this on the ground. We just accept that 1 million people die in car crashes each year and something like 10 million sustain serious injuries that leave them scarred for life. Also many that die and are injured are NOT the culprits, they're just innocent bystanders. We also destroy property constantly with cars and suffer from horrible congestion everywhere.

Some fair points. What if this tech made the individual flyer safer?

Obviously there’s the additional air traffic, but how much could be in the air at one time?

> What if this tech made the individual flyer safer?

I'd hope that's the case! That's why I put it in the "good" category".

> how much could be in the air at one time?

Hard to say, but there's a ton of congestion around busy airspace as is. I'd think an order-of-magnitude increase in GA traffic would require a major rework of the whole airspace system.

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