Sounds a lot like the Airbus's "normal law" flying!
My $0.02 - I'm a CPL ME/IR who gets wet a lot, and is upside down half the time.
Background is Automotive and Mechanical Engineering, been in software since 2007.
The Cirrus SR20 is the closest we have to this, at 6-7x the cost. You can kit build a Sling or RV10, which will get you what you want at 3-4x the cost plus 2-3 years of time.
Garmin, Rotax, Vans etc ... the avionics, materials, plans and tech already exists. It's needing a few hundred million dollars to set it up to be produced at scale so the $100k avionics package can be had for $10k. The $100k equivalent Rotax or Lycoming can be had for $10k. Maybe it's electric vs avgas.
Foreflight, Garmin Pilot etc do so much of the planning - and integrate well with the "Connext" or Dynon etc already. They've like racked up millions of hours now, I know I've thrown in a few hundred hours worth of feedback to them.
Your closest competitor is Cirrus who are already very successful using off the shelf components customized (eg Perspective+ vs 1000Nxi) to their liking, and are running a pretty substantial wait list for their planes. Their training is top notch, customer service is excellent and have thousands of airframes now flying over the past 20+ years.
I'm glad you guys trying to shake up this space, and I'd like more than anything to be proven wrong - I genuinely hope there's enough runway and capital to setup manufacturing to bring these component prices down and actually deliver a plane at a comparable cost to a car.
Totally agreed. Our long term roadmap has basically this exact product on it. However, anyone who doesn't know about GA will have no clue what this even means. We want more people to get into GA so that there's enough of a market that building such a plane becomes a sustainable business.
I don't think the GA market will ever grow that large though - not without substantial effort to make compliance with all the regulations effortless.
You need more pilots, so making it easier to navigate and comply with Parts 61/141/142, with 67/68.
You need more aerodromes; Part 139.
You need more aircraft, that's Parts 21, 23, 33, 35, 45 and maybe 34, 36 and 39 too.
You need more mechanics; Part 66 / 147.
You need more maintenance facilities, Part 21, 39, 43, 145.
There's maybe 50,000 active GA pilots (PPL or LSA) doing it for pleasure regularly? The rest are time building for the airlines, and same for mechanics.
To get that 50k to 500k to 5M actual people ... I think an affordable aircraft is probably the easiest part. Maybe it'll get people interested? Though you can already buy factory-built LSA's for $300k that'll do 150kts (see Risen); Europe already has a booming LSA scene ... but it hasn't really resulted in more people flying, not as far as I can tell.
I don't think an aircraft is the missing link, but I can't express how much I'd love to be proven wrong!
I haven’t done any piloting. If I could convert a 250 mile trip from a 5 hour drive to a 90 minute flight, I would take my family of 4 to many more places. I’d be willing to invest several months in the requisite training.
Currently I won’t do that at all because (1) way too dangerous, (2) way too expensive, (3) not obvious how to start.
Honestly, I’d love a subscription model for this. I’d pay an initial fee for training. Certify me when I’m safe. Then let me pay to get the airplane and fuel for a specific journey. Handle all the maintenance for me. Check my work on planning. Have a real expert available on integrated speed dial to talk me through anything complicated.
If this winds up being fun and fast, I’m willing to pay more for it. The specific trip I’m looking at would cost $800 to fly with a standard airline. I’d pay double that to self-fly. The premium gets me convenience (I control the exact departure time, less airport hassle) and adventure (flying!).
We are exploring how to make a subscription model work. It's not possible in an experimental category airplane, but our future models where they can be rented (legally due to FAA requirements) will make that possible.
The best analogy for USA equivalent is that imagine Alaska is where we have a bunch of oil / gas, but we need it in New York and Miami.
We can’t lay pipes because of terrain / distance, and the road infrastructure is pretty spotty too.
The companies extracting / producing / selling the oil/gas off in Alaska are private and separate to the companies wanting to buy it in NYC or Miami. There’s minimal government oversight.
It might work out cheaper for the companies to buy gas coming from eg Europe or Canada or Mexico for NYC/Miami vs Alaska (in our instance it would be SE Asia / China). Or from Alaska.
California actually has to import oil from Canada, Ecuador and a a few other countries. The local production is insufficient for the population level plus since the 70s voters wouldn't allow much oil exploration. Washington and Oregon are able to get it from Canada however.
> plus since the 70s voters wouldn't allow much oil exploration
and their beaches are national treasures compared to Texas where they subscribed to the "drill baby drill" mantra and "fuck those beaches. it's just sand" mantra. it is funny comparing California beaches where they did allow offshore drilling for a side-by-side comparison of how they are affected. Take Seal Beach with all of the tarballs vs something nearby like Santa Monica.
I don't have specific information about Seal Beach, but Tar Balls are completely natural and are not [necessarily] caused by drilling.
The are decomposed by a number of bacteria, and unless you happen to know of a spill nearby are not an indicator of a problem. In fact drilling for the oil can reduce them by reducing the pressure that would otherwise squeeze them out.
The US would just lay pipe through the lands of the native peoples and screw the expense or the impact on those lands. The fact Australia is an island makes shipping a very enticing option.
The longest gas pipeline in the world is the PetroChina. The main part of that is around 4,000km (2,500mi) long, BUT passes through 66 cities, and includes 8 branches.
A pipeline from West to East in Australia would be 4,000km long in a perfectly straight line, but have near no branches, and pass through no infrastructure at all for well over 3,500km of it. You're talking areas that are so remote that you need fixed wing aircraft for maintenance because helicopters don't have range, areas that even vehicles will have to carry extended fuel tanks because the nearest fuel supply might be 1,000 miles away, with little to no water supplies.
It could take days or more to get to the pipe for inspection, security would be non-existent.
And all this in a climate that is ... unforgiving. One of the nearby towns to where such a pipeline is situated has the following factoids:
At least one month a year where the mean maximum temperature is 107F.
Holds a record of 160 consecutive days above 100F.
Regularly records 110F+, with record temperatures approaching 120F.
It's highly suspected that the uninhabited areas along that route would exceed those temperatures. Multiple towns in the vicinity have exceeded 120F in the shade on multiple occasions.
The railroad nearby holds the world record for the straightest section of train track: 500mi+ dead straight (though not dead level).
A “licensed” mechanic needs to “certify” or sign off on the paperwork that a given task was done to a given standard following a given procedure.
The person certifying the work does not have to be the one that did the actual work, but it’s their license on the line so they tend to make sure it was done correctly.
This is how unlicensed mechanics / apprentices actually learn and eventually get their “license”.
There are varying levels and abilities for these licensed mechanics too in terms of what they are allowed to do, and also the organisation licenses too they’re working for.
It’s not quite as sinister or as “Wild West” the author wants to make it out, but outsourcing was inevitable in the airlines economic model.
If you predominantly work in TypeScript, for the web, there's no better editor.
It's faster & "lighter" than any JetBrains product, but has excellent "auto-complete" that's fairly intelligent / context aware, while still being almost as fast / lightweight as Sublime. Use with ESLint + Prettier, with format on save enabled and you tend to fly through typing TypeScript.
It does pretty well for React Native too, it's reasonably good for JavaScript, and pretty poorly for anything else (Go, Ruby, PHP, Java / Kotlin, Swift / Objective-C), C/C++/C#.
I'd argue you need this split - managing people is different skill set to managing a project, which is different to managing the technology, which is different to managing a product.
They do overlap, but to me there is a clear line between their responsibilities and authority. Things get blurry in smaller orgs, but in larger ones with multiple product streams, budgets and stakeholders - they're usually pretty clearly defined roles.
Like many things, it sounds good in theory which is why many try it... but in reality it often turns to shit because you end up with 4 quazi-managers all stepping over everyone else and constantly asking the team to do extra work (like generating data/reports or attend meetings) that's really their own damn jobs because surprise-surprise being technically capable of more than making spreadsheets wasn't part of the original job requirements.
A kindle is excellent to read eBooks, and that's about it.
An iPad (or tablet form factor) is excellent for consuming content on the internet, which includes eBooks amongst movies, reels, articles, blogs, news etc.
I've got a paper white and while the browser on it is decent, and you can email yourself PDF's to view on there - it's still a subpar experience for anything that isn't formatted to display as an eBook on an e-ink display.
Don't get me wrong, I love reading on my kindle and it's far easier on the eyes, but it doesn't do what an iPad does in the same way reading a book on the iPad is more tiresome than on a kindle.
Honestly - as someone who did their primary and instrument using steam gauges, and now mostly flies a Cirrus Perspective+ system (G1000 with some extra's), you'll get up to speed in less than a few hours of digging through the manual and playing in the SIM.
After about 10 or so hours, you'll start finding so many small things that make life infinitely easier for single-pilot ops that it's ridiculous we can do x or y with so little effort.
Running lean of peak, having a TOD, programming in our steps, hitting the approach button and just letting the plane fly is black magic at times. There's no going back for me at this rate, especially when I just want to go places. I've got a single-seat Yak for when I truly want to "fly"!
My $0.02 - I'm a CPL ME/IR who gets wet a lot, and is upside down half the time. Background is Automotive and Mechanical Engineering, been in software since 2007.
Want to shake up GA?
The Cirrus SR20 is the closest we have to this, at 6-7x the cost. You can kit build a Sling or RV10, which will get you what you want at 3-4x the cost plus 2-3 years of time.Garmin, Rotax, Vans etc ... the avionics, materials, plans and tech already exists. It's needing a few hundred million dollars to set it up to be produced at scale so the $100k avionics package can be had for $10k. The $100k equivalent Rotax or Lycoming can be had for $10k. Maybe it's electric vs avgas.
Foreflight, Garmin Pilot etc do so much of the planning - and integrate well with the "Connext" or Dynon etc already. They've like racked up millions of hours now, I know I've thrown in a few hundred hours worth of feedback to them.
Your closest competitor is Cirrus who are already very successful using off the shelf components customized (eg Perspective+ vs 1000Nxi) to their liking, and are running a pretty substantial wait list for their planes. Their training is top notch, customer service is excellent and have thousands of airframes now flying over the past 20+ years.
I'm glad you guys trying to shake up this space, and I'd like more than anything to be proven wrong - I genuinely hope there's enough runway and capital to setup manufacturing to bring these component prices down and actually deliver a plane at a comparable cost to a car.