Pretty exiting times in aerospace these days. Seeing spacex doing awesome innovation with starship and boom making good progress bringing back supersonic air travel
Can someone innovate general aviation
Can someone innovate general aviation
For a vivid example, look at the multi-year certification torture that even a minor new engine design (DeltaHawk https://www.deltahawk.com/ ) must endure, or hell, the comical marathon of low-lead avgas adoption, or even a basic 12V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22K-XdV7e-0 lithium battery.
GA is a hell of a fun hobby, but not a market conducive to venture capital timelines or returns.
Unless you take a look at why those regulations came into place - literally tens of thousands of people dying in fiery crashes. Aviation safety is an incredibly complex topic, and even with the strict regulatory regimes of today, companies like Boeing manage to skirt the rules and proudly sell planes that crash themselves, or fall apart in mid air.
Lowering regulatory boundaries in aviation will certainly result in more death.
We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
I'm not saying repeal it all or exempt GA but the current approach is clearly the worst of both worlds and ought to be changed.
Aviation regulations are indeed written in blood. I can recommend https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ if you're into reading, or https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot if you're into watching for some education of how bad things used to be. Airplane crashes were an almost weekly occurrence, sometimes barely making it into national news. Enormous advances have happened in technology, redundancy, training, maintenance to make aviation absurdly safe. In the US, you have a higher chance of injury/death while driving to the airport than flying (if anything that's an indictment on American roads, terrible cars and bad drivers, but that's a whole other topic).
> We don't regulate freight barges and personal watercraft the same way we regulate cruise ships and ferries. There's a pretty clear demarcation line between commercial passenger service and noncommercial non-passenger in every industry,
> Why is aviation not similar? Oh, that's right, because decades ago the FAA and Congress brought the entire industry (with a tiny carve-out for experimental) under the same regulatory scheme and damn near killed the GA industry.
If you think GA is under the same regulatory regime as civilian airliners, you're misinformed. It's drastically easier, with much less redundancy or safety requirements. None of the current GA planes would be accepted in commercial airline service for a variety of reasons. For a quick example, TCAS (a system that will warn you if you're going to crash into another plane) isn't mandatory for planes with less than 30 seats or with takeoff weight less than 33,000lbs.
And as for why there are still regulations for GA, it's quite easy - those planes fly in the same airspace, and them falling down on population centres or crashing into other planes can kill people just as much as a civilian airliner. You really really have to try to kill someone if your Zodiac fails.
> Furthermore, the whole Boeing fiasco is a great illustration of how futile the approach that you people peddle is. Boeing and their army of lawyers and carousel of lobbyists get to skirt or play right up to the letter of the the regulation while the little guy has to bend over and take it full force. So what even is the point of having the same set of rules if the big guys are the ones subject to less rules in practice?
Boeing aren't subjected to less rules. They're lucky to be in a country that doesn't care that much for rules because they're the national champion and must be protected. But the rules still are being enforced for them - they're at a very low production cap because they shat the bed so badly so many times.
I cited three technologies (ICE engine redesign, low-lead gasoline, and lithium batteries) where those timelines for market adoption (outside of GA) were orders of magnitude (decades) shorter.
My comments were solely targeted at GA. Commercial aviation is an entirely different ball game.