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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

#391

Post by creshal »

limitedfrom wrote: post #268
AdrianB1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

50% seems very unreasonable here, if not in the wrong direction overall. Ikarus C42 at about 86 knots will use 13 L/hr, for a two-hour flight, it's 26 L fuel and 8.31 kg CO2/gal avgas[1], this comes to 57 kg CO2 to cover 320 km (and this is assuming it immediately starts covering flight distance and not using gas for climbing/approach, etc.). An average new car in the EU uses 6 L/100 km in 2019[2]. To drive 320 km, t…

> Even if you had to make the auto trip 400 km because roads aren't as direct, this comes to 51 kg CO2.

What if there's a sogging great mountain range in the middle and I literally do need to drive 2-3x as far, because (rail) tunnels take something between 2 and 3 decades to build and won't be finished before 2040, if any are even planned to begin with?

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

#392

Post by dartharva »

yard2010 wrote: post #372
dartharva wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't take a train to anywhere you want. Tracks will always be less accessible than roads or the sky.

Only in the beginning and it's not linear. One track can be used by an infinite amount of people with very little to no congestion, unlike roads.

You also can't travel anytime you want. What happens when a doctor has to reach his hospital for a critical emergency but the next train is scheduled in half an hour?

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

#393

Post by Aachen »

n_ermosh wrote: post #65
Majestic121 wrote: post #59

While 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 ?

Our early model you see here will use unleaded fuel rather than traditional low-lead fuel used in aviation today. The master plan is to use the scale we will create in this new market and invest it into green propulsion tech for our future aircraft. A lot is going to change in that space over the next 5 years so I'm very interested to see where things go, but I suspect hybrid-electric will be the move for the first g…

How does further reducing lead in the fuel compare to all the other emissions' impact?

I would imagine that lead is dangerous for a long as it's being used, whereas CO2 has an annoyingly long half life that we need to actively remove in (currently) time- or energy-intensive processes, while it's reducing healthy years of life for millions of people —speaking of air pollution from combustion in general here, I don't have specific numbers for airplanes but as an airplane company you are surely better aware of this than me

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

#394

Post by krisoft »

mattmaroon wrote: post #219
nikitaga wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like the real problem in this industry is lack of competition. There’s a chicken and egg problem: planes are expensive because so few people buy them, but so few people buy them because they’re expensive. Lack of competition is not the root cause. It's all the regulations. Certifying a new GA airplane takes a lot of time, and costs a fortune. This translates to high development costs, and certification cos…

I do believe that’s a factor (and mentioned it further down) but there are shockingly few companies that build planes. The regulatory cost is amortized over the number of planes built. If people bought planes the way they buy cars, they’d cost far less. Hence the chicken/egg problem I mentioned.

> but there are shockingly few companies that build planes.

Because the ones who try go bankrupt twice before they manage to certify their planes? If ever.

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

#395

Post by Etheryte »

iandanforth wrote: post #302

The video and the pitch strike me as odd. The value proposition here is to grow the market for small planes by making them easy. You still need to be rich so this is basically an expensive toy. I'm not sure comparisons to what came before matter, the people who will buy this don't know or care about the existing way to control a plane. All you have to do is show how easy your system is. To which end, why the hell wou…

Based on the comments the submitter made in other subthreads, their long term plan is to market a plane that's in the $100k range, whereas currently you would be looking to dish out at least $400k. Whether that's realistically feasible remains to be seen, but that steep of a cut would surely make it a lot more accessible than it is right now.

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

#396

Post by bambax »

serial_dev wrote: post #343
sethkim wrote: post #83

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…

> but I'm not super excited about the idea of lowering the barrier to entry for GA on a foundational skill basis. Like the 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 By that logic, shouldn't we make driving cars as dangerous, complicated, inaccesible, and confusing as possible?

Depends... Is it a good thing for the world that there are so many cars everywhere?

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

#397

Post by Aachen »

> We want people who don’t think about airplanes as a mode of transportation to start flying

Oh yeah that's just what we needed. I love flying but rarely do it because it's not like airplane transport is underused compared to our available resources to run this system. It's not sustainable to keep using the limited amount of atmosphere as a dumping ground for combustion products so the big task ahead of us is finding workable alternatives as well as installing facilities (there are several options today) that remove the extraneous greenhouse gasses and other emissions within a reasonable amount of time. We can make transportation sustainable but there's a long way to go yet

In the meantime, I don't see that flying being too underutilised is a problem any one of us benefits from solving, even if that requires thinking beyond the immediate "I get somewhere faster" and "it is fun and beautiful in the sky" benefits which I fully recognise

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

#398

Post by witx »

dartharva wrote: post #392
yard2010 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in the beginning and it's not linear. One track can be used by an infinite amount of people with very little to no congestion, unlike roads.

You also can't travel anytime you want. What happens when a doctor has to reach his hospital for a critical emergency but the next train is scheduled in half an hour?

Have you ever heard about helicopters? There are hospitals that have them. Why do we need _personal_ airplanes for this to happen? Why you think doctors will have money or space for their own airplane when they have no helicopters yet?

In this scenario of yours where would this doctor have their "airplane" at home? In a airfield?

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

#400

Post by Aachen »

lutorm wrote: post #375
entropie wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my part, I find it questionable to invest in and develop a transport technology that consumes seven times as much fossil fuel as a car. You give consumption of 7 gallons in cruise mode. I don't want to know what is burnt during take-off or landing.

How do you get seven times? Takeoff constitutes a negligible part of the total fuel consumption. Climb to altitude uses more, but you get that back when landing since you're then using your stored potential energy. Small-aircraft GA is a vanishingly small fraction of total fossil fuel use, and it will be quite easy to replace that with some renewable fuel solution (compared with the huge amounts of fuel consumed by t…

> Small-aircraft GA is a vanishingly small fraction of total fossil fuel use

OP wrote: "We want people who don’t think about airplanes as a mode of transportation to start flying"

They're meaning for this to become a larger fraction, besides that the relevant measure is pollution per benefit or per capita or something rather than absolute amount of pollution

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