SpaceX just got what it wanted from the FAA for Texas Starship launches
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The issue is literally sonic booms over people's homes and businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalizatio...
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/planes-claims-and-automobil...
Fewer people are learning to fly except to go work for the airlines. Most of the small aviation manufacturers and engine producers have been snapped up by China. It's so expensive to certify an engine for flight that most of general aviation is using engines where you burn leaded fuel and manually control the carburetors and fuel injectors. In aviation, a 1940s era airframe is considered perfectly safe, and it is completely acceptable to use vacuum pneumatic instruments despite them being significantly less reliable than MEMS or solid state ring laser (or fibre optic) gyros. Even something as simple as a radar altimeter would cost well into the 5-6 figures. It's a very backwards industry similar to medicine and pharmacy. The doctors believe in hazing new grads through residency, while biotech legislators holds the view that right to try and loosening clinical trials lead to moral hazard; better ten people die from disease than for one to be accidentally killed during drug testing. It is the same in aviation, safety is written in blood and all that so the best way to stay safe is to make it too expensive to fly. Many flight schools preach training with old airframes and technology. A lot of pilots refuse to admit the real reason is because of cost, and instead come up with all sort of post-hoc fantastic explanations that students learn better when they are flying rickety vehicles with century old technology. If you want to learn to fly, find a school that offers the DA-20/DA-40 (or even better, the DA-40NG with push button start) manufactured in the past ten years. Avoid the Cessna-only places.
The FAA is trying to improved the situation with the new MOSAIC light sports aircraft policy (that's mostly half baked) and certifying more engines for unleaded fuels. But unless the White House comes down hard on them for their inaction, they are going to drag out the issue for another decade (and hopefully kill off the general aviation industry all together). Regulators don't like general aviation, especially post 911. Between drones and climate change, and the fact that general aviation pilots are mostly Midwestern farmers and upper middle class people curious about aerospace, the industry doesn't have any real advocates. Not enough nouveau riche tech bros fly, and the ones that do are often rich enough to buy their own legislators and presidents that the costs don't matter. It's the aviation version of the middle class being squeezed from both ends.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-proposes-rule-enhance-safet...
If general aviation continues to decline, it's going to become a national security issue. It's not a good world where aviation becomes a professional luxury, where aviation manufacturers cater primarily to foreign clients, and where most aerospace engineers would never have the opportunity to actually fly what they build.
Beats being in bed with bankers, pharmaceutical companies, arms dealers and people selling our personal data.
He has resisted all calls to rectify obvious and public fatal design defects since they would harm his profits.
He has a pattern of abusing the legal system and the natural extensions of the “benefit of the doubt” to shield him and his companies from their responsibilities.
For all of this, he has been richly rewarded and made the richest person in the world, yet demands the lowest level of scrutiny. He is a role model and a blueprint showing that the path to riches is lying your ass off and killing your customers for a profit as long as you can spin it as “for the greater good”.
Because he hurts people, different people in different ways. There are plenty of examples, e.g. handling the Twitter employees and Twitter users. Elon does a lot of genuinely useful things, but that doesn't mean he doesn't also do bad, selfish things. And even people who aren't directly affected by that see those bad things.
Aside from firing most of them, what did he do?
I think that's sort of the problem, the person we're discussing is a significant purveyor of that sort of incivility. When someone chooses to play in the mud like that it should not come as a surprise that people respond with distain.
However, it seems unlikely that this document—which has been in the works for more than a year—was unduly influenced by Trump's election. It was prepared by an FAA still under the Biden administration.