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Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

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Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#151

Post by imoverclocked »

n_ermosh wrote: post #121
imoverclocked wrote: post #111

Congrats on the launch! > The core of what makes a good pilot isn’t stick and rudder skills; it’s good decision making and risk management. At best, this is only half of the story. What separates GA operations from airline operations in terms of safety is much more involved than that: - GA (Part 91) flight hours are not recorded so safety data can only be estimated - Part 91 incidents follow much less scrutiny than p…

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 ta…

> 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. :)

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#152

Post by gizajob »

shafyy wrote: post #107
stetrain wrote: post #27

> In the US, trips that are 50-300 miles are almost all done by car because that distance is too short for commercial airlines and too far for public transportation. A bit off-topic but this is a political problem, not a technical one. Trips of 50-300 miles are certainly within the operating range of fast and efficient rail travel as demonstrated in multiple places around the world outside of the US.

A million times this. Modern and efficient train networks are the best way to travel, even for longer distances of a few thousand kilometers (night trains). Sure, there are still use cases for flying, but the dismissiveness of people who have never experienced great train travel against it just shocks me.

Hmmm I just flew from Bergamo, Italy to Liverpool, UK and it was basically four hours door to door from where I was staying to where I was going in Liverpool, and for less than €100. The train can’t do this.

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#153

Post by hsolatges »

dsugarman wrote: post #141
namdnay wrote: post #112

> We want people who don’t think about airplanes as a mode of transportation to start flying It really depresses me that in 2024 we have some of the smartest, most privileged people in the world deciding that this is what they’re going to dedicate their life to Shouldn’t we be doing exactly the opposite? Getting people to stop flying

you don't really clarify why people should stop flying, I'll assume it's due to global warming? Personally, I think this is a fantastic idea, to simplify the user experience of flying to make it accessible sounds incredible. Private jets are the ultimate luxury in life that so few have access to today. If it is global warming related, then I think that problem needs to be solved as well, but it's somewhat separate. E…

[dead]

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#154

Post by n_ermosh »

polishdude20 wrote: post #148

How much of GA accidents are caused by the high prices of training? Like, there are minimum hour requirements to get a license and then minimum yearly hours for proficiency but I can see the high cost of training and flying to cause pilots to just do the bare minimum. My wish would be that prices go down and we'd see more pilots training more often and becoming better as a result.

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.

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#155

Post by namdnay »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #134
namdnay wrote: post #112

> We want people who don’t think about airplanes as a mode of transportation to start flying It really depresses me that in 2024 we have some of the smartest, most privileged people in the world deciding that this is what they’re going to dedicate their life to Shouldn’t we be doing exactly the opposite? Getting people to stop flying

No. What we should be doing is encouraging smart, motivated people to address what they see as problems that they can make actual progress towards solving. As a natural consequence, many of those efforts will be things you find worthwhile and many others you won't. If you think there's a problem more worthwhile of their efforts, why don't you dedicate your life to it?

It’s not a question of “worthwhile”, I’m not judging them for writing mobile minigames or whatever, it’s a question of pulling in the exact opposite direction to where we should be going. What’s the point of having people dedicating their lives to getting us out of this pickle, when others are saying “you know what we need more of? Private air flights”

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#156

Post by rglullis »

n_ermosh wrote: post #84
stetrain wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even just analyzing it on a person-mile-efficiency basis, moving from personal cars to personal aircraft is the wrong direction. Trains obviously do well at that metric, but I'm not opposed to exploring other options on that side of the spectrum. Pitching a market move towards smaller, less-efficient vehicles is anti-sustainable. The better pitch for this kind of technology is probably on the order of modernizing fli…

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…

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

Why is it that you think it's feasible to put all this effort to "scale the market", but getting to something like "building efficient passenger rail" or even "offer a comfortable, fast intercity bus" is out of your reach?

The US doesn't "need" flying. It needs a more efficient way to move passengers. To suggest that small planes are ever going to be more efficient than mass transit is delusional. The US needs to move away from "personal" transportation and invest in multi-modal, public mass-transit. And yes, there are still plenty of opportunities for engineers to do that.

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#157

Post by _djo_ »

Smart approach partnering with an established light aircraft manufacturer with a good safety rating (South Africa’s Sling Aircraft) rather than trying to reinvent the wheel on the base platform. That gives me more faith in the rest of the engineering decisions made on this project.

Wishing you all the best! Anything that improves the safety of flying GA aircraft like this is a good thing.

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#158

Post by 9dev »

I understand the excitement on a technical level, and your plan sure sounds neat; and I definitely have a lot of respect on a personal level.

On the other hand, humanity is rolling head-first into a climate crisis, won’t stop emitting way too much CO2, and people generally refuse to adapt their lifestyle even a modicum in face of an exponentially growing list of problems.

Do we really need even more personal aviation in the situation we’re currently facing? Is that what talented engineers should work on, are personal planes in addition to personal cars really what people should be buying?

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#159

Post by light_triad »

As someone interested in learning to fly this is very cool. Congrats on the launch!

> an aviation grade GPS can cost upwards of $10k, but it’s the same hardware as in a $20 consumer grade GPS

I think the cost of aviation hardware might be much higher because of issues with precision, insurance, updates, redundancy and the very small volumes compared to consumer volumes. Is there a way to certify consumer hardware for aviation applications or are there essentially monopolies and regulatory capture that limit cheaper alternatives from entering the market?

Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

#160

Post by maples37 »

CalRobert wrote: post #102
stetrain wrote: post #27

> In the US, trips that are 50-300 miles are almost all done by car because that distance is too short for commercial airlines and too far for public transportation. A bit off-topic but this is a political problem, not a technical one. Trips of 50-300 miles are certainly within the operating range of fast and efficient rail travel as demonstrated in multiple places around the world outside of the US.

Interestingly I'm hosting my dad near Amsterdam for the week and to get from Sacramento to SFO (from where he flew to AMS) he... flew. Which I guess is logical, but seems insane to me when he lives close to Sacramento Amtrak which actually HAS good, regular service to SFO (via Bart, connecting at Richmond). Even if you build the train some people won't give it a try, sadly. A lot of carbon was spewed in to the air to…

I really want to try Amtrak. I've looked at it a few times. But the only train line near me only has a train at it 2 or 3 times a week, at some crazy hour like 2:30am. If I'm taking a Monday-Thursday business trip, I'd have to arrive at my destination the Friday before and return home late night on Sunday. It's just not a realistic choice, unless you're really excited about trains.

It doesn't help that the website is terrible at helping you plan a trip, if you say "I want to leave on Monday" but there are no trains at the station on Monday, it just takes you to a page saying "there are no routes, sorry" instead of suggesting the next day a train is available. I found a download link for the train schedule, and it took me a solid 10 minutes to figure out what I was looking at. (If you're following along at home: the big bold date at the top of the page is completely irrelevant. It's just today's date, so you know when you downloaded the PDF. Because of course that's why you downloaded the PDF in the first place.)

I have a friend who is really excited about trains, and he wanted to take a weekend Amtrak trip. The only way he could make it work was to ride the train up and have someone at his destination who was willing to drive him back. And even then, most of the trip was plodding along in the darkness, because the train only stops at our city in the dead of night.

They're supposed to be putting in some new lines in the coming years, one of which will stop by our city. I'm cautiously optimistic, though I'm not sure how useful those lines will be if there's no trains rolling on them at reasonable hours.

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