n_ermosh

thanks!

> In practically every example so far in aviation, adding automation makes things harder, not easier.

While somewhat unsatisfying as an answer, I think the industry has done it wrong, exactly because the result was harder, not easier. the UI/UX of modern glass cockpits is incredibly unintuitive and difficult to use. It's extremely opaque as to what the system's actually doing, if much. And no one has truly tackled the core problem of stopping our less trained, less rigorous part 91 pilots from losing control of their airplanes.

We definitely recognize that this creates a new failure mode. However, we're address those failure modes with redundant systems and following the same engineering standards as commercial aircraft. Many of them fly pure fly-by-wire and rely on the probably of a total electrical failure to be extremely low. We are doing the same.

If everything really does fail, there's the full airframe parachute to bring the airplane to the ground as a final layer of safety

It's solved for the "cruise in a straight line" sense, but for emergencies or much more dynamic situations like a final approach, autopilots don't really help all that much. We can set up our VNAV and everything, but the second we get an unexpected clearance because something changed or we need to be diverted for a faster airplane or something, you need to be a real pro at using the autopilot to quickly adjust, or hand fly. We're offering a third solution--blend the two into one unified control interface.

maybe I wasn't clear but I completely agree that airplanes are not good for the environment. That absolutely needs to be fixed. But to fix it requires capital and public demand. We are hoping to generate both by getting more people flying so that it's not just a niche people who fly planes and care about the environment working asking for it and spending money in the industry

True--but those are quite rare compared to other sources of fatal accidents. And if it does happen, we have the full airplane parachute to bring the airplane safely to the ground

> It feels like the real problem in this industry is lack of competition. There’s a chicken and egg problem: planes are expensive because so few people buy them, but so few people buy them because they’re expensive.

100%. We're here to try to break that cycle.

We definitely think aviation needs this too and I'm excited to connect with all the people out there who agree!

Yes, lowering all operating expenses by moving to more efficient engines and greener propulsion systems is on our roadmap as "the next problem"

> If you take optimizing transportation options as a holistic problem, rather than focusing on any individual user who needs to travel those 50-500 km distances, more trains is a far more straightforward and efficient investment than flying cars, no?

maybe. But people are still tied to the trains schedule and don't have the "get in a go" freedom that they do with a car. I don't know the details of what it actually takes to build a train network but my intuition is telling that it's fundamentally more investment because of the land requirements.

> You need to build an entirely different traffic control system for that

probably true. but I think it'll take some time to get there and that gives us the opportunity to invest in that. The more modernized airplanes we have, the more opportunity we have to start creating a more automated ATC system that uses digital communication between the airplane and ATC, rather than the voice system we use today.

> But it is a problem that increases with the number of vehicles in the air.

We (as an industry) have gotten pretty good at knowing how to build an airplane so that parts don't fall off (this is a facetious example, I'm really referring to general system reliability) that revolves around rigorous production standard, and those we definitely must continue to follow.

> Building good passenger rail (no need for actual HSR) is a solved problem with proven solutions

True, but even those solutions are starting to become outdated. Rail also has a very high safety bar because of the consequence of failure, so developing a new rail network is really hard too.

> How many decades will it take to actually develop a "production-ready"...

We expect that we will 10x the number of vehicles flying over the next 10 years, so N is ~10k, and M is 500km. In the US, we already have that infrastructure, and I suspect (based on not much but my own intuition) is that it'll take another 10 years to get that infrastructure updated to support every 3x (sqrt(10)) increase in N

thanks!

Yes, it's that entire helmet-fire that makes flying hard and often dangerous. But what the accident data shows is that these kinds of problems that you mention occur, and then the pilot loses control of the plane. If we give them the ability to relax, think through their situation, and make a good decision because at least the airplane will continue to descend safely towards the runway, we make safer pilots.

thanks!

We are creating a complete "managed ownership" experience, so that fractional ownership is super easy too

You're totally right the cost is the driver right now. Our goal is to get the market of people who don't fly planes right now into it so that with economies of scale, we can drive prices down. On our roadmap is an airplane that costs <$100k.

> Another area I'd really like to see more innovation in is aircraft design. Besides Mr Ruttan, everyone just builds tried and true designs and rarely explore the edges of what is possible.

Just wait till you see what we've been sketching up :) Having control systems like ours unlocks a whole new world of possibilities for aerodynamic design.

Growing GA should also create a pipeline for commercial pilots which we desperately need. But let's be honest, flying commercial is a pretty poor experience. Getting to a major airport, getting through security, waiting to board, and then deplaning and waiting for bags at your destination adds hours to travel time. Door to door, I can get from LA to SF in the small plane faster than commercial even though I fly at ~1/3 the speed.

We want our airplanes to be more efficient than cars, but to get there we need to first scale the market.

I hope so! That's definitely a use case we want to see happen, but when you start charging people for flights things get... complicated

yep! lots of interesting stuff indeed!

Our plane will be ~7 gph at cruise burning unleaded fuels and fly ~170mph over the ground (with no wind)

our system has a complete picture of what airports exist in the vicinity and can plan a path to get their fairly trivially. ATC communication can be done by the system automatically as a "broadcast only" emergency message with it's intentions and rely on ATC to give the airplane priority (though we'll have obstacle avoidance as well to avoid other traffic that ATC can't get out of the way). There are other systems on board that let ATC know that your airplane is in an emergency and needs to full priority.

Today, airplanes are not great when it comes to their environmental impacts. If we are successful in our bet that we can grow the GA market, we'll have the resources to invest into greener propulsion technology. That space is currently evolving quickly, with hybrid-electric, hydrogen, full electric and others all being explored. So it's in our plans to address that as well.

Our goal is to get to the same level of safety as (if not safer than) automotive. There are some issues that we don't immediately address including engine failures, but at the same time, most of the stats are based on engines that were designed 50 years ago, while we are using a much more modern engine with better monitoring and data collection.

However, a large number of accidents are just "unknown"--we have no idea what happened. With the level of connectivity in our airplane we'll at least always have data to understand what went wrong if an accident does occur, regardless of if it's caused by our system or not. From there, we can refine to solve the issues that we currently have little insight into.

We are concerned about that too. Our first airplane, the Airhart Sling uses unleaded fuel. In future models, we will be investing into greener propulsion tech.

Our early model you see here will use unleaded fuel rather than traditional low-lead fuel used in aviation today. The master plan is to use the scale we will create in this new market and invest it into green propulsion tech for our future aircraft. A lot is going to change in that space over the next 5 years so I'm very interested to see where things go, but I suspect hybrid-electric will be the move for the first generation of green aircraft.

We will eventually hit a limit to the current infrastructure, but based on where the GA market was in the 70s when a lot of the small airports were built, we estimate we can handle ~10x the number of planes we do today.

Cost is definitely a barrier and our long term goal is the get down to a plane that costs <$100k. getting there is incremental, this is just our first product to start wedging our way into the market.

congrats on the PPL! we understand that 500k is a high price point for a lot of people (but still cheaper than a new SR20 and we have the same performance and better fuel economy), but our goal is to get to a scale where our 3rd model costs <$100k.

1. the flight controller is triply redundant, so it's basically 3 flight controllers and any 2 can fail and the system will still function (though with a greater risk posture as you now don't know if that 3rd one is giving correct information. There's also an emergency reversionary mode to fly the airplane directly without the flight controller in the loop

2. We don't think that a direct override is necessary or even recommended. We're relying on the fact that we have multiple sensors, flight computers, and servos to make sure that the probability of being wrong is < 1e-7. You can't force a spin in the system and the system will always leave enough buffer so that external factors can't initiate a spin. but if one happens, spin recovery is automatic.

3. We are exploring this possibility. If you are genuinely interested, fill out the contact form on our website and we'll talk.

4. Thanks! we are actively debating making this a standalone radio product for any airplane to replace an existing comm radio

Eventually, it might be. Currently, the US airspace system could handle ~10x the GA traffic we have today (I'm basing this on the fact that when we were building it up in the 70s, we were selling and flying ~10x more airplanes than we do today).

However, as we get to much larger scales, we can start using our aircraft to actually augment ATC to help handle the traffic. the airplanes can have more intelligent communication systems to coordinate with each other and the pilots and automatically send and receive data to/from ATC with digital comms rather than voice radio. That's an entirely separate project and company though when Airhart is a huge success and we hit this problem :)

They don't necessarily have to learn in an old school plane. In fact, our early adopters who aren't pilots will be getting their flight training through us in an Airhart airplane (included in the purchase of the airplane)

In the near future, a new set of regulations is coming out called MOSAIC, which will allow pilots to learn how to fly purely in simplified control aircraft. This is expected to come roughly at the same time as when we begin production, so we hope that new pilots will be able to learn under these new regulations and not have to learn the old-school way of flying at all.

thanks!

initially we'll be working with existing systems (specifically, a Rotax 916iS) which has an almost-FADEC, but we're adding our own systems on top of it to add push to start, full control of the throttle, automated restart in the case of an engine failure in flight, and full data collection to better predict when maintenance is going to be needed.

> there is certainly a lot to improve in that regard even if the end result isn't a huge increase in the number of family roadtrips taken in personal aircraft.

that's kind of how I see it too, the failed version of this is that GA is safer than it is today.

thanks! my hope is to eventually make you a well informed airling!

I love this guy. trains solve all the worlds problems :)

His discussion is focused a bit more on europe which I think is a very different environment than the US. We don't have trains and want to go larger distances more regularly. We also have a much larger airport infrastructure and a complex airspace system that handles the issue of flying over populated areas and flying approaches safely quite well. So as long as things aren't falling of the plane over someone house (which really isn't a problem even with todays airplanes) I think until we get high speed rail, small airplanes are the next best thing

thanks! I 100% agree with your comments.

> anything that helps to simplify aircraft operations may decrease cognitive load and is therefore welcome.

exactly. decreasing cognitive load is very important and I think we as existing pilots tend to forget how much of their cognitive load goes to just aviating. But the students who drop out certainly don't.

> If your system can reliably prevent base-final stall spins then that would clearly be awesome.

This was actually a core inspiration for this project. A student on his first solo at an airport north of me crashed on his base to final turn.

> Can I put it into a forward slip, or will it refuse or return to coordinated flight?

Yes, you can make if forward slip. It's a bit clever imo--you just "ask" for low speed and a high descent rate and the energy controllers in the flight computer will figure out that a forward slip is the best way to achieve that. We also have independent ailerons that can be used as spoilers for an even faster descent.

> If I need to make a steep turn to avoid someone heading the wrong way on base is it going to let me?

yep! just push the stick full deflection. you'll feel the active stick fight back because it doesn't want to bank that steeply in normal flight, but you are in control of the plane and it will do anything you command up to it's aerodynamic and structural limits.

100% agreed. I'd love a high speed rail system in the US. but we're engineers not politicians :)