In your video, what flight simulator engine are you using? Is it something you created or is it something like Xplane or MSFS?
The core flight simulator is x-plane with some of our own stuff on top
Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
221–230 of 632 posts
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#222Howdy! FI(H) here. Looks very cool, I watched the video too. Many students get the hang of hovering within 10 hours - "learning to fly" really isn't that hard? I see the rest of the course as "learning to become a pilot." That means the background knowledge and practice to allow decision making & dealing with emergencies etc. I think if you could improve just a single one of the problems you touch on (difficult contr…
You are definitely correct that "learning to become a pilot" is the meat of training. Our belief is that we want to make the continued act of "aviating" as easy as possible so that pilots can focus on the decision making aspect of being a pilot, and when doing so, not let the airplane get ahead of them and cause an accident. Basically, you can't command the plane to do anything it can't safely do. If you pull the sti…
I get the idea... but what happens when a pitot tube is blocked or an aoa sensor gets stuck or ... ?
With "traditional" controls and an autopilot failure, you still have control over all the control surfaces.
With your solution, you don't have enough hand axis to fall back to manual flying? How can the computer possibly guarantee safe flight in all conditions?
In the case of an e.g. air speed sensor failure, how do you get on the ground safely? Is the answer "Just BRS"? Or multiple sensors etc. ?
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example it's crazy that most pilots are still taught to calculate W&B using printed charts and approximate takeoff performance. We're taught that so we know what we're doing. Then we open our iPhone app (EFB or electronic flightbag) and do it there. In fact, part of the reason we do it there is because most of them phone home to their maker and log that we did it. So if there's an accident people can know "well…
Stall speed is a misnomer. Stalls occur due to exceeding the critical angle of attack and can happen at ANY speed.
Whoever is downvoting this: Stop. It's the key point here. Planes don't need to know their weight to produce a stall warning; AoA is a great metric, and GA planes not having an indicator or warning based on it is astonishing.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#224While I think the project is pretty cool, I can't shake the pollution side of things out of my mind. Air transport is one of the most polluting ways to travel, and I would expect a single person airplane is even worse than a full A380. Is there anything you're doing to alleviate this issue ?
Some of the LSAs I've flown are not actually that bad pollution/climate wise. Slightly less green per mile than my mini cooper, way more green than basically any common American pickup truck.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#225Instrument-rated pilot (and engineer) here. First - congrats on the launch! I think you're working on an interesting set of components that will prove useful to GA aircraft technology. Bringing fly-by-wire, and lowering the cost of maintenance/manufacturing are both great efforts. That being said, my personal view is that stick-and-rudder control is one of the less critical components to improving GA safety. Everythi…
light-sport rating, it encourages more people to be in the (already congested) airspace system who haven't really gained all the other skills necessary or experience to be there. LSA pilot here. I'm curious to know what skills or experience I haven't gained which allow me to be in the airspace system? I passed the exact same checkride a private pilot would, minus flying at night and VORs. I also have class B,C,D airs…
I figured this comment would get me in trouble :)
I recommend doing some instrument lessons if you haven't already. When I got my instrument rating I questioned whether the private requirements are actually enough. The skills that the instrument rating teaches in terms of preparation, workload management, and emergency weather scenarios make me question whether I was really ready to fly before I had it.
With the private or sport license you'll be fine in the majority of cases. I think my comment comes more from the edge and corner cases that more skills and experience help with, not your ability to work in the system at all.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's called eminent domain. But if the government attempts to do so you can file a lawsuit and argue that they don't have a right to purchase your property from you. These lawsuits are expensive and take a lot of time/effort, which makes building a railway impractical by this method. To "solve" this politically would require a constitutional amendment, which is obviously not going to happen for this issue.
But, as a previous poster said, these problems always seem solveable when building a freeway.
I think it's a question of public support, political will, and stamina.
People think of freeways as vital, so it's ok if I-69 through southern Indiana takes over 30 years from initial studies to completion.
If a train route took 30 years to build, it would be lambasted as a boondoggle and abandoned.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#227...three flight controllers ... two different sets of sensors ... independently compute the desired actions to take, and vote on what to do. Each ... has its own power source, backup battery, networking hardware, and set of critical sensors. You didn't mention activators. Do all the redundant components you mentioned connect to a single voting system, and single set of actuators? How do you avoid your voting system a…
yes I should have mentioned actuators as well. the actuators are internally redundant in terms of computation and power and will fail silent and not move if they disagree. Then, each control axis has 2 sets of these servos.
I say axis, rather than control surface, because for something like ailerons, we can have one go neutral in a fault case and the aileron on the other wing still operates with some reduced control authority. So even though each aileron has one servo, the roll axis has 2 and it maintains redundancy
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#228What are the environmental implications of transitioning people traveling by car/train to small planes? In addition to being louder and dispersing pollutants over a wider area, don't small planes generate significantly more GHG emissions than cars over the same number of miles? Also, given that planes are not nearly as easy to electrify as cars and trains (energy density is significantly lower in batteries than liqui…
Hard to tell. I have a frequent route that takes me ~ 2 hours of flight (13 liters/hour, 26 liters in total) or ~ 10 hours to drive with around 50 liters of gas. Flying means burning 50% less gas. But for others there may be better driving, how to calculate that?
What kind of plane are we talking about here? A Cessna 172 is cruising at about 200 km/h, so your route would be 400 km. You’re not driving 10h for that, right?
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#229In the demo, on what is the system's assumption that you want to land based?
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are definitely correct that "learning to become a pilot" is the meat of training. Our belief is that we want to make the continued act of "aviating" as easy as possible so that pilots can focus on the decision making aspect of being a pilot, and when doing so, not let the airplane get ahead of them and cause an accident. Basically, you can't command the plane to do anything it can't safely do. If you pull the sti…
I get the idea... but what happens when a pitot tube is blocked or an aoa sensor gets stuck or ... ? With "traditional" controls and an autopilot failure, you still have control over all the control surfaces. With your solution, you don't have enough hand axis to fall back to manual flying? How can the computer possibly guarantee safe flight in all conditions? In the case of an e.g. air speed sensor failure, how do y…
Multiple sensors, actively modeling the flight dynamics to detect anomalous sensors/behaviors (i.e. is what we are measuring what we expect to measure), and BRS as a final backup.