36 karma · joined May 31, 2022
My 2c - the best way to go to big scale with a GA product is to somehow find a way to make it dual use and secure the DoD as a customer. The problem with doing this is that the DoD becomes your main customer and GA becomes your hobby...
I'm not sold that this approach - eliminating the need for coordinated flying- really removes the big barriers to flying. I'm surrounded by aviation lovers who don't fly PPL, and the big barriers are cost, time, and fear.
The Ercoupe tried this exact approach in the 30s in one of the big GA booms and it just wasn't borne out.
I'd love to see more GA pilots, but this won't get us there as quickly as say, comprehensive medical reform or a production aircraft that's cheaper than $50/hr to fly would.
With that said, I'd really like to have some sort of load path-sensing autonomy onboard, like strain gauges in the corner posts of our sail which detect an incorrectly fastened or out-of-spec container before the other corners fail. Should be pretty detectably nonlinear if one twistlock isn't installed right and one corner post isn't transmitting any load.
Oceanbird is awesome! The trouble is that overhauling the entire industry with new-built ships would take too long to make a meaningful climate impact, and be extremely expensive (not to mention that their approach only works for ro-ros).
Synthetic fuels will compete with aviation for the green hydrogen supply (needed to make methanol/ammonia/green hydrocarbons) and are expected to cost 2-3x what current fuels cost. This net makes our fuel cost savings case even stronger.
Industry insiders generally already know that there's really no good cost-saving decarbonization solution, and that decarbonizing fast is a hair-on-fire problem for owner/operators. The barriers standing in the way of most wind-assist devices are: poor ROI, shipyard availability for retrofits, risk to shipwoner (capital upfront), and that they don't package on containerships. We solve all these problems by using a large, efficient wing and depending on the container load path. There are technical problems to solve, but the fundamental physics works.
Our design evolved out of a routing/performance analysis software that we run on historical weather data. Angle of attack and trip cost-benefit varies per lane. In general transpacific and transatlantic have amazing winds, with other routes performing well but not at well.
We've done the excel-level analyses on container loads and wing buckling forces. It all checks out. There is a combined-load case at 15deg of roll with heavy containers and heavy winds that's zero-margin, but as you said we can reef when required. Reefing will likely be single-digit minutes, but we can also feather (0 angle of attack) much more quickly.