This is dope! Go S22
Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
461–470 of 632 posts
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't take a train to anywhere you want. Tracks will always be less accessible than roads or the sky.
It is not the #1 reason. #1 reason is being in the same train with other human beings. Nobody wants to deal with public transportation anxiety. Trains are so relaxed and loose security compared to airplanes.
I’m subject to social anxiety but public transport never bothered me. You’re among an anonymous group that just wait to arrive at destination. Very different than driving where everybody is involved with their journey, resulting in constant interaction to handle.
On the other side it’s easy to picture why a regular driver would be stressed in a train : you’re not in control.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#463Great ideas - all destined to wither and die on the vine of certification and regulatory approval. A certified Dynon autopilot for a Cessna 172 starts at $26k just for the components - you expect a similar amount for installation and then ongoing maintenance, calibration, and servicing. Designing and building the technology is the easy part - pushing that technology through testing and certification is the very hard…
Have you considered that maybe Airhart and its founders have thought through those inevitable hurdles and decided to push forward anyway?
Even if they don’t ultimately succeed, so what? This is how true innovation happens—someone decides to take a chance on an idea/concept everyone else thinks is impossible or unrealistic.
There are innovators and then there are armchair critics who just tell the innovators all of the reasons why they’re going to fail.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
GA planes have a stall warning horn (based on AoA). They just generally don't have a AoA indicator (though that might be a good idea indeed), relying on indicated airspeed instead, which (for given airplane mass) has a one-to-one [1] mapping to AoA in unaccelerated flight. That's why the concept of stall speed exists.
That is the case since, in unaccelerated flight, we need weight == lift, so
W := m g == L := 1/2 rho v^2 c_L S
Now, weight is constant (for given airplane mass, in unaccelerated flight), and so is the wing area. The coefficient of lift depends on the AoA, and dynamic pressure has a monotonic one-to-one relationship to IAS. Thus you have the relationship between IAS and AoA.
[1] Unless you get to "the back of the power curve" (the coefficient of lift increases with AoA, then decreases again, until it drops off in a stall). Let's not go there.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#465Great ideas - all destined to wither and die on the vine of certification and regulatory approval. A certified Dynon autopilot for a Cessna 172 starts at $26k just for the components - you expect a similar amount for installation and then ongoing maintenance, calibration, and servicing. Designing and building the technology is the easy part - pushing that technology through testing and certification is the very hard…
Have you considered that maybe Airhart and its founders have thought through those inevitable hurdles and decided to push forward anyway? Even if they don’t ultimately succeed, so what? This is how true innovation happens—someone decides to take a chance on an idea/concept everyone else thinks is impossible or unrealistic. There are innovators and then there are armchair critics who just tell the innovators all of th…
This "armchair critic" was an engineer at VisionAire Corp. in the late 90's and watched a truly innovative aircraft and company be consumed by the red tape and outright corporate protectionism of the regulatory bureaucracy. Not only have I considered it - I lived it. What relevant experience do you bring to this discussion?
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
While some base to final stall accidents are as simple as you make it sound a good chunk of them happen when you try to come OUT of the turn at an already slow speed increasing the angle of attack on one wing alone. The stall and subsequent spin catches the pilot entirely surprised unaware of why they’re even stalling and with very little escape bandwidth. The FAA has been trying for better angle of attack instrument…
Right but I don't know of any GA stall/spin warning system that takes into account pilot input. Even simple sensors are lacking, for example accelerometers are nearly free yet GA planes give you no warning that you're in a skid. Similarly given yoke input, bank angle and speed you could warn of an impending stall well before it actually happens with a few position encoder sensors. As you point out, the current system…
> GA planes give you no warning that you're in a skid.
"The ball" will show you that you're in a skid.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#467Great ideas - all destined to wither and die on the vine of certification and regulatory approval. A certified Dynon autopilot for a Cessna 172 starts at $26k just for the components - you expect a similar amount for installation and then ongoing maintenance, calibration, and servicing. Designing and building the technology is the easy part - pushing that technology through testing and certification is the very hard…
Exactly. There's a reason an IFR GPS navigator costs upwards of $10K. It's incredibly expensive to make certified avionics.
"(an aviation grade GPS can cost upwards of $10k, but it’s the same hardware as in a $20 consumer grade GPS)"
No, it's absolutely not the same hardware as a consumer grade GPS. And this misses the entire point of why it costs so much.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in a suburb near a county airport. I cannot fathom a life with Tesla owners flying over where my kids and I bbq. This idea is great, but people should still be licensed for the real safety protocols e.g. radio and not crashing into others.
This is such a common argument for everything NIMBY. Your point remains valid, but the argument you've presented comes across uninspired. What if you had no way to stop or from happening; what do you think might be reasonable mitigation steps that regulators could take to minimize the risk to your BBQ? If something becomes an inevitability, you probably should be prepared with an argument that is accepting of that in…
"No fatal airplane crashes in my back yard" is probably the easiest NIMBY to justify of all time.
Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
but you get to "beat traffic"! lol
Joking aside, that's an interesting point actually, since it would probably be a common argument for this this type of transportation. However I doubt it would work for the masses due to Jevon's Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
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Re: Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was about to post the same. Passing no judgement on this particular project, which must have been the result of honest hard work and dedication, but it's truly bizarre that people in the US would rather double down on the failed personal vehicle concept rather than embracing public transit, as more developed countries have.
Most people in the USA are too shy/prudish to say it but I think this is a conversation that needs to be opened: Americans are so resistant to public transportation because the public seriously sucks to deal with. There will be no popular utilization of public transit until we implement strong economic safety nets and extensive support/mandatory detention of people that are mentally ill. Those problems are much harde…
You aren't wrong, although your comfortable car ride also includes huge amounts of risk of personal injury, we just tend to not think about that until it happens.
The lack of other places for people to go often leaves public transit facilities as a place for homeless people to congregate or seek shelter.
The US also tends to treat public transit as welfare transit in general. A transportation option of last resort for those who can't afford a car, where the primary goal is being inexpensive, instead of being the best and most efficient way to move around a city for all citizens.
Transit stations in the US also generally don't have revenue-generating amenities like food, coffee, or shopping. This makes them money sinks instead of revenue sources that pay for their own cleaning and security etc.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”