> After all, pilots and passengers generally want, other things equal, to be safe, so an unfettered free market will deliver cost-effective safety-improving innovations over time.
Ah, such optimistic belief in the "unfettered free market"! That might be true, but aircraft operators mostly want to make as much money as possible, so if the choice is between a cost-effective safety-improving innovation and an even more cost-effective non-innovation (i.e. not doing anything), they will choose the latter.
Without safety regulations, or any other kond of regulation, the "free market" will optimize for the bare minimum of what it can away with. And if they have to do less than even that at times, then be it.
Aviation is the only true six sigm asave industry human kind created so far because of regulations and restrictions. And not because the free market magically worked...
I think this kind of belief in free markets should be treated as equivalent to beliefs in Santa or fairies at the bottom of the garden.
'Consumers don't want to die in plane crashes so if they are killed in a plane crash they will simply avoid doing business with that company in future' is certainly... A take and I guess actually correct taken literally but uhhh, nobody listen to free market maniacs please.
Qantas markets quite effectively on being safe. People are pretty quick to react to markets without great regulation and it quickly becomes a key differentiator.
The trap phrase there is "passengers .. want to be safe", when what it really means is "passengers . . want to feel safe". The vast majority of aviation consumers can't possibly make any sort of informed decision about safety or maintenance requirements, so what they're really buying is the experience of safety. Which of course is why regulation becomes necessary.
We could say a whole bunch of other things about when companies or people value the lives of other people - and when they decide not to - but that's tap dancing around other topics I'd rather not bump into on HN.
In personal aviation, the aircraft operator is the one who files the plane and the one who will die if something goes wrong, and that's a big reason why the rules are much more relaxed than for commercial aviation.
Those who have a personal aircraft care about safety, because of Darwinism, literally.
Literally the next sentence is “It’s possible by some lights that the market will not produce the optimal amount of safety at all relevant margins, and so regulation persists.”
Everything the faa does boils down to limiting liability, and liability is asses occupying seats in aircraft. Want to fly without a medical? Great, you can do basic med but can't fly over 6 people. You want to import a foreign war bird? Awesome, you're going to have to register that restricted and or experimental and you can't do aerial tours or turn a profit. You own a vintage aircraft and are the owner / operator? You legally can fabricate your own parts if you follow certain guidelines.
I hate to burst the "hope" and optimism bubble, but we won't be seeing flying cars or anything crazy from the MOSAIC rules. While I think there will be a lot of positives that come from it, the faa more or less is laying out a set of rules and guidelines for new aircraft and tightening up definitions. LSA was a major failure, and the Feds are realizing that they can actually limit liability and increase safety by making a set of standards and guidelines for small aircraft.
Also, I don't see any "emerging markets" coming out of GA. Flying is expensive, takes a lot of time, and is hard. Real wages also haven't risen since the 80s, and the younger folks have other interests.
> I hate to burst the "hope" and optimism bubble, but we won't be seeing flying cars or anything crazy from the MOSAIC rule
You can already buy a paramotor and learn how to fly it for roughly the price of a new Tesla. I can't imagine getting any closer to "flying cars" than that
That's a huge improvement. Some existing aircraft will be able to convert to LSAs under MOSAIC, many existing manufacturers will switch to building LSAs, and we'll see many new developments as well.
The current crop of planes in general aviation is deteriorating with nothing to replace them. The average age of a GA aircraft is over 50 years old. They were never designed for this lifetime. Many people are flying aircraft that are closer to the Wright brothers in time than to today. The most popular engine, the Lycoming O-320 was designed in 1953.
50 years ago planes were affordable, maintenance was not prohibitive, and an upper middle class person could easily fly for fun if they wanted to. These rules are hopefully going to make general aviation dramatically cheaper.
The fact that electric engines are included, that you can install new experimental avionics, do some of your own maintenance, etc. while lifting the many restrictions on current LSAs is pretty amazing. Just getting past many of the certification requirements, which are overkill for GA applications, are going to make everything insanely cheaper.
MOSAIC will also give new companies a path into the market, now they can start in the LSA category, develop their product and sell it, and then eventually go for certification. Otherwise you have a massive startup cost with no idea about product-market fit.
I am strongly in favor of MOSAIC's aims and almost all of their choices. I do think that SLSA not having a better safety record than TC/Personal is a problem for the current SLSA grouping. Weather and fuel accidents factor prominently as contributing or primary factors in fatal accidents and an airplane that can only go 120 knots and can only weigh 1320 pounds is far less prone to tangle with unexpected en route weather. (It's not impossible, but contrast that with a 200 knot airplane carrying 700 pounds of fuel in terms of ability to cross multiple weather systems.)
I think it's great. I hope the losses remain low enough for the program to continue to be expanded. I'm not nearly as hopeful as you are that it's going to be transformational for the industry in the sense of returning to the 1960s heyday.
> The current crop of planes in general aviation is deteriorating with nothing to replace them.
In the ultralight world, you got a ton of new airframe designs - including electric ones such as the Pipistrel Velis Electro.
Agree on the engines though, there hasn't been much innovation there for decades, but IMHO that's also a factor of war planes switching over to jet engines and the GA market being too small to justify the investment into the development of piston engines and too poor to invest into jet engines.
Great I guess, but isn’t “personal aviation” (and 90% of general aviation) exactly the type of activity we should be discouraging? It’s incredibly carbon inefficient.
(I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much?
> is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much
I wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already. Yes, GA isn't exactly cheap, but there are many upper middle class families with RVs, boats, trucks, and vacation homes that are more expensive than a shitbox 1970's Cessna is and no one whines about how it's only the 1% that enjoy those pursuits. Not to mention the many more people in partnerships and flying clubs to split the fixed costs across multiple people.
The short of it is that GA is an expensive hobby just as many other upper middle class hobbies are, but an accessible one for many more than the 1%. The people that proclaim how it's only the ultra rich who enjoy aviation are admitting that they know absolutely nothing about the actual general aviation community.
GA is necessary for commercial aviation. Airline pilots first learn as GA pilots. GA is also essential throughout their career to complete their flying hours, become instructors, and acquire a large range of experience which are useful/necessary for the good stewardship of the pilot profession.
> I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much?
At least the ultralight world is beginning to change - Pipistrel has a fully electric model that Green Flight Academy in Sweden is using for instructions [1].
Even in the passenger aircraft world, there's progress - some startups did a full-electric conversion of a Cessna Caravan [2] as a prototype, and a from-scratch design [3]. Yes, these are only short hop capable, but hey - everything counts.
Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction. And it makes you feel good because you're "sticking it to the rich". But that percent of a percent means nothing in terms of reducing real emissions and affecting climate change.
Stop doing "feel good" activism and start being effective. Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter. And publicly, loudly, denounce the carbon market.
I'm proudly driving an electric car powered by rooftop solar. And I am not rich. That solar install produces more power than my frugal home and driving habits use. Yes, I am aware that night charging uses energy produced from coal. My solar install more than offsets that during the day, when peak grid power is critical, and I am constantly pressuring the electric company to add storage to the grid. It's not viable yet due to base power loads at night being too low, but as more solar roofs are installed and more electric cars hit the road, it will become viable.
If it's "recreational carbon emission categories" you want to ban, whether as a proportion of global carbon emissions or recreational carbon emissions per person, then I think there are much larger categories that would be banned first. If you just consider aviation, there's a really wide spread: people travelling the world in private jets cause orders of magnitude higher carbon emissions that someone enjoying the local area in a microlight. It seems odd to bundle them into a single bucket since this spectrum crosses so many other more typical non-aviation activities in magnitude of emissions that you don't seem to be suggesting banning.
If you want to be discussing recreational carbon emissions you should use the size of those emissions to discriminate, not some very broad arbitrary category that varies in emission magnitude across the entire spectrum of the emissions that you're simultaneously ignoring.
This is true only for planes that burn fuel. There are about to be a lot of new planes entering the market that don't burn fuel but have batteries and will charge from any usable power source. I.e. mostly renewables given the price of everything else.
Basically think flying bath tubs with batteries, propellers, and some fancy fly by wire logic. They are not that hard to build. There are already several flying and flight proven prototypes. Several are in advanced stages getting certified, and factories that will produce these things are being built and financed. The big bottleneck (in the US) for this is the FAA and its certification bureaucracy. This will go from very small volume production now to mass volume production by the tens/hundreds of thousands units in the space of a few decades.
That's the reason there's a lot of pressure on the FAA to adapt to new realities because they are suddenly in the business of certifying lots of planes that no longer fit their existing rules and are looking at a vast increase in the number of these things. Most of these things are either capable of flying autonomously or at least vastly simplify pilot workloads. You and I could learn to operate these things in an hour or so.
Another reason is that the world is bigger than the bit the FAA has jurisdiction over (the US). These new planes are going to be flying in China, Europe, Africa, and wherever and there's a world where the FAA adapts proactively in anticipation of these changes and where they adapt late reacting and responding to general public and politicians asking them WTF is keeping them in the stone age while the rest of the world gets to play George Jetson.
A smart policy maker would want to be conservative but not too late to the party here. And a smarter one smells the money and business potential and would want to be an enabler rather than an obstacle. So, right now is a good moment to let startups experiment a bit and and adapt existing rules. Waiting until these things are flying all over China would be too late. This btw. is not a hypothetical risk but actually starting to happen.
I don't understand what you're asking for. Ban activities that aren't necessary which could have an impact on the environment?
This is an article about a new set of standards designed to shift the category of planes pilots fly away from homebuilt ones (done out of a cost/availability necessity) by allowing a wider range of accessible commercial ones to be certified. What does that have to do with the environment?
This change has been needed for a long time and is good to see
This is a great summary of a complex topic, but I wouldn't put safety or experimentation as the primary driver. As you suggested, MOSAIC is likely a way to migrate people off experimentals to discontinue that little idealistic free-for-all.
The vast, vast majority of pilots are aging out. The vast majority of builders are retired. 30-50 years of experimentation has exhausted most people, who now just buy the tried-and-true design and kit from Van's. Many people wasted their lives on projects that never fly, and most deaths and injuries come in the first few flights.
Old airplanes are cheap and mostly just as functional as new planes, making it really, really hard to sell a lot of new planes. And there aren't enough numbers to justify selling avionics or engines, etc. unless you already have certificated products and want to reach the Van's customers. So not really enough market, notwithstanding the breathtaking improvements in electronics and composites.
The major costs in flying are gas, hangar, insurance, and maintenance, which is not going to change with these rules, particularly since they don't resolve the uncertainty around leaded aviation fuel. Those costs prohibit flying except for the wealthy or the super-motivated upper-middle class.
LSA's are safer because they're new and mostly Van's, and don't really invite scud-running or stupid fuel decisions. The push to MOSAIC is mostly the FAA trying to stay relevant, and eventually to kill experimental aviation.
I could see a new business model, where a company like Van's offers an all-in-one packages of long-term lease + insurance + maintenance, particularly to buyer's groups. Sharing a plane gets it flown more, and group members can come and go. The company gets the benefit of its own engineering effort in low maintenance and insurance costs. Rotax, Continental, or some new electric consortium et al could make deals with such companies guaranteeing enough new engines to justify new product lines. If there's a behind-the-scenes driver for MOSAIC, it might be some deal-making contingent on more sympathetic and predictable FAA regulation.
Private and experimental aviation is not stymied by product fit as much as market fit and transaction cost risks. If MOSAIC helps with that, it could be a game-changer.
Disclaimer: I built, tested and now fly a Van's kit so I'm biased. I don't think the FAA is trying to "kill" experimental, at least not with MOSAIC. In fact, my understanding is that there was quite a bit of behind the scenes work between EAA and the FAA on MOSAIC.
MOSAIC doesn't add really enough to the LSA category that would change my mind and "push" me toward it. If I had to make the choice again, I'd still build and operate a kitplane. To me, the major benefits of the E/AB category are: 1. the builder's permission to perform his own annual condition inspections, 2. the owner's permission to perform major maintenance and make modifications, 3. access to bleeding edge avionics and safety systems not available on certified or LSA. I don't think the MOSAIC rulemaking adds any of this to the LSA category[1].
If anything, MOSAIC helps LSAs eat into the market of Part 23 personal aircraft. If I wanted a fairly beefy airplane, didn't want to build, and was trying to decide between a LSA and FAR23 aircraft, I would lean much farther towards the LSA post-MOSAIC.
1: EDIT: Actually, it looks like it's more complex than I thought, and I'm probably wrong. There are actually pathways for folks to obtain repairman certificates for both ELSA and SLSA aircraft. Interesting topic I'll have to dig more into!
Dumb question: how does insurance work? Like, I get it would be a good idea if a bunch of randoms collectively buy a plane or (can you do this:) want to rent it out to randoms. Or required if you get a secured loan for it.
But if you own your own (or a close group does), is insurance required? Or do airfields require it and good luck if you don't have a private strip? FAA requirement? Every hanger requires it? Mechanics will refuse work if it's uninsured?
Or is it cheap enough there's no point in foregoing it even if it's not required?
Supersonic falling out of fashion is just economics, it's not a forgone conclusion that better technology and higher performance will always be more popular.
There really is a "peak comfort" or "good enough" for most people, the metrics of cost and convenience can trump objective quality and performance.
Moving the amount of people we want to move, for the cost at which people are willing to endure, shook out the way it did and supersonic lost out.
For general aviation you just have many more challenges to overcome than say driving. It takes really special circumstances before it makes sense.
We won't have flying cars for the same reason we don't all have planes. They aren't required, few need them and they would be more inconvenient to operate than a simple car.
An unsung part of the economic disadvantages of supersonic is how often the value of speed in the connection of two cities is not anywhere near even in both directions. Say we are looking at London-NY. The flight takes 3 hours, and the time difference is 5 hours. If you are leaving London, this means you can leave at a reasonable time, and have plenty of useful business meetings in New York: Much better the subsonic flight. But what happens when you fly in the other direction? In practice, it's 8 hours. So leave NYC at 8 am in the morning, and by the time you are at an office in London, the workday is over: Far less valuable for an executive than the other direction. Thus, the price differential over the regular flight in one direction is very different than in the other.
A supersonic jet with concorde-like economics in supersonic routes would be usable if it could fly subsonic at a competitive price on the way back, but that's not how physics works.
> Supersonic falling out of fashion is just economics, it's not a forgone conclusion that better technology and higher performance will always be more popular.
The regulatory environment is the economics. A majority of airline customers won't pay extra for supersonic flight, so whether it's worth having a separate model of supersonic plane that might represent 10-20% of plane sales for planes of that passenger capacity is down to how much it costs to certify a new model of plane.
I think what really killed "personal aviation" was the interstate highway system and the advent of extremely fast efficient cheap cars. In the 1950s, there was a dream that millions of average people would have their own personal planes for commutes and vacation because a 500 mile road trip was an epic days long journey to be made on unreliable roads with manual transmissions at 45 mph. But the equation just doesn't make sense anymore, even ignoring cost. A 500 mile trip in a private plane would take about 4 hours, or 7 on the highway today, with all the logistical savings of avoiding airports and having ground transportation at your destination.
When I look at my own goals in aviation, why I am pursuing my PPL. I want to avoid those 15 to 20 hour drives. I want to fly planes with 1200nm+ range and cruising speeds above 200 knots. And not have to avoid foggy/overcast weather.
I also want to be able to social distance a bit while traveling post-covid.
> The explicit safety target that FAA and other regulators have settled on is that catastrophic events should be “extremely improbable,” meaning one per billion flight-hours. The regulation of this kind of aviation is nothing short of maniacal.
He is, airlines have been complaining about the paperwork involving anything that flies for decades - however given incidents like [1] with fake parts being spliced into legitimate supply chain, or how that paperwork enables accident investigation boards to quickly determine root causes often in a matter of weeks to months, the regulations do have merit.
On the other hand, you got a ton of Global South countries, particularly in Africa, with very lax enforcement of any kind of standards, and they don't end up with hundreds-of-pax-dead catastrophes every year, so either the regulations could be relaxed legitimately across the board or the lack of catastrophes is mostly because almost all planes flying out there are Western-built with considerable amounts of safety margins, redundancies and fail-safes built-in.
I'm gonna sound like a huge downer, but I actually like MOSAIC.
Couple observations though:
Overall thought: UAS BVR flight is now officially MORE regulated than light sport. Interesting.
The aviation consumer doesn't "pay for safety". They pay for the experience of safety, because they can't possibly make informed decisions about almost anything they're buying. Can they look up the maintenance inspection history of their aircraft? Can they google the bio of their pilot? Of course not. It's why regulations exist, Ayn. We can't all be Russian Superwomen with completely perfect comprehension and knowledge of the world around us, and we don't want to be executed if we're not.
The big, enormous, really huge contribution of distributed propulsion is not redundancy or noise but in lift assist. A fan in front of the airframe is not the optimal place to stick thrust for winged flight. You can do insane stuff putting thrust in weird places, and tiny little fans make that easy.
§ 22.180 is bananas without something like a SDER (software designated engineering rep) or SOMETHING to quantify what the FMU's electronic brain thinks is good control input. I guess that's part of the cert path.
§ 22.185 oh boy more government specs that send you to another spec you have to pay some rando third party to look at. YAAAAAAAAYYYYY
Too much regulation and safety enhancements don’t reach the fleet, is the thesis. Does the FDA believe this thesis for drugs? Clearly not. Or, more precisely, the benefits do not outweigh the harm. I don’t believe it applies to aircraft, either.
“the explicit goal here is to make the new category so attractive that many recreational pilots switch from more dangerous experimental amateur-built aircraft to light-sport aircraft that are designed according to consensus standards.”
Umm, that’s wishful thinking. It might work to some degree, but the real fix is to regulate the crackpots out of the experimental category. Flying a dangerous piece of shit through common airspace is not a right.
It sounds like the FAA has their hands tied by some law, and, absent Congressional reform, is trying to do the best they can with the constrained authority they have.
> Too much regulation and safety enhancements don’t reach the fleet, is the thesis. Does the FDA believe this thesis for drugs? Clearly not. Or, more precisely, the benefits do not outweigh the harm. I don’t believe it applies to aircraft, either.
What's the connection? Allowing drug use on planes does not increase technological innovation. Technological experimentation does.
> Umm, that’s wishful thinking. It might work to some degree, but the real fix is to regulate the crackpots out of the experimental category.
Source? The FAA seems to back their claims up with actual data.
> Flying a dangerous piece of shit through common airspace is not a right.
I did a little bit of googling, and the experimental aircraft are not allowed over densely populated areas or crowded airspace without the guidance of an ATC and sufficient altitude is there to glide away to safety. Even experimental aircraft must receive an airworthiness certificate.[0]
From what I've seen, they're only loosening the restrictions that seem to make no contribution to safety and will make it easier for more aircraft to adopt the restrictions that do make it safer. They're incentivized to be safe because they fly the planes, and a higher rating means more privileges(haven't verified this), crackpots who don't care about safety won't make it through the trial period before their plane is allowed out of limited airspace.
Why express strong opinions that are unresearched? Or if they are, provide some sources? Or provide some reasoning other than intuition? Especially in a world where we are increasingly not allowed to do things unless specifically allowed. (allowlist instead of denylist)
Experimental is a very broad category. On one hand we have $250k Rv-10s that are immaculate and built well from kits that thousands have used to shitty canard garage designed birds.
I will say, the crackpots are largely getting pushed out of experimental and the folks who love flying and want to see it succeed on a budget are stepping in. I'm not an experimental bro, but I am tempted with the crazy costs of mundane parts for 60 year old planes.
If you are arguing against overly stringent safety regulation by pointing out that they actually decrease safety, you have already lose the war against safetyism. We must reach the point where it is widely permissible to say "the safety benefits are not worth the costs".
> This lack of space for experimentation, as I discussed with Last Energy CEO Bret Kugelmass recently, is one reason for stagnation in the nuclear industry.
And this is why nuclear innovation is thriving in third-world countries with little to no nuclear regulation, right?
An interesting article, but I'd question a few things:
> This heavy regulation means that few new reactors are being built, which in turn means that if you are starting a new nuclear company, you’re going to have mostly engineers who have never built a nuclear reactor of any kind before. This lack of space for experimentation, as I discussed with Last Energy CEO Bret Kugelmass recently, is one reason for stagnation in the nuclear industry.
That is a problem, but on the other hand, the more people work in nuclear, the higher the likelihood is that someone ends up diverting nuclear material. It's already a huge issue with nuclear material in medical devices that ends up creating (sometimes fatal) dangers to the public ("orphan sources") [1].
> Under today’s light-sport rules, LSAs are limited to a single reciprocating (piston) engine. What this has meant in practice is that turboprops are not allowed.
Which is a good thing IMHO. Jet engines are orders of magnitude more complex to maintain with high requirements on precision (a must, given that these things spin at 100k RPM) than a piston engine is - effectively, maintenance on these can be done by any car mechanic specializing in oldtimer cars, as they're dating back to 1950s designs.
> 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.
It's one thing to allow certified legitimate manufacturers faster iteration speeds in design. But allowing people to use uncertified avionics? That's just asking for incidents to happen, be it because sun glare causes a pilot to not recognize something critical, or because Android's OOM killer crashing at the wrong time. When even the big names such as Samsung can't be arsed to put something out that doesn't crash the UI twice a week, I don't want to see that stuff on a vital plane system.
> If we can get LSAs into mass manufacturing, production costs of the airframe could go down further.
For that, there would need to be a market for these. But as urbanization is happening rapidly across the world, I'd question that - who wants to drive hours out in the country, just for a few flight hours? Even with you Americans not being required to use actual airfields (unlike us Germans), you can't sustain a large GA market... that's the problem IMHO.
[+] [-] rob74|2 years ago|reply
Ah, such optimistic belief in the "unfettered free market"! That might be true, but aircraft operators mostly want to make as much money as possible, so if the choice is between a cost-effective safety-improving innovation and an even more cost-effective non-innovation (i.e. not doing anything), they will choose the latter.
[+] [-] hef19898|2 years ago|reply
Aviation is the only true six sigm asave industry human kind created so far because of regulations and restrictions. And not because the free market magically worked...
[+] [-] Guid_NewGuid|2 years ago|reply
'Consumers don't want to die in plane crashes so if they are killed in a plane crash they will simply avoid doing business with that company in future' is certainly... A take and I guess actually correct taken literally but uhhh, nobody listen to free market maniacs please.
[+] [-] kortilla|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MilStdJunkie|2 years ago|reply
We could say a whole bunch of other things about when companies or people value the lives of other people - and when they decide not to - but that's tap dancing around other topics I'd rather not bump into on HN.
[+] [-] GuB-42|2 years ago|reply
Those who have a personal aircraft care about safety, because of Darwinism, literally.
[+] [-] elidourado|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bongoman37|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] napierzaza|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] parineum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happyjack|2 years ago|reply
Everything the faa does boils down to limiting liability, and liability is asses occupying seats in aircraft. Want to fly without a medical? Great, you can do basic med but can't fly over 6 people. You want to import a foreign war bird? Awesome, you're going to have to register that restricted and or experimental and you can't do aerial tours or turn a profit. You own a vintage aircraft and are the owner / operator? You legally can fabricate your own parts if you follow certain guidelines.
I hate to burst the "hope" and optimism bubble, but we won't be seeing flying cars or anything crazy from the MOSAIC rules. While I think there will be a lot of positives that come from it, the faa more or less is laying out a set of rules and guidelines for new aircraft and tightening up definitions. LSA was a major failure, and the Feds are realizing that they can actually limit liability and increase safety by making a set of standards and guidelines for small aircraft.
Also, I don't see any "emerging markets" coming out of GA. Flying is expensive, takes a lot of time, and is hard. Real wages also haven't risen since the 80s, and the younger folks have other interests.
[+] [-] defrost|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37964608
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|2 years ago|reply
You can already buy a paramotor and learn how to fly it for roughly the price of a new Tesla. I can't imagine getting any closer to "flying cars" than that
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] light_hue_1|2 years ago|reply
The current crop of planes in general aviation is deteriorating with nothing to replace them. The average age of a GA aircraft is over 50 years old. They were never designed for this lifetime. Many people are flying aircraft that are closer to the Wright brothers in time than to today. The most popular engine, the Lycoming O-320 was designed in 1953.
50 years ago planes were affordable, maintenance was not prohibitive, and an upper middle class person could easily fly for fun if they wanted to. These rules are hopefully going to make general aviation dramatically cheaper.
The fact that electric engines are included, that you can install new experimental avionics, do some of your own maintenance, etc. while lifting the many restrictions on current LSAs is pretty amazing. Just getting past many of the certification requirements, which are overkill for GA applications, are going to make everything insanely cheaper.
MOSAIC will also give new companies a path into the market, now they can start in the LSA category, develop their product and sell it, and then eventually go for certification. Otherwise you have a massive startup cost with no idea about product-market fit.
[+] [-] sokoloff|2 years ago|reply
I think it's great. I hope the losses remain low enough for the program to continue to be expanded. I'm not nearly as hopeful as you are that it's going to be transformational for the industry in the sense of returning to the 1960s heyday.
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
In the ultralight world, you got a ton of new airframe designs - including electric ones such as the Pipistrel Velis Electro.
Agree on the engines though, there hasn't been much innovation there for decades, but IMHO that's also a factor of war planes switching over to jet engines and the GA market being too small to justify the investment into the development of piston engines and too poor to invest into jet engines.
[+] [-] namdnay|2 years ago|reply
(I feel like the person who says the party is too loud and has to stop, but come on - given the list of things many people are going to have to sacrifice to survive the climate disaster, is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much?
[+] [-] S201|2 years ago|reply
I wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already. Yes, GA isn't exactly cheap, but there are many upper middle class families with RVs, boats, trucks, and vacation homes that are more expensive than a shitbox 1970's Cessna is and no one whines about how it's only the 1% that enjoy those pursuits. Not to mention the many more people in partnerships and flying clubs to split the fixed costs across multiple people.
The short of it is that GA is an expensive hobby just as many other upper middle class hobbies are, but an accessible one for many more than the 1%. The people that proclaim how it's only the ultra rich who enjoy aviation are admitting that they know absolutely nothing about the actual general aviation community.
[+] [-] eastbound|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
At least the ultralight world is beginning to change - Pipistrel has a fully electric model that Green Flight Academy in Sweden is using for instructions [1].
Even in the passenger aircraft world, there's progress - some startups did a full-electric conversion of a Cessna Caravan [2] as a prototype, and a from-scratch design [3]. Yes, these are only short hop capable, but hey - everything counts.
[1] https://greenflightacademy.com/fleet/
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/redmo...
[3] https://www.dw.com/en/are-electric-planes-ready-for-takeoff/...
[+] [-] dotancohen|2 years ago|reply
Focusing on "solutions" that address less than a percent of a percent of emissions is a distraction. And it makes you feel good because you're "sticking it to the rich". But that percent of a percent means nothing in terms of reducing real emissions and affecting climate change.
Stop doing "feel good" activism and start being effective. Push any non-carbon energy source you like - nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, it doesn't matter. And publicly, loudly, denounce the carbon market.
I'm proudly driving an electric car powered by rooftop solar. And I am not rich. That solar install produces more power than my frugal home and driving habits use. Yes, I am aware that night charging uses energy produced from coal. My solar install more than offsets that during the day, when peak grid power is critical, and I am constantly pressuring the electric company to add storage to the grid. It's not viable yet due to base power loads at night being too low, but as more solar roofs are installed and more electric cars hit the road, it will become viable.
[+] [-] rlpb|2 years ago|reply
If you want to be discussing recreational carbon emissions you should use the size of those emissions to discriminate, not some very broad arbitrary category that varies in emission magnitude across the entire spectrum of the emissions that you're simultaneously ignoring.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|2 years ago|reply
Basically think flying bath tubs with batteries, propellers, and some fancy fly by wire logic. They are not that hard to build. There are already several flying and flight proven prototypes. Several are in advanced stages getting certified, and factories that will produce these things are being built and financed. The big bottleneck (in the US) for this is the FAA and its certification bureaucracy. This will go from very small volume production now to mass volume production by the tens/hundreds of thousands units in the space of a few decades.
That's the reason there's a lot of pressure on the FAA to adapt to new realities because they are suddenly in the business of certifying lots of planes that no longer fit their existing rules and are looking at a vast increase in the number of these things. Most of these things are either capable of flying autonomously or at least vastly simplify pilot workloads. You and I could learn to operate these things in an hour or so.
Another reason is that the world is bigger than the bit the FAA has jurisdiction over (the US). These new planes are going to be flying in China, Europe, Africa, and wherever and there's a world where the FAA adapts proactively in anticipation of these changes and where they adapt late reacting and responding to general public and politicians asking them WTF is keeping them in the stone age while the rest of the world gets to play George Jetson.
A smart policy maker would want to be conservative but not too late to the party here. And a smarter one smells the money and business potential and would want to be an enabler rather than an obstacle. So, right now is a good moment to let startups experiment a bit and and adapt existing rules. Waiting until these things are flying all over China would be too late. This btw. is not a hypothetical risk but actually starting to happen.
[+] [-] dude187|2 years ago|reply
This is an article about a new set of standards designed to shift the category of planes pilots fly away from homebuilt ones (done out of a cost/availability necessity) by allowing a wider range of accessible commercial ones to be certified. What does that have to do with the environment?
This change has been needed for a long time and is good to see
[+] [-] w10-1|2 years ago|reply
The vast, vast majority of pilots are aging out. The vast majority of builders are retired. 30-50 years of experimentation has exhausted most people, who now just buy the tried-and-true design and kit from Van's. Many people wasted their lives on projects that never fly, and most deaths and injuries come in the first few flights.
Old airplanes are cheap and mostly just as functional as new planes, making it really, really hard to sell a lot of new planes. And there aren't enough numbers to justify selling avionics or engines, etc. unless you already have certificated products and want to reach the Van's customers. So not really enough market, notwithstanding the breathtaking improvements in electronics and composites.
The major costs in flying are gas, hangar, insurance, and maintenance, which is not going to change with these rules, particularly since they don't resolve the uncertainty around leaded aviation fuel. Those costs prohibit flying except for the wealthy or the super-motivated upper-middle class.
LSA's are safer because they're new and mostly Van's, and don't really invite scud-running or stupid fuel decisions. The push to MOSAIC is mostly the FAA trying to stay relevant, and eventually to kill experimental aviation.
I could see a new business model, where a company like Van's offers an all-in-one packages of long-term lease + insurance + maintenance, particularly to buyer's groups. Sharing a plane gets it flown more, and group members can come and go. The company gets the benefit of its own engineering effort in low maintenance and insurance costs. Rotax, Continental, or some new electric consortium et al could make deals with such companies guaranteeing enough new engines to justify new product lines. If there's a behind-the-scenes driver for MOSAIC, it might be some deal-making contingent on more sympathetic and predictable FAA regulation.
Private and experimental aviation is not stymied by product fit as much as market fit and transaction cost risks. If MOSAIC helps with that, it could be a game-changer.
[+] [-] ryandrake|2 years ago|reply
MOSAIC doesn't add really enough to the LSA category that would change my mind and "push" me toward it. If I had to make the choice again, I'd still build and operate a kitplane. To me, the major benefits of the E/AB category are: 1. the builder's permission to perform his own annual condition inspections, 2. the owner's permission to perform major maintenance and make modifications, 3. access to bleeding edge avionics and safety systems not available on certified or LSA. I don't think the MOSAIC rulemaking adds any of this to the LSA category[1].
If anything, MOSAIC helps LSAs eat into the market of Part 23 personal aircraft. If I wanted a fairly beefy airplane, didn't want to build, and was trying to decide between a LSA and FAR23 aircraft, I would lean much farther towards the LSA post-MOSAIC.
1: EDIT: Actually, it looks like it's more complex than I thought, and I'm probably wrong. There are actually pathways for folks to obtain repairman certificates for both ELSA and SLSA aircraft. Interesting topic I'll have to dig more into!
[+] [-] two_in_one|2 years ago|reply
They have recent relevant experience with remote controlled aircrafts. Which was an great hobby for many decades. And suddenly it's not.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|2 years ago|reply
But if you own your own (or a close group does), is insurance required? Or do airfields require it and good luck if you don't have a private strip? FAA requirement? Every hanger requires it? Mechanics will refuse work if it's uninsured?
Or is it cheap enough there's no point in foregoing it even if it's not required?
[+] [-] ehnto|2 years ago|reply
There really is a "peak comfort" or "good enough" for most people, the metrics of cost and convenience can trump objective quality and performance.
Moving the amount of people we want to move, for the cost at which people are willing to endure, shook out the way it did and supersonic lost out.
For general aviation you just have many more challenges to overcome than say driving. It takes really special circumstances before it makes sense.
We won't have flying cars for the same reason we don't all have planes. They aren't required, few need them and they would be more inconvenient to operate than a simple car.
[+] [-] throw3823423|2 years ago|reply
A supersonic jet with concorde-like economics in supersonic routes would be usable if it could fly subsonic at a competitive price on the way back, but that's not how physics works.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
Most people are irrelevant for commercial aviation. And there are entire sections of the market for which most rich Americans are irrelevant.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|2 years ago|reply
The regulatory environment is the economics. A majority of airline customers won't pay extra for supersonic flight, so whether it's worth having a separate model of supersonic plane that might represent 10-20% of plane sales for planes of that passenger capacity is down to how much it costs to certify a new model of plane.
[+] [-] trimethylpurine|2 years ago|reply
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/nasa-50th-anniversary-us-comme...
[+] [-] ramesh31|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] test6554|2 years ago|reply
I also want to be able to social distance a bit while traveling post-covid.
[+] [-] isaiahg|2 years ago|reply
Maniacal really? Is the author living in reality?
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
On the other hand, you got a ton of Global South countries, particularly in Africa, with very lax enforcement of any kind of standards, and they don't end up with hundreds-of-pax-dead catastrophes every year, so either the regulations could be relaxed legitimately across the board or the lack of catastrophes is mostly because almost all planes flying out there are Western-built with considerable amounts of safety margins, redundancies and fail-safes built-in.
[1] https://fortune.com/2023/10/03/delta-fourth-major-us-airline...
[+] [-] MilStdJunkie|2 years ago|reply
Couple observations though:
Overall thought: UAS BVR flight is now officially MORE regulated than light sport. Interesting.
The aviation consumer doesn't "pay for safety". They pay for the experience of safety, because they can't possibly make informed decisions about almost anything they're buying. Can they look up the maintenance inspection history of their aircraft? Can they google the bio of their pilot? Of course not. It's why regulations exist, Ayn. We can't all be Russian Superwomen with completely perfect comprehension and knowledge of the world around us, and we don't want to be executed if we're not.
The big, enormous, really huge contribution of distributed propulsion is not redundancy or noise but in lift assist. A fan in front of the airframe is not the optimal place to stick thrust for winged flight. You can do insane stuff putting thrust in weird places, and tiny little fans make that easy.
§ 22.180 is bananas without something like a SDER (software designated engineering rep) or SOMETHING to quantify what the FMU's electronic brain thinks is good control input. I guess that's part of the cert path.
§ 22.185 oh boy more government specs that send you to another spec you have to pay some rando third party to look at. YAAAAAAAAYYYYY
[+] [-] 7e|2 years ago|reply
“the explicit goal here is to make the new category so attractive that many recreational pilots switch from more dangerous experimental amateur-built aircraft to light-sport aircraft that are designed according to consensus standards.”
Umm, that’s wishful thinking. It might work to some degree, but the real fix is to regulate the crackpots out of the experimental category. Flying a dangerous piece of shit through common airspace is not a right.
It sounds like the FAA has their hands tied by some law, and, absent Congressional reform, is trying to do the best they can with the constrained authority they have.
[+] [-] yipbub|2 years ago|reply
What's the connection? Allowing drug use on planes does not increase technological innovation. Technological experimentation does.
> Umm, that’s wishful thinking. It might work to some degree, but the real fix is to regulate the crackpots out of the experimental category.
Source? The FAA seems to back their claims up with actual data.
> Flying a dangerous piece of shit through common airspace is not a right.
I did a little bit of googling, and the experimental aircraft are not allowed over densely populated areas or crowded airspace without the guidance of an ATC and sufficient altitude is there to glide away to safety. Even experimental aircraft must receive an airworthiness certificate.[0]
From what I've seen, they're only loosening the restrictions that seem to make no contribution to safety and will make it easier for more aircraft to adopt the restrictions that do make it safer. They're incentivized to be safe because they fly the planes, and a higher rating means more privileges(haven't verified this), crackpots who don't care about safety won't make it through the trial period before their plane is allowed out of limited airspace.
Why express strong opinions that are unresearched? Or if they are, provide some sources? Or provide some reasoning other than intuition? Especially in a world where we are increasingly not allowed to do things unless specifically allowed. (allowlist instead of denylist)
[0] https://www.eaa.org/eaa/aircraft-building/intro-to-aircraft-...
[+] [-] happyjack|2 years ago|reply
I will say, the crackpots are largely getting pushed out of experimental and the folks who love flying and want to see it succeed on a budget are stepping in. I'm not an experimental bro, but I am tempted with the crazy costs of mundane parts for 60 year old planes.
[+] [-] jessriedel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtfwhateven|2 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbaVdge7kU
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] littlestymaar|2 years ago|reply
And this is why nuclear innovation is thriving in third-world countries with little to no nuclear regulation, right?
[+] [-] hnav|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cagenut|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|2 years ago|reply
> This heavy regulation means that few new reactors are being built, which in turn means that if you are starting a new nuclear company, you’re going to have mostly engineers who have never built a nuclear reactor of any kind before. This lack of space for experimentation, as I discussed with Last Energy CEO Bret Kugelmass recently, is one reason for stagnation in the nuclear industry.
That is a problem, but on the other hand, the more people work in nuclear, the higher the likelihood is that someone ends up diverting nuclear material. It's already a huge issue with nuclear material in medical devices that ends up creating (sometimes fatal) dangers to the public ("orphan sources") [1].
> Under today’s light-sport rules, LSAs are limited to a single reciprocating (piston) engine. What this has meant in practice is that turboprops are not allowed.
Which is a good thing IMHO. Jet engines are orders of magnitude more complex to maintain with high requirements on precision (a must, given that these things spin at 100k RPM) than a piston engine is - effectively, maintenance on these can be done by any car mechanic specializing in oldtimer cars, as they're dating back to 1950s designs.
> 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.
It's one thing to allow certified legitimate manufacturers faster iteration speeds in design. But allowing people to use uncertified avionics? That's just asking for incidents to happen, be it because sun glare causes a pilot to not recognize something critical, or because Android's OOM killer crashing at the wrong time. When even the big names such as Samsung can't be arsed to put something out that doesn't crash the UI twice a week, I don't want to see that stuff on a vital plane system.
> If we can get LSAs into mass manufacturing, production costs of the airframe could go down further.
For that, there would need to be a market for these. But as urbanization is happening rapidly across the world, I'd question that - who wants to drive hours out in the country, just for a few flight hours? Even with you Americans not being required to use actual airfields (unlike us Germans), you can't sustain a large GA market... that's the problem IMHO.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incide...
[+] [-] napierzaza|2 years ago|reply
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