251–260 of 632 posts
The cost per trip seems to be about on par with commercial flight prices. Can an airplane like this ever be made electric, with similar range?
Instrument-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…
Can you please be more specific with regards to the necessary skills that sport pilots haven't gained that you believe makes them a liability in the skies?
Lets be real: plenty of VFR private pilots are threats in the air & garbage on the radio - especially at untowered fields. You should be judging pilots on an individual basis, rather than broadly assuming a lack of knowledge based on their certificate type, given that the syallabus (61.105 & 61.309 + 61.325) is more-or-less identical.
edit 2 min later: I see your response to another user now.
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?
- 150kt Cruise, 4h endurance
- 400kg "useful" load for pax/luggage @ 4h endurance / batteries
- 3-axis AP that'll do coupled approaches + autoland
- BRS, FIKI, Oxy/Pressurized
- $100k fly away
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.
Former pilot (now paragliders) and founder/engineer here- I'm not sold that this approach - eliminating the need for coordinated flying- really removes the big barriers to flying. I'm surrounded by aviation lovers who don't fly PPL, and the big barriers are cost, time, and fear. The Ercoupe tried this exact approach in the 30s in one of the big GA booms and it just wasn't borne out. I'd love to see more GA pilots, bu…
The Ercoupe was a great idea for it's time, but we can do so much more with the technology we have today that we didn't have back then
> a production aircraft that's cheaper than $50/hr to fly would.
yes! our long term goal is to get there, but we need more people flying airplanes today to generate enough scale to actually build such an airplane and also stay in business. That's our approach, get more people who can afford to fly doing it, then use that to drive down the cost for everyone.
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. Want to shake up GA? - 150kt Cruise, 4h endurance - 400kg "useful" load for pax/luggage @ 4h endurance / batteries - 3-axis AP that'll do coupled approaches + autoland - BRS, FIKI, Oxy/Pressurized - $100k…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I thought the point was predicting a stall by knowing the approach speed will be so low that you will stall, not detecting a stall just before it happens
Former pilot (now paragliders) and founder/engineer here- I'm not sold that this approach - eliminating the need for coordinated flying- really removes the big barriers to flying. I'm surrounded by aviation lovers who don't fly PPL, and the big barriers are cost, time, and fear. The Ercoupe tried this exact approach in the 30s in one of the big GA booms and it just wasn't borne out. I'd love to see more GA pilots, bu…
> The Ercoupe tried this exact approach in the 30s in one of the big GA booms and it just wasn't borne out. The Ercoupe was a great idea for it's time, but we can do so much more with the technology we have today that we didn't have back then > a production aircraft that's cheaper than $50/hr to fly would. yes! our long term goal is to get there, but we need more people flying airplanes today to generate enough scale…
My 2c - the best way to go to big scale with a GA product is to somehow find a way to make it dual use and secure the DoD as a customer. The problem with doing this is that the DoD becomes your main customer and GA becomes your hobby...