291–300 of 334 posts
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Fuel in NZ is $5 NZD? Has Covid had an impact on that local price or is that standard? It's Less than $1.50 AUD across the ditch at the moment. And that's a bad day.
Per gallon. $1.30 / L => $5.85 / gallon. Petrol is/was always more expensive in NZ though, around ~70c/L from memory. On the flip side, registration and insurance is much cheaper.
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Lots of innovation has happened in aircraft electronics. The powerplant? Not so much. Most light aircraft engine designs are four or more decades old, and the only ones cheap enough for a moderately-priced aircraft have carburetors. I don't think you can even buy a car these days with a carburetor, but with airplanes they're still standard, even though fuel injection makes a lot more sense in an airplane than in a ca…
How do carburetors work when inverting the plane?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_carburetor
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I dunno man, im getting kind of jaded as I get older. "True moonshot" to me seems more like cheap clean water for everyone, or a real way to sequester carbon, not a way for rich folks to get to their country cottages faster.
I feel like I’ve heard so many ‘cheap clean water’ ideas over time that I’m sure it already exists. The problem is probably nobody wants to pay for that.
(Turns out a key problem is preventing shit from getting into the water)
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Totally agree about the certification. It's so annoying having to do stuff like managing the mixture. There is absolutely no chance I'm going to be better at that than even the most basic FADEC system. Every car since the early 90s has done away with the choke, but for some reason in a 2020-built C172 I still have to do this... :X I would argue that this insistence on safety certification makes actual flights less sa…
Yes! Rotax (Austrian company) actually builds great engines. They are heavily used in ultra-light airplanes with much more “relaxed” certification. And you are right: in the ultra-light market, we see a giant boom because of lower certification hurdles and actually much safer systems: automated engine control, constant speed propellers, ballistic parachutes, etc. But Maximum Take-Off-Weight (MTOW) is 650 kg (Germany)…
I am training for a PPL(G) in the UK (G is for Gyrocopter). There two proper certified makes of Gyro in the UK (Magni and AutoGyro), and all of the engines are Rotax. The newest is the 915, which includes a FADEC and turbo.
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Lots of innovation has happened in aircraft electronics. The powerplant? Not so much. Most light aircraft engine designs are four or more decades old, and the only ones cheap enough for a moderately-priced aircraft have carburetors. I don't think you can even buy a car these days with a carburetor, but with airplanes they're still standard, even though fuel injection makes a lot more sense in an airplane than in a ca…
Wow, hearing that rich people are still allowed to dump lead into the atmosphere above our heads just ruined my morning. What things of non-entertainment value would we loose if we just banned leaded fuel overnight? Are crop dusters burning lead while spraying pesticides over our food crops?
I love innovation and stuff. Radical ideas. But the aviation market is one of the most heavily regulated - bureaucracy beyond comprehension. Did you ever wonder why Piper or Cessna airplanes look EXACTLY what they did 50 years ago? And why the engines used in these planes (e.g., Lycoming) are referred to as “Lycosaurus”!? If you go for a sightseeing flight with a local aeroclub - you will find the pilot spending 30mi…
I'd argue that some of the difference between a pilot license and a driver's license would diminish if the difficulty of a driver's license more accurately reflected the challenges of operating a heavy vehicle in close proximity to pedestrians and other vehicles. At the current standards, apparently the only hard requirement is a pulse.
In a plane you don't have that single goto option. You have to know the correct response to every possible situation and it's different in each case.
Plus, many mechanical failures in an aircraft will kill you. Most things in a car won't. You need to learn how to look after a plane, and what to check for.
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This is just basic marketing. You sell to the guy who can buy. The Tesla company was started in 2003 to productionize the AC tzero. In 2005, the Roadster was conceived as the product it became and Tesla and Lotus tied up. The Secret Master Plan arrived in 2006. So yeah, that's just how it goes. Because there is an army of people who lament things targeted at rich people, but that army does not participate in progress…
That makes the current state of our humanity kind of sad, doesn’t it. It is also not true. There are numerous innovations targeted for the betterment of us all. The three-point seat-belt is a quick one that comes to mind. The field of medicine has tax funded research innovating at a remarkable frequency, where the target beneficiaries is all humans who need it. Expensive infrastructures like roads, train networks, el…
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Lots of innovation has happened in aircraft electronics. The powerplant? Not so much. Most light aircraft engine designs are four or more decades old, and the only ones cheap enough for a moderately-priced aircraft have carburetors. I don't think you can even buy a car these days with a carburetor, but with airplanes they're still standard, even though fuel injection makes a lot more sense in an airplane than in a ca…
Wow, hearing that rich people are still allowed to dump lead into the atmosphere above our heads just ruined my morning. What things of non-entertainment value would we loose if we just banned leaded fuel overnight? Are crop dusters burning lead while spraying pesticides over our food crops?
The problem comes with flying in lower atmospheric pressure (high or hot environment) because the replacement chemical used in place of the lead-based additives makes fuel much quicker to evaporate.
BTW, the really rich don't use AVGAS 100LL except maybe for hobby flying - kerosene-based JET A-1 is used in all turbine engines, as well as the rare diesel.
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Wow, hearing that rich people are still allowed to dump lead into the atmosphere above our heads just ruined my morning. What things of non-entertainment value would we loose if we just banned leaded fuel overnight? Are crop dusters burning lead while spraying pesticides over our food crops?
You don't need to be rich to fly. You can buy a older used aircraft for the cost of a nice car. Sometimes cheaper. (Note: Not the Cirrus they're talking about upthread.) They're working on replacing leaded fuel. The challenge is mostly regulatory, since they won't certify any of the replacements until they're sure it's 100% safe. It's still a work in progress. As for what you'd lose: Search and rescue, medical transp…
Same is true of Medical Transport except possibly for Australia where light aircraft are used more frequently than turbine helicopters.
Same for powerline inspection, although there could be a couple of companies using Robinsons somewhere I guess.
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Private pilot here. Yes, aviation innovates slowly, but it's not nearly as bad as you make it sound. Cirrus aircraft have been a game changer, as has the Garmin G1000 avionics. I can fly just about any instrument approach entirely on autopilot. The only thing I have to touch is the throttle and the flaps. I get real-time traffic information via ADS-B, real-time weather via Nexrad. I do my flight planning in five minu…
You could hold the director of the FAA at gunpoint and they still wouldn't let personal planes fly close enough to each other to make this remotely scalable. Even if you pulled the nonexistent vehicles out of a hat like magic we missed the social acceptance window. Automobiles emerged at a time when nobody really cared about safety regulations and they've continuously gotten safer, so nobody has a problem with the cu…
I don't think that's the reason we accept the higher death rate of cars. In cars, you feel like you have direct influence on whether you die, or at least you know the person in control. This might not be the actual case, but it's enough to make people save.
Compare this to planes: You're flown in big machines you don't understand by people you don't know and, if something goes wrong, you can do nothing but protect your head and hope for the best. Also, you have no way out - if an engine fails, prepare for quite some time of horror. Compared to a car, where you might have some unpleasant deceleration, but safety is always very near.
I'm pretty sure these factors are the main reason we are so wary of aviation deaths compared to car deaths.