Personal aviation is about to get interesting (2023)
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For example it has a ballistic parachute that will bring the entire aircraft to the ground. Unlike the Lycomings and Continentals the engine wasn’t designed in the 1950s. It’s equipped with real time satellite weather, GPS autopilot, Avionics that would cost you $15-20k to put in a Cessna due to all the red tape.
I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people. If pilots had low cost access to things like glass cockpits, satellite weather, inexpensive autopilot, and a healthy ecosystem of cheap, modern aircraft with modern engines (Basic things like fuel injection) a lot of pilots might still be alive right now.
On the balance, the FAA has saved more lives than it's cost just because big jetliners hold SO MANY PEOPLE.
But otherwise I fully agree with you.
It's deranged that students these days are taught to manually lean the mixture until the engine sputters (i.e. the engine begins to DIE), then bump it back up.
It's incredibly stupid that an aircraft flying in 2025 has multiple solid state accelerometers and gyroscopes on board as part of people's phones - but the only certified one is a vacuum-powered analog instrument from 1981.
And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?
Don't even get me started on the DPE or medical systems.
These changes cannot come soon enough, because the entire GA world has slipped through the cracks as the FAA has become a disaster.
Unleaded avgas is a thing now. But it won't work with many legacy aviation engines. I hope this new rule will finally enable some engine (and thus fuel) innovation.
If they were cars, most GA planes would qualify for 'antique' plates. Most of the rest are not technically antique, just antique technology.
Why? That is essentially an engine check. I think you want pilots to understand their machines and to do that you need to operate the engines.
Pilots will understand their engines' quirks better, but those quirks are stupid and obviated by newer technology.
Many people have died from believing that their satellite weather was real-time. It’s 3-15 minutes delayed typically.
Go up on a VFR day with widely scattered wet clouds and maybe scattered showers or virga. Fly near some of the wetness and notice they are physically quite displaced from where they are on your weather display. In some cases, your weather display will show weather on the left and clear right, while your windshield will show the weather is actually on your right, having moved during that delay.
Imagine then trying to navigate that in more serious weather and you’ll hopefully get religion that the display is definitely not real-time and must not be relied upon as if it were. It’s a strategic tool, not a tactical one.
You're talking about what's known as an electronic flight bag, which is using a tablet as a replacement for paper maps and charts. This is legal and has been for some time.
What I and Animats are talking about is running an app on a ipad as a "replacement" for equipment or training that is required for safe, legal, operation. NOT legal.
Here's the cockpit of the Gripen, Saab's current fighter aircraft.[1] One big screen across the whole panel. No sign of a classic altimeter or compass. There's a HUD as well, so there's a second device for the basic flight instruments.
[1] https://bestfighter4canada.blogspot.com/p/the-saab-gripen-do...
Very few pilots manage to earn a lifetime ban.
It's really quite brilliant.
The way that you get pilots to do it is that if you drop the dime on yourself it actually gives you virtual immunity from consequences, as long as no injuries or serious damage actually occurred. The idea is to actually find systemic process/procedure issues.
Don't get me started. It's virtually impossible to buy a car without fuel injection nowadays, but most GA airplanes still use carburetors. And these are vehicles that are constantly changing altitude, so carburetors are even more unsuited for airplanes than for cars.
Okay I lied. You can buy fuel injected engines for airplanes. They are readily available. They merely cost 2x or 3x the price of carbureted engines.
GA engines may look antiquated—with their carburetors, magnetos, and mechanical fuel pumps—but this apparent simplicity is entirely by design. These “outdated” systems are actually time-tested solutions engineered for ultimate reliability when failure means catastrophe. While car oils use metallic detergent additives, aviation oils must use ashless dispersants to prevent spark plug fouling that could cause engine failure. The oils must handle sustained high RPM operation and brutal temperature cycling while meeting strict FAA specifications that prioritize proven reliability over cutting-edge performance.
Every component, from the dual magneto ignition (no electrical system dependency) to the mechanical engine-driven fuel pump, represents decades of refinement focused on one critical goal: the engine will not quit when you need it most. It’s not that these engines are behind the times—they’re precisely engineered for their mission-critical role where proven, simple systems trump technological sophistication.
Much easier to fuel, no electrical system dependencies, no spark plugs to foul, liquid cooling to keep the temps more constant, and dual redundant FADECs. Plus much better range.
But they're still expensive.
https://www.flyingmag.com/inside-aviation-diesel-revolution/
It's just that this is not a fair comparison because manufacturers of said airliners have more resources for R&D.
But because it's a job they have much less Plan Continuation Bias aka "Get-there-itis". Flying New York to Dallas? I did that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. So if the weather looks bad and maybe we shouldn't, well then I guess we just don't go, I'll go tomorrow, or maybe somebody else will, it's just a job.
GA pilots are notorious for this problem, and it puts them in vulnerable situations where they're one problem away from disaster, as weather is worse than they hoped, things don't happen the way they expected, and gradually they go from "It'll probably be fine" to "I hope I live to learn from this experience".
Many common airplanes engines have a max RPM of 2700 and are often cruised at 2300-2400.
(Edited for completeness)
Do you believe anything I say is inaccurate or do I need to accommodate another “please don’t do X because otherwise I feel offended/cannot trust a random stranger/…” stance?
>The oils must handle sustained high RPM operation
Flat out wrong, most GA piston engines are quite low RPM and even the "higher RPM" engines are rated lower than an equivalent car engine. Redlines are lower than car engines too.
>aviation oils must use ashless dispersants to prevent spark plug fouling
Also flat out wrong, lol. FAA allows use of straight mineral oil and although most people break-in with mineral oil and switch to oil with ashless dispersants, the use of straight mineral oil for an engine's entire life is perfectly legal.
>(the oils must meet) strict FAA specifications that prioritize proven reliability over cutting-edge performance
Another lovely LLM hallucination. I would love to see any sort of FAA "specification" on engine oil that causes a serious performance compromise.
The main thrust of your comment is - and I quote - that the use of carburetors instead of fuel injection is "entirely by design." That is entirely bullshit. Fuel injection was not a mature technology until the 80s and didn't even become the default in new passenger cars until the 90s. If you are designing, let's say, the Lycoming O-320 - one of the most popular GA engines today - in the early 1950s, you used a carburetor because it was the only real option.
I say this all as a supporter of old, simple systems, and as a man who has trusted his life to old, reliable, simple engines. I would love a debate about the actual reliability and factors of reliability of GA engines. But I would have that debate with a human. Because, for all their merits and uses, LLMs currently struggle to produce real insight.
That's because GA airplanes in general are significantly older than most cars on the road. If you're buying a brand new car and a brand new GA airplane you're equally unlikely to encounter one without fuel injection.
Now the reason this is the case is because instead of buying brand new GA airplanes, most people are just trading around the old ones because new GA airplanes are ridiculously expensive. This is also a regulation problem, among other things, but the fuel injection thing isn't because modern GA is behind the curve. The issue is that the vast majority of GA pilots aren't flying modern GA.
We're probably agreeing with each other but using different words.
I share your frustration with the technological stagnation of general aviation, but this is completely damning. Cirrus added all of the features you mention, at great expense and in a fully certified aircraft, and took decades to show any kind of clear safety advantage over clapped-out Cessnas (as I understand it, the vast majority of improvement came from intensive training in when to deploy the parachute, which was wildly less intuitive than anyone originally realized and likely remains so for pilots without specialized training). Digital instruments, weather displays, and automation have significant benefits for many use cases, but it's unclear that they're inherently safer than legacy systems for amateur aviators.
It’s (mostly) not the plane, it’s the pilot.
Risk compensation is real... they put themselves into marginal situations because they're telling themselves they can always just pop the chute.
AIUI the specific problem was that humans are bad at "calling it" and the parachute isn't magic. If you used the chute on time you're saved, if you spend that time working through all other options which don't save you, then deployed the chute with no time, you're still dead. So the training was to teach people to call it - yes maybe I could restart the engine (but if not I die), maybe I could keep looking and see that state road (but if not I die), however I could pull the chute right now and almost certainly live so I need to make sure I do that before it's too late.
Suppose in a board game you have three choices. One is worthless, we'll lose, one is 80% chance to draw but otherwise lose, one is a utter gamble maybe 5% chance to outright win otherwise lose. Many players will take the 5% chance. In fact in professional sports not taking that risk often annoys fans - they're here for the thrill. But flying an aeroplane isn't a game, the "outright lose" case is you die and if you have passengers they die too. You should take the draw when it's offered, and if we have to train people to do that then I guess that's what it takes.
I can understand (and even agree with) why Cirrus teaches to “pull early and pull often”. It’s not a terrible policy, Cirrus doesn’t exactly suffer financially from a chute pull, and some Cirrus occupants died who could have lived if the chute were pulled earlier or at all.
Rotax engines have been extremely popular in Europe for LSA equivalents - but boy do I recall countless stories of engine failures. The most crazy one was of a flight instructor that had a total of 12 (!?) before he quit flying. A lot has to do I believe with the “creative ways the engine and its components are stuffed into different airframes”.
Rotax engines were not worse than Lycoming or Continental ones, 1 in 36 vs. 1 in 35. Japiru engines were the bad outlier.
"Engine failures and malfunctions in light aeroplanes 2009 - 2014"
https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/2013/ar-2013-107_resear...
The relevant excerpt, paragraph breaks added:
"Over the 6-year study period between 2009 and 2014, 322 engine failures or malfunctions involving light aircraft were reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and/or Recreational Aviation Australia (RA-Aus). These reports involved single-engine piston aeroplanes up to 800 kg maximum take-off weight.
Aircraft powered by Jabiru engines were involved in the most engine failures or malfunctions with 130 reported over the 6 years. This represents about one in ten aircraft powered by Jabiru engines in the study set having reported an engine failure or malfunction.
Reports from Rotax powered aircraft were the next most common with 87 (one in 36), followed by aircraft with Lycoming (58 – one in 35) and Continental (28 – one in 35) engines.
When factoring in the hours flown for each of these engine manufacturers, aircraft with Jabiru engines had more than double the rate of engine failure or malfunction than any other of the manufacturers in the study set with 3.21 failures per 10,000 hours flown."
(When you read on, it appears the Jabiru engine was improved and now has less failures)
Last year, the LSA association in Germany started a large survey across its members because of the high number of failures with Rotax engines: https://www.daec.de/news/news-detail/service-bulletin-zu-sto...
Now, I definitely do not say that these are bad engines, but there is a lot of chatter in Europe how these engines are plugged into a wide range of airframes and there are more complex system interactions than meets the eye which can cause some problems. Or put differently: C172 and Pa28 are probably among the most common airframes to stuff the Lycomings and Continentals into. I suspect we kind of figured out how to make these work reliably.
Rotax works in MANY many different combinations and many different airframes - so there is that.
> there are more complex system interactions than meets the eye which can cause some problems
I will grant this for sure. Kind of like modern cars though, it's a double-edged sword. On the UAS programme I'm working on it has been absolutely invaluable to be able to just plug into the 912 ECU's CAN bus and gather a ton of engine telemetry (and send it down to the ground for monitoring at the GCS).
Thank you for posting the links and starting the discussion about 912 reliability. I'm going to have to dig into it a little and see if there's any takeaways I need to bring back to my team.
With zero evidence to support this other than my own experience with N=4 of these, I have a suspicion that part of the problem could be that they're not getting sufficient maintenance and inspection because of how simple they are from an O&M perspective and how robust they are in nominal and off-nominal conditions. When I was first working with it and flipping through the operators manual I was kind of shocked to discover that the only real pre-flight actions are: check coolant level, rotate the prop and make sure the oil reservoir burps. There's a startup and warm-up procedure that we follow to the letter but short-term you almost certainly won't notice if you skip it. Before we had our robust telemetry system and checklists in place, we accidentally flew it with only one ECU lane turned on once and didn't notice until we were on the ground. Engine was already off after landing when someone came on the radio and asked "hey guys... in-flight we're supposed to have both lanes A and B on right?" "Yeah..." "The Lane B switch was off when I approached the aircraft...".
To summarize what I'm getting at: this engine, in my experience so far, has a ton of really robust redundancy features and those redundancy features work so well that you may not notice that you've got issues until you've run out of redundancy. I can only think of two situations where we've had issues bad enough that it caused it to "run rough" and trigger a deeper investigation:
- Because our aircraft is unmanned we have electromechanical relays in series with the Lane A/B switches that we can control from the ground both for engine-start safety (the engine can't be started unless both the crew chief and remote pilot have turned on Lanes A and B) and to be able to kill the engine remotely after landing or in an emergency. We had an electrical issue that was causing the relays to chatter, resulting in Lanes A and B getting sporadic power.
- Somehow in one revision of the ever-evolving full-system checklist the "check water separator" item got dropped and no one noticed. It flew probably 10+ flights on that checklist before we had a really rough start, in an environment that was highly conducive to water accumulation in the fuel (large daily OAT and RH swings). We were horrified at how much water came out when I realized that no one had been checking... and yet there had been zero negative effects until there was a big negative effect.
It drives my crazy that in 2025 ADSB is still not mandatory for all aircraft. I get there's old timers flying their tail wheels from the 1950s that don't have any electrical components, but this would massively improve GA safety.
Another one is multiplex radio, again, it's 2025, the technology is there. Why are we still seeing so many blocked communications during emergencies in busy airspaces?
Frustratingly, the FAA hasn't certified a straightforward solution to this problem. Here in the UK, we can use a fully standalone ADS-B transceiver that requires no permanent installation. After a rebate from the CAA, it costs about $500.
The difference between the radio on the WW2 era ex-pilot boat I spent time on recently and the radio in a brand new jet liner is crazy. The Global Maritime Distress Safety System - a global requirement from the 1980s - mandates a digital VHF radio service named DSC - it's not very clever by today's standards and it's hardly the easiest to drive UI - but it's night and day compared to what is provided for aeroplanes. First of all, and most crucial for its core purpose, many crucial elements of a "Mayday" call are automated so that rescuers have the most important information right away even if you're panicked and incoherent, and it won't get "blocked" by low priority callers trying to figure out which gate they're scheduled for, or whether they can get the longer runway for this approach.
It's almost aggressively bad, I guess they couldn't get an OK to use Morse code?
Radio navigation aids identify themselves by trnsmitting their name in morse code!
> The only positive method of identifying a VOR is by its Morse Code identification or by the recorded automatic voice identification which is always indicated by use of the word “VOR” following the range's name.
There's such a long way from "Move fast and break things" to "Eh, it was good enough for my grandfather" and it feels as though aeronautics is very close to the latter. This would be OK if the demands on the system were declining or even steady, but they're increasing.
That said, misidentifying a navaid is particularly dangerous so they have to broadcast somethting that's clear even under adverse radio conditions.
Completely agree with you.
Rotax 912? :D
I've spent a lot of time getting familiar with that engine over the last two years as part of a large UAS programme. Every time I have to do integration work with it (electrical or CAN) I end up having an even-deeper appreciation of how thoughtful the engineering behind it is.
Edit: also, since people below brought up 100LL... I also deeply appreciate that it runs fine on plain ol' premium mogas. Both because I'd rather not expose my self to tetraethyl lead all the time and because it's really convenient to be able to just load up a few jerry cans on my way out to the field while getting fuel for my truck.
A possibly good example of this: I believe that in Switzerland, small planes almost universally carry "FLARM" devices, essentially "TCAS for hobbyists", implemented through unregulated devices from a private company that people just got because they were cheap and useful. Bureaucratic regulation would have most likely killed a project like this.
Is it good? Well, a lot of people are cheering the change. The FAA doesn’t normally make things easier for the average Joe. This will make it easier for an inexperienced (but still fairly wealthy) pilot to get their hands on a real hot rod of a plane. There’s probably some additional risk, but the FAA has clearly recognized that one of the biggest dangers too flying a high performance aircraft is having to land fast. 200 kts vs 100 kts doesn’t make a big difference in risk in straight and level flight, but landing at 80 kts vs 55 kts does make a difference.
I don’t know where I stand exactly. It’s a big jump. Surely this is going to cause some old geezer to be screaming through a congested area and not be able to keep up with the ATC traffic calls because he’s never gone this fast before, and he’ll have a midair collision. Surely this is going to cause someone to buy a “light sport” aircraft with 280 hp and a huge prop and they’re going to crash taking off. But I think that overall I’m just being overly cautious, and most Sport Pilots are too poor to afford a plane that burns 15 gallons of avgas an hour, so most of the new planes under MOSAIC won’t be that powerful. I am curious to see what kind of new aircraft become available, and what the long term safety impacts will be.
Edit: for about five minutes my post said “not approved” when I meant to type that MOSAIC is “now approved”
- New engine options. Previously getting an engine certified was a big expense, so there wasn’t a lot of advancement. Now I think that higher performing Light Sport aircraft can be made with non-certified engines or components. All electronic ignitions, variable valve timing, electronic fuel injection, it’s all on the table now, and it gets to exist in a factory manufactured plane, not just experimentals.
- New avionics. The light sport category got to put some neat digital avionics in their panels because they weren’t certified. They had portable ADS-B transmitters that were legal. These options will now be open to faster planes too.
- Importing light sports from around the world. Lots of European light sport planes couldn’t be imported in the past because they weren’t certified but were too fast for American light sport rules. Now a lot of them will be able to be imported as soon as the rules allow.
- Cheaper complex trainers. Allowing variable pitch props and retractable gear in the light sport category will hopefully mean there will be a plane that comes along that allows you to build time in the complex category without spending the money that usually comes with these types of planes.
- there’s probably a bunch of other things we’ll see that I haven’t thought of, and I am curious to see whatever that is as well.
My cold take is that the only significant, short-term effect will be slightly lowered training standards for low-to-moderate-performance aircraft. It's unclear that this will have any practical effects, since personal airplanes will remain prohibitively expensive to own and operate for the vast majority of us.
FADEC means one less knob the pilot had to worry about in flight and one fewer item on the landing checklist. Probably not a massive performance difference, but I’ll call the sum of the marginal fuel efficiency and engine longevity gains along with the additional safety reduced cognitive load a compelling advantage overall.
Cheaper, modern three axis autopilots are compelling. Repeat this exercise twenty more times with areas all over an airplane and you make a huge difference. Cheap planes aren’t going to swamp the market overnight, just like most of the original LSAs were over $100k when they first came out. But a $100k LSA sure was cheaper than a new SR20 or C172. But they trickled in, and now you can buy a few year old LSA at a decent price. The new crop will start to trickle in over the years too and maybe I’ll be able to afford one when I’m at retirement age.
You’re right about the reduced training standards, but doing it with the old light sport pilot restrictions didn’t cause a massive increase in incidents, so maybe this won’t be that bad. If you fly around rural airports you’ve already been flying around sport pilots and people on BasicMed for several years, so you would have already seen the difference.
Some "geezer" trying to land at OSH 2025 did this, just this year.
The geezer has an ATP and ATC certifications (Airline Transport Pilot)
The amount of people gatekeeping, coming up with scenarios and hating MOSAIC because of "feels" is so tiring. FAA made these changes based on DATA
All pilots are limited to 200hp or less, and non-complex aircraft without separate instruction and endorsement. 14 CFR 61.31(e) & (f)
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
One of the more arbitrary and kinda pointless rules. Someone flying a 160 knot 200 hp Piper Arrow with a controllable prop and retractable gear doesn’t need the endorsement. Someone flying a 90 knot fixed gear fixed prop biplane with a 205 hp engine does.
It’s pretty much “use more right rudder”. Although most aircraft with over 200 hp have a constant speed prop so you learn to use manifold pressure and engine speed to set power.
I went from a 145 hp plane to a 235 hp one with about 30 min of instruction during a BFR.
You could always get endorsements as a sport pilot, but complex and high performance didn’t make sense because there were no LSAs that qualified. But tons of people got tailwheel endorsements as sport pilots in the past. Now a bunch of sport pilots are going to get complex and high performance endorsements too.
But MOSAIC probably will result in more aircraft being announced that are designed to run unleaded fuel because you won’t have to use a certified engine and can use something more modern.
Most single-engine aircraft were already restricted to 61 knot stall speed (and I think all MOSAIC-eligible ones were).
I’m a big proponent of MOSAIC (as I was of BasicMed), even though the MOSAIC rule change won’t directly help me.
The fact that the stall speed limitation closely matches the existing limits for light singles shows where the FAA draws the safety lines. Although MOSAIC apparently allows twins, they keep the stall speed limitation at a sane number.
The only thing I don’t fully understand is them differentiating between 59 kts for a sport pilot, and 61 kts for a light sport aircraft. It feels a little arbitrary to draw those lines differently.
The NPRM document explains it somewhere around page 200. It’s important to note that it’s 59 knots CAS clean vs 61 knots CAS dirty.
The argument seems to be that a sport pilot is operating with less training and less oversight and so if something goes wrong and they can’t get the aircraft fully configured for landing they’ll still be able to operate and touch down at 59 vs whatever the clean stall speed would be for an aircraft with a dirty stall speed of 61 knots. That margin could be fairly large (10 knots or more) and the difference in energy between 59 and 71 knots is massive.
It's really disheartening to know that I'm not allowed to fly recreationally from time to time because I take a stimulant medication to help finish university.
She talks about Pilot Mental Health Campaig https://www.pmhc.org/ and a campaign to lobby for changes.
She's also just started a new video series where she's building a wood and fabric Pietenpol Air Camper plane from 1929 plans: https://youtu.be/YThMZZ3M9uk?si=byl8E_wJF9cKY0Fj
I don’t expect that to change, but I also wouldn’t have expected MOSAIC to be adopted either.
I think your best path is either to fly with an instructor (you don’t need a medical if the instructor is acting as pilot-in-command) or to fly Part 103 ultralights.
Then it will be the much less likely to be gamed insurance market effectively deciding who gets to fly the higher performance aircraft.
I was on board up until this phrase. I don't want my plane behaving as flakey as my Tesla, and my gauges shifting their location around every update at the whim of some junior designer.
Not saying there couldn't be a manufacturer that does OTA properly, I just haven't seen that as the trend in any other space (cars, smartphones, etc). The OTA part always seems to benefit the manufacturer, not the user. ("Watch this ad to take off....")
The process right now is pulling out an SD card from your Garmin/Avidyne/BendixKing whatever every 28-days or so (that's how often the FAA updates the navigation database backing these avionics), popping it into your PC, using software/webistes that could be... much better designed (to put it lightly) and then going back again. It's not exactly the hardest thing in the world, but it's not exactly a walk in the park either (especially for less-technically inclined pilots, who just let it lapse, and click out of the big expiration warnings every time they start up their planes).
An interesting point here is that you can sometimes get safety improvements in an experimental aircraft that you can't get in the same airframe under Part 23 because the manufacturers don't want to go through the certification process for upgraded parts and newer technology.
Even at full speed in a straight line, 2000 mile trip in a C172 would take 14.5 hours, and that's without refueling. Fuel would cost you ~$920.
In a twin prop like a Piper Seneca it would take about 9 hours, and ~$1700 of fuel.
There's also the issue of weather which small aircraft are much more subject to.
You don’t fly New York to San Francisco. You fly Cupertino to Driggs with three friends. The point is connectivity between unconnected points; similar to why we drive private cars.
Also, the article’s entire point is flying is unnecessarily expensive in the birthplace of aviation.
Or fly to Vegas in half the time as driving or fly to Catalina Island which you cant go to any other way than ferry
If you have the skills and equipment, it might well be worth the $900-$1700 or whatever. You're also potentially taking 3 other people, and luggage, and avoiding the costs and headaches of big commercial airports and airlines, plus TSA etc.
Spending over $1700 (thats just fuel, add probably $900 for the oil/maintainence, $100 for landing/tiedown fees, $200 for a hotel...) for the luxury of not spending few hours in an airport would certainly be rich
https://www.eaa.org/eaa/news-and-publications/eaa-news-and-a...
> the category could include planes like the forthcoming Pipistrel Panthera.
The "forthcoming" (2023) Panthera has been worked on since 2011, had its first flight in 2013, and is still in development (2025).
Once airborne, autogyro planes can safely descend without relying on power or even a functioning engine. They possess remarkable hover-like capabilities without stalling, unlike fixed-wing aircraft, and can achieve impressive distances at commendable speeds, unlike helicopters.
In other words, it’s the best of both worlds and very beginner friendly IMO.
FAA split the concept of "sport pilot" from LSA
Now Sport Pilots can fly just about anything with VS1 of 59 knots or less (clean stall speed) (up from 45kts)
Meanwhile, new plane designs can go through a less rigorous certification as LSA if they have a VS1 of 61kts or less.
Personal aviation is about to get interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37988638 - Oct 2023 (137 comments)
A bunch of the coverage has a nice table showing the new spec. https://www.flyingmag.com/faa-finalizes-major-overhaul-of-li...
I have a couple of concerns about a large expansion of personal aircraft of the type the original author is advocating.
For one, even certified GA aircraft have a fatality rate far in excess of automobiles, let alone public transport or airliners. Yes, some of that is pilot error which can be mitigated to a substantial extent by computer controls, but it’s also a result of the lack of redundancy and hard failure modes of a light aircraft compared to a car. I’d also note that the flight controls don’t do the maintenance that is required to keep a light aircraft safe. Yes, the more libertarian amongst you won’t have a problem with this, but I’d also observe that the proposal is to make these regulations applicable to four-seater aircraft, so plenty of spouses and especially kids will be affected by this risk.
Secondly, expanding a class of vehicle that chews a lot of fossil fuel is going to worsen the already serious effects of climate change; and while short-range aircraft might well electrify you’re not going to fly at 250 knots for 1000 nautical miles on batteries any time soon.
Everyone wants the use of a flying car.
Everyone in a flying car wants an airport at every street corner, just as long as they don’t have to pay for the land it occupies.
But…
Nobody wants to live next to an airport, or underneath a flight path. In the world where everyone has a flying car, everyone will live next to a next to an airport, below a flight path, or both.
In road transportation, rather than trying to link the private benefits of cars with their public costs, we “solved“ the inherent and fundamental conflict by putting the freeways in neighbourhoods that had the least political power.
If we had the ability to learn from past mistakes, we might try to internalize some of the externalities of flying cars, and get better results. One can dream.
Single engine airplanes weigh less than a small car. They are not designed to protect the occupants from side impacts, to brake the vehicle to a stop 20 times in an hour, etc.
Today, if you fly 750 miles away and get into a fender bender in your rental car, you turn it in, fill out some paperwork, and fly home in an undamaged airplane. What are you going to do when your flying car gets into a fender bender in car mode 750 miles from home?
A flying car is bound to be a terrible (and likely unsafe) car and certain to be a terrible airplane.
Your average single-engine piston gets ~22mpg with a single passenger. It's not terrible at all.
22 mpg is not terrible only if your frame of reference is pickup trucks, whose load-carrying capabilities can only be matched by far larger aircraft with far higher fuel usage.
Furthermore, aircraft that cruise at 250 knots are not going to get anywhere near 22mpg. A Lancair Evolution, a reasonably modern four-seater turboprop that cruises at around that speed gets something approximating 7 mpg.
I personally don't see the point of comparing a car at 50mph with a small plane at 120mph, but if you really want to, I bet that easily doubles fuel efficiency. No one flies at Vg because that's stupid, but you COULD, and then you're basically the same fuel efficiency as a car but flying in a straight line.
Even that 22mpg is not a 1:1 comparison because of that inconvenient "as the crow flies" thing. We can build more efficient aircraft in theory, but in practice the regulation gets too expensive.
Long EZ reference: https://generalaviationnews.com/2016/05/25/going-fast-on-les...
Most of it is, and has always been pilot error. If we only had to worry about mechanical problems the safety record would actually look quite good.
It’s harder than driving a car due to much longer decision horizons (what you do now can doom you minutes to hours from now), much more of a dynamic environment with non-obvious hazards, and just plain higher baseline skillset and awareness requirements. All of these can and should be mitigated with technology to some extent, but there will always be that one guy who will choose to dodge thunderstorms at night.
Wonder if there's something similar in other domains.
Will also need huge changes to training and certification of aircraft mechanics.
Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes.
Hopefully those mechanics only take jobs they are proficient in, but this is going to create a bunch of new mechanics. And maybe a trickle down effect of giving those people enough experience to upgrade to a full A&P / IA license over time. But it will be the owner/operator’s job to make sure that only a proficient repairman works on their plane.
Why? These aren’t novel power plants.
> Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes
Sport pilots aren’t landing at La Guardia.
There's already a shortage of certified mechanics. Adding thousands of more pilots and presumably aircraft will make already long wait times for annuals even longer.
The article specifically calls out bringing simpler power plants and engines to general aviation.
>Without the need for type certification, manufacturers can iterate on their designs more rapidly without going through the costly supplemental type certification process. They can include cheaper uncertified avionics. They can do over-the-air software updates.
Being completely out of the loop and nothing more than a moderately interested member of the public (outside USA) -- isn't lack of type certification one of the causes of recent major aviation calamities.
Looks like they're saying loads of EABs crash but well just call them LSAs because those don't crash as much, problem solved! Oh, and software is totally reliable so well have that control the aircraft. And we'll make them go faster.
Did it get reassessed at all with the type certification review prompted by the 737 MAX crashes?