AWildC182

Are you sure you aren't thinking of ITAR et al? "Customs" is a bit of a broad statement here.

This is why people need to start rejecting closed ecosystems. If you own the hardware you can control everything that happens on it including companies trying to force their will upon you

I agree 100%, though in reality these events happen almost yearly at this point, just not quite this widespread. In just the past few years we've seen tons of localized outbreaks such as the ebola and zika scares. It's a pretty dangerous thing to assume as a one-off.

Sorry for the late reply... Test pilots by definition are pilots with an engineering background. They're often seasoned aircraft mechanics and/or aerospace engineers.

Kit: Yes, in my case it's an RV-8 by https://www.vansaircraft.com/ they're probably the biggest name in town by volume and they make mid-cost kits. There are some more and less expensive options however.

Hard: I took a class from a licensed A&P mechanic and while not mandatory, gave me a pretty good idea of what I'd be up against. It is extremely challenging even with a kit however. Lots of learning, lots of redoing stuff because of mistakes, many many hours.

Cost: whatever you want it to be really. You can do safe builds probably from around 40-50k for something like a Sonex or Kitfox to several hundred thousand for a Velocity twin or even something turbine powered.

Transport: most people build in their garage and leave the wings off then stick it in a trailer or U-Haul to complete final assembly at a hangar. It's mostly a non-issue.

I work in aerospace software so I live in between those two realities. Much like software, they'll do testing to make sure everything is bonded. They've also done plenty of modeling to determine what the expected strength is and they have a significant error margin baked in.

...They also don't call them test pilots for nothing...

Depends on the event. I've never heard of anyone doing an xray on hangar rash type damage, at least not within a part 91 environment. Taxiing into a pole would be a different issue however.

Aluminum aircraft go together more or less the same way. There will be some inspection panels but the interesting stuff is already exposed, there's very little reason to go inside the wings, particularly on a composite aircraft where corrosion isn't a problem. If you really need to see something, use a borescope.

Carbon repairs are relatively easy as long as they don't damage any internal structure. IIRC they usually just patch and sand.

Building a plane in my garage. You'd be surprised how minimal yet how strong a lot of these structures are. The vast majority of the material I use is thinner than a credit card.

And forcing companies to make the of their firmware source code available would fix all of this.

The market will always steer everyone to the lowest common denominator and as a result fails when the externalities of pollution and e-waste are concerned.

Because by allowing companies to market segment through software they inherently have to cripple the ability to repair products/right-to-repair.

Hence why closed source firmware should be illegal

Best I can tell, the stock market is trying to look mid-term and investors are assuming (read speculating) that his whole thing will blow over and life will resume its normal cadence.

Obviously this isn't reality but if you have enough money to be considered an "investor", the 16 million unemployed aren't the people in the forefront of your mind. They're also probably watching the covid task force briefings while wearing the same rose colored glasses that our mango unchained has.

A light bar for a light bar makes the whole world blind

They're allowed to have discussion that exist off the record. Classifying things mean they are forcing such discussions to happen in secure facilities and under very specific terms in order to prevent foreign interception. That seems a bit like overkill to me.

Anyone with a better background, are micro surface features required for this kind of thing or could teflon/rain-x type chemical coatings create a more durable/corrosion resistant/easily repairable effect?

Could be easier said than done. There are lots of edge cases that could become a problem in real use. Stuff like surface contamination from various fluids or environmental factors.

Would be nice to save weight on full size anti ice systems. Flying around to test anti icing is also not the greatest approach. If ice starts to build up and you shed it, it can come off in chunks and break things.

Interesting approach and hugely useful if practical, though it bears mentioning that the leading edges on aircraft experience a fair amount of abrasion from dust, debris, and insects. I wonder how long this treatment would be effective for in a real world environment

I've worked on both sides of that, I think you'd be surprised. I also suspect that it's worse at the TLAs and any organization with access to FBI, license plate and various criminal databases. Obviously CCard databases and stuff are off limits as their use is outright fraud, but stuff like traffic cameras, imaging systems, etc.

I'm starting to get the feeling that a lot of these jobs, both tech and government, are low key treating non public data access as a perk.

For context, I interviewed with a company that had police videos stored on their systems and were using them for entertainment, to the point of showing me one at the beginning of the interview for grins

The stuff described would mostly fit in a backpack as it's all backpacking gear to begin with. The only thing that wouldn't would be 30 days of food and water which is probably overkill. A reasonable food supply would fit in a couple cubic feet and multiple redundant water purification options could fit in a pocket.

I'm just a backpacker though not a doomsday prepper, the stuff we carry isn't always appropriate for an emergency situation and is generally geared towards being very portable rather than robust/100% reliable.

It's as if killing the golden goose is a tale as old as time...

Wow... I've never read so much bullshit in one blog post. They're basically hoping that nobody who reads this has any embedded development knowledge.

Why did Yubikey ever close source their firmware? It's really saddening to see a company going back on that

I definitely see things going in this direction eventually however. They've been trying to push it with cars for a while now, doing it with aircraft is trivial by comparison

What did you build? Working on an RV8 myself.

I don't think it's quite so altruistic. Militaries are systematically moving to smaller, more precise munitions across the board. If they're smaller and smarter you need A)fewer of them for a given mission and B)can carry more of them, therefore being able to complete more missions, on any given launch platform. A B-29 can carry max 20,000lbs of ordinance but with no precision so at most it can kill one factory or depot. Hypothetically, the same aircraft carrying a max load of GBU-53/B StormBreaker small diameter smart bombs would be able to destroy a hundred factories and installations in one flight.

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