[matt_morgan]

My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes. It's like the textbook case of when regulations work, and I don't think the FAA has a department of special exceptions. We can wishfor it, but it's not easy to handle someone who wants to do something different.

[ineedasername]

>must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes

Yes, at least somewhat:

1) The safety record of flying is often cited but that safety record pertains to commercial aircraft, not private aircraft. For hours of travel, private aircraft are significantly more lethal commercial flight and even more than driving [1]

2) The article mentions having to jump through regulatory hoops in the same sentence as literally putting out engine fires. Maybe the two are unrelated but I can see a strong public to regulatory hoops on something that, if done wrong, amounts to a small homemade fuel air bomb with 1,000lb+ of cessna debris added in to the mix if things go wrong.

[1]https://www.wijet.com/private-jet-crash-statistics/#:~:text=....

[kragen]

a fuel-air bomb is very much more difficult to build than you think it is

it isn't going to happen by accident

right now lots of people are getting exposed to fumes from both leaded gasoline itself and the combustion products from the engines, which probably kills more people than faulty civil aviation engines ever will

[KennyBlanken]

The crash/death rate for piston general aviation is staggeringly high and a lot of it has to do with how unreliable ancient systems in the planes are, and task saturation from pilots still expected to manage stuff like fuel mixture settings by hand.

It's almost entirely about protectionism of a massive industry of rebuilding and servicing companies for ancient engines and electromechanical systems, not safety or reliability.

Compare a modern electronic gyro to its electromechanical cousin. The electromechanical version is unreliable, power-hungry, and extremely expensive to service.

The modern electronic equivalent is ultra-reliable, can self-test, needs no servicing or repair, can contain its own battery to self-power in an emergency, and be networked with other devices in the cockpit.

Want to put the electronic version in your plane? Ooooo, sorry, no can do, Mr. Airplane Owner, says the FAA. Can't hurt the profits of an entire industry dedicated to emptying your wallet of thousands of dollars every time your gyro needs to be rebuilt.

A modern fuel-injected, water-cooled airplane engine can run constant self-diagnostics and logging, and provide highly useful, actionable information to both the pilot and mechanic. It's single-lever, increasing reliability and reducing task loading during the most critical phases of flight, and reducing emissions substantially, too. It doesn't have special considerations in terms of flight profiles; air-cooled piston airplane engines require a gentle descent profile or they will be "shock cooled" and undergo high wear or outright seize. There are no issues with carb freeze. Starting is a breeze, instead of a chore. The list goes on.

We should be encouraging the hell out of EFI conversions and EFI engine options...but instead the FAA buries them all under mountains of paperwork and regulations to protect Lycoming and the like.

[AtlasBarfed]

What drives me nuts about those auto engines loaded with sensors is that all that info gets hidden behind the "check engine" light in cars, even in modern cars with big LCD displays.

No, I don't want to plug something into an OBD-2 and bluetooth to a phone/laptop. Put the FUCKING INFO ON THE SCREEN. Speaking of protectionism, don't want your customers knowing what is actually wrong with the car...

[ericbarrett]

Commercial aviation, sure. General aviation, e.g. a private pilot flying a Cessna 172 as in the article, is about as deadly per-mile as riding a motorcycle: far more dangerous than driving a car the same distance.

[outworlder]

> Commercial aviation, sure. General aviation, e.g. a private pilot flying a Cessna 172 as in the article, is about as deadly per-mile as riding a motorcycle: far more dangerous than driving a car the same distance.

Others have touched on the probability thing.

The issue with motorcycles is that a some of it is under your control (driving safely, protective gear, bike maintenance) but there's a lot that isn't: potholes, other drivers, animals and so on.

Flying, almost everything is under the pilot's control. That includes most plane failures. Good preflight and maintenance takes care of most issues. The rest is taken care of by the flight planning – for example, engine failures. You should always have a place to put down the plane at any moment if you lose an engine - and general aviation aircraft land pretty slow.

Newer advancements have made it even safer (see also, whole frame parachutes).

That basically leaves freak accidents; they are a minority. Go spelunk the NTSB database, you'll find most accidents were preventable.

In a nutshell, you are probably going to find the risk is very skewed by complacent or otherwise irresponsible pilots.

[p1necone]

The usage of 'per-mile' stats for aircraft safety irks me a little bit. It's certainly not how I think of safety when I hop on a plane - my internal comparison is more based on time - like, I'm about to spend 30 minutes on a plane, how much safer/less safe is that vs 30 minutes in a car?

The distance comparison also doesn't make sense because it's not like you could drive across the ocean even if you tried.

I guess it makes sense in terms of aggregate safety for a population for transport planning, but on an individual level it just doesn't communicate what I want to know.

Edit: for an analogy - imagine if someone invented faster than light space travel, but 25% of passengers don't survive the trip. The deaths per 100 miles statistic would be amazing compared to both car and air travel, but would you sign up for a ticket?

[ROTMetro]

Have you even looked into the history of aviation and why we have the FAA? Thes homebrew airplanes were falling out of the sky all over the place. A lot of people were dying.

[pdonis]

> all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes

Many of them do, but that certainly doesn't mean all of them do.

It's really hard to see how using decades old engine designs with leaded gas is necessary to prevent crashes, or how updating a proven airframe to newer engine designs that have a lot of operating time in cars needs to be an extremely onerous process to avoid crashes.

[ceejayoz]

Cars and planes have significantly different impacts on the engine.

https://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft-do-car-engines-make-good-...

> Car engines are designed to provide quick bursts of relatively high power output for acceleration, and then only modest power output for steady-state cruising. It’s unusual for an auto engine to operate anywhere near its redline rpm or max-rated power output. Airplanes, on the other hand, usually take off and climb near 100 percent power output, followed by steady-state cruise often at 75 percent power. Aircraft engines are designed to sustain this punishment reliably over a typical 2,000-hour service life. Try running your car’s engine at or near redline rpm all the time and see what happens. Of course, we don’t know what will happen, and in an airplane we can’t pull over to the side of the road when it does.

[aeternum]

The problem is that regulations are often a knee-jerk reaction without consideration to the second order effects.

When a crash happens, add a rule to prevent it from happening again.

Eventually however you have so many onerous rules that it becomes incredibly expensive to design a new aircraft engine and thus are suck with decades old tech that lacks modern innovation and safety features.

It's very rare to do a pass over regulations to try to simplify them. From a regulatory POV, there is little glory in that and lots of risk.

[rlpb]

I had an engine failure the other day. Fortunately I managed to land safely. Turns out that the problem had been brewing for a while. A modern engine design would have told me about the failure before it happened. The 1970's engine design did not. Nor did the retrofitted modern engine monitor that was certified and bought at great expense.

The current certification regime makes aircraft more dangerous by preventing modern technology from reaching or replacing the current fleet.

[tysam_and]

GA is extremely dangerous, piloting runs through part of my family and single-engine aircraft are for the post-midlife/retirement crisis that many pilots go through. It also is their deathbed.

One family member was at breakfast that morning with several other pilots, all of whom had private aircraft except him (he is a voracious pilot, though). Every single one of them apparently had some extremely harrowing stories about engine failure, etc. Every one of them.

It's not a game, and the FAA is really sleeping on the private sector as far as I understand. Its dying under bureaucracy.

To respond to the parent comment as well -- I don't think this is a 'Republican', 'Democrat', or even a 'Libertarian' issue. All three of those parties have weaknesses that tend to screw over this kind of organization -- the first two with extremely bloated processes, and the second with perhaps far-too-little regulation.

This is the kind of org that just needs good leadership with integrity and funding that focuses on getting the little guys up and out there, as well as promoting development and having _very strict_ best practices for safety. It's a very hard blend to do right, I think. Sorta a combination of reducing bloat and inferred/accidental corruption, etc, I think.

(not to get terribly political, I do not like politics at all personally. Just talking through the technical points of the matter as much as I can. Much love! <3 <3 <3 <3 :)))))) :D :D :)))))) )

[BXLE_1-1-BitIs1]

Mechanical engine failure is not a major factor in GA fatalities, mind you running out of gas is a big chunk of engine failure accidents.

Weather exceeding pilot and/or airframe capability is the big killer. That includes black hole takeoffs where failure to use the instruments kills quickly.

There's a bunch of fatal loss of control accidents where the pilot stall/spins out of a low level turn to the runway - which can happen when the engine quits on takeoff. With urban development crowding runways, you might just have to land on a roof.

I have been fortunate in not needing to use such airports. Flying gliders I don't always make it back. I keep landable areas in reach. In one case a dark cloud over the hills blocked my way back and I had to retreat 30 km to an airport.

[vkou]

> My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes.

Very few people die in large commercial aviation crashes, but the hobbyist pilot space is a graveyard. ~400 deaths/year in the US, ~13 deaths/100M miles traveled. Meanwhile, commercial aviation is closer to 0.002 deaths/100M miles traveled.

Incidentally, the FAA rules around general aviation are a lot more relaxed than they are around commercial aviation. As a landlubber who occasionally spends a week geeking out about planes, but would never own one, their rules don't really seem to be ridiculous.

[jojobas]

So, about the same as motorcycles, with probably much less danger to the general public.

I'd say most of these deaths (for both motorcycles and GA) can be attributed to poor judgement outside the scope of FAA regulations or road rules.

[stackedinserter]

There would be fewer crashes if FAA allowed us to fly modern planes instead of those relics from 60's

[voldacar]

You are demonstrating a lot of status-quo bias

[rippercushions]

Obligatory link to why the FAA maybe should have a couple of special exceptions.

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/06/16/revitalizing-th...