we won't want to lower the bar in terms of the pilot's ability to stay safe. But we do want to lower the barrier to entry so that more people can learn to do it, do it safely, and enjoy all it's benefits.
One of the biggest barriers at this point is probably getting a medical. There are tons of perverse incentives there - getting one if you've ever been prescribed mental health meds, for instance, can be at best a ton of red tape.
A $500k aircraft that still requires a PPL solves neither of those, and getting the PPL is contingent on passing the medical, both inititally and at regular intervals thereafter.
I was not saying the plane proposed here will lower the barrier, I’m just stating what I think the barrier is.
I think 90% people who aren’t older than 60 or so would get the medical without a problem. If you would remove the medical requirement, you wouldn’t suddenly have double the private pilots. If planes were 1/10th of the price they currently are (both in purchase and operation), you would. Medical isn’t the main blocker to private aviation.
Sorry for that, I didn’t read the thread again when writing the reply. I’m still not sure if I would even call the medical one of the major barriers, but of course I don’t have a statistic on how many people wouldn’t pass a medical.
In your case, you do start to approach the point where time-wise it's about equal. But, 30 minutes to your nearest GA airport is on the long side, most people (300M) live within 15 minutes of one (don't have a direct source for that--it's based on analysis we did of locations of airports and population densities)
We want to see prices go down too. That will only happen if more people want to fly airplanes and the market grows. So, we are trying to make it more accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise want to fly.
redundancy in sensors, computers, and actuators reduces the probably of a system failure due to random errors/failures and dissimilar computer systems help reduce the probability of a common mode software bug causing a failure.
I can't speak for what will or won't happen with MOSAIC, but the current proposal bakes in SVO so we (and a lot of other companies) all hope that stays.
Yes, our first product is experimental and has a 51% requirement, but Sling has a great factory build assist program that will help with that. Typically, electrical systems aren't included in a 51% build and Sling builders don't usually touch the avionics (when doing a factory assist), so we hope that stays true.
The things that exist today are good steps in the direction, but we are pushing the boundary further with fly-by-wire, where these is very little innovation.
We are starting in experimental, working with Sling Aircraft for the airframe, factory build assist, etc to prove out the exact product that we want to take to certification in the future.
Thanks for the reply. This is a super interesting project and I wish you great success. As a builder/pilot I have so many little questions, mostly around how you're making all the trade-offs and decisions that pilots make based on the situation in the air (leaning for cruise / power, climb and descent rates, weather-related decisions, switching tanks, and so on). Do you anticipate equipping / certifying the airplane and systems for instrument flight? Is your entire avionics package custom, or do you use some off-the-shelf?
I'd love to chat through your questions directly--feel free to book a call with us through our website (just mention this HN post) and I'm happy to talk through everything
In the 70s when a lot of this system was designed, the industry was selling 10x the number of GA planes it does today, so I imagine 10x more were flying as well. So we have the capability for an order of magnitude increase. We'll need more controllers, sure.
But, you are totally right, we need to move away from voice based ATC to more digital systems that allow a management of more aircraft, and allow the GA aircraft to manage themselves through a "peer to peer" type ATC system, but like we have with our cars.
> the industry was selling 10x the number of GA planes it does today, so I imagine 10x more were flying as well.
I'm pretty sure most of these planes from the 1970s are still merrily flying around!
The wikipedia article on the 1994 General Aviation Revitalization Act has a graph showing the astonishing drop in shipped aircraft (and the rise in unit cost!) since around 1980:
yep--we want to reverse that trend. And you are probably right, a lot of those 70s planes still fly today. hopefully we can replace them with better alternatives
> 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
> the UI/UX of modern glass cockpits is incredibly unintuitive and difficult to use
Be careful here :)
The current UI/UX is the best that design had to offer ... at one point. That design is then solidified in concrete; It was once considered to be intuitive but the world's design of interfaces always moves on. Touch/swipe based UX drives many design decisions today but those practices can fall over in turbulent situations. That is to say, the "intuition" is not an innate factor of the interface itself. Rather, it's culturally informed.
Any UX design you create will likely seem unintuitive to either the previous or to the next generation. Either way, current pilots will likely just view it as something that needs training to adopt. I don't envy your task of making a new UI that is modern and timeless! It will be fun to see what you come up with though. :)
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
