501–510 of 632 posts
I understand that weight on ground for stability is completely different than air travel... but why not create a whole class of vehicles around this premise?
The only one I can remember is the SkyCar from Moller. He was a little ahead of the game with petrol based quad motors.
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> Do we really need even more personal aviation in the situation we’re currently facing? Yes? What's to stop them from using the fly-by-wire tech on a battery-powered, solar-powered, or hydrogen-powered airplane as they become viable? What in particular does the motive power for the prototype have to do with global warming? Is flying inherently bad even if carbon-free? I certainly don't think so! Mad props to the eng…
> Is flying inherently bad even if carbon-free? I certainly don't think so! No plane is ever going to be carbon- free . The energy source doesn't even matter—producing and transporting the constituent parts and involved people has its own, big, footprint. If a single employee drives to the factory, it's no longer carbon-free; you've just externalized the cost. If your house is burning, you don't use an induction stov…
I'm actively really trying to understand your perspective here, and how you do... anything? at all? Ever? Do you not leave the house?
If I drive to the factory with my EV and work on a hydrogen airplane using electric tools charged with solar panels, this seems perfectly reasonable. What does not seem reasonable is your complete anti-human anti-anything attitude.
Our house is not on fire. If it were, I would invest in putting the fire out. I would not just stop doing anything at all and say oh gosh anything I do will make the fire worse.
Great 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…
> Then a doped up former major league pitcher decides to hop in your plane and fly it into the ocean and everything you have done is called into question and you end up buried in lawsuits. Here's what I don't understand. If the same meathead pitcher gets in his Ferrari and drives it into a tree, nobody questions the car company or buries them in lawsuits. Driver crashes car, it's their fault. So wouldn't it stand to…
If you think an aircraft is a car with extra dimensions of travel then you've trivialized flight. Airplanes have gotten more complex over the past 50 years, and you're not going to get away abstracting any of it comfortably. The red tape exists because flying is hard, expensive and extraordinarily risky.
Junior aviators shouldn't be getting into planes they cannot operate themselves. It's like trying to claim it's safe putting a person without a drivers license behind the wheel of a self-driving car. You might feel that your life or the major-league pitchers' isn't worth enough for it to matter, but there's at least 1 or 2 important people on the overbooked 747 you crashed into due to crosswinds on the runway or after ignoring ATCs demands to "go around".
Aero-engineers: why can't we make airfoil kits to make certain vehicles 'air worthy'? A 10k addon to your current sedan to make it short take off and landing sounds way more fun than anything else. I understand that weight on ground for stability is completely different than air travel... but why not create a whole class of vehicles around this premise? The only one I can remember is the SkyCar from Moller. He was a…
It's insane the length we go as humans (in the US at least) to not invest in the easiest, most cost-effective and environmentally friendly mode of transportation: trains. Hyperloops, wider and wider highways, now personal airplanes. Anything but goddamn trains. It's mental to me. Wish the best to the startup, after all they are filling a void someone else would, but still, not happy with the direction transport is go…
It's not actually cost-efficient if you take into account one factor: demographics, or specifically: staffing. A crew member of a train has a very demanding job. The shifts are highly irregular and you may have to spend the night far from home. In this regard it's even worse than flying. Someone has to maintain the infrastructure, which by its very nature can also be in remote places. Particularly busy railroad cross…
The ratio of staff on a train to the count of passengers is much lower than on a bus or in a plane. Even less for freight.
> The shifts are highly irregular and you may have to spend the night far from home. In this regard it's even worse than flying.
This assume either long distance trains or slow trains. This can be solved Why would have shift to be irregular. Trains run on a schedule.
> Particularly busy railroad crossings also require staffing, even if they're ostensibly in the middle of nowhere.
Just get rid of busy crossings. Build bridges.
I recommend to come to Europe, and especially in France, for a trip in the TGV. Paris to Marseille (650 km) in 3 hours from city center to city center.
Presumably anyone who wants to fly this would still have to go through a traditional pilot qualification with an old-school plane? So this is actually targeting people who do fly airplanes, but want to be more comfortable and more able to focus on the navigation and general enjoyment of the air while reducing the actual risk of flying, rather than having to, as you put it, micromanage the aircraft. As someone who lik…
They don't necessarily have to learn in an old school plane. In fact, our early adopters who aren't pilots will be getting their flight training through us in an Airhart airplane (included in the purchase of the airplane) In the near future, a new set of regulations is coming out called MOSAIC, which will allow pilots to learn how to fly purely in simplified control aircraft. This is expected to come roughly at the s…
Is your first plane more of a roadster or a model 3, and what does your path look like to getting to a plane that has a cult following?
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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.
Public transit exists in the US. I take a train to work. But the problem you're not understanding is that we're not Europe. We don't all live in cities within a couple of miles of our workplaces. Even me, I've got a sixty mile commute, I'm fortunate that there is a commuter train -- but I still have to drive five miles to get to the station. There's no other way, it's not even safe to walk if I felt like walking five…
It also used to have streetcar networks in most major cities and suburbs. And shops you could walk to from your house.
Amsterdam used to have a city center full of cars, parking lots, and no bike paths.
Things can change. It’s harder for them to change when we sit around and say “It’s just the way it is, it’s not going to change”
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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?
Good for you. Why didn’t you answer my question though? > Have you considered that maybe Airhart and its founders have thought through those inevitable hurdles and decided to push forward anyway? Do you genuinely think you’re the first person to tell them all of the reasons why they’re going to fail? Wouldn’t it be much more useful to try to understand, in good faith, why they’re pushing forward with this venture any…
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I really want to try Amtrak. I've looked at it a few times. But the only train line near me only has a train at it 2 or 3 times a week, at some crazy hour like 2:30am. If I'm taking a Monday-Thursday business trip, I'd have to arrive at my destination the Friday before and return home late night on Sunday. It's just not a realistic choice, unless you're really excited about trains. It doesn't help that the website is…
This is also ignoring that it’s entirely possible for Amtrak to miss the schedule by literal days.
In places where Amtrak owns most of the track (ie the Northeast Corridor) service is much more frequent and reliable.
That’s a problem that is solvable by public investment in infrastructure.
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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…
Look at their staff; all engineers, nobody there who has ever got anything past the FAA.
So what?
When the Collison brothers founded Stripe, they (1) were young, (2) had no experience at all in the domain, (3) weren’t even U.S. citizens, (4) were entering a highly regulated space, and (5) were about to compete with some very powerful institutions that have existed forever worth billions and billions of dollars. In the eyes of folks who just look at all of the ways you can fail, they were extremely unattractive and Stripe’s fate was obvious failure. Today, most Americans can’t avoid using Stripe (both directly and indirectly) even if they tried. They’ve overcome all of those hurdles to the point of making it easy for the average engineer to build products without even having to think about the hurdles, dealing with regulators, etc. I vividly remember how awful the process of implementing payments was prior to Stripe (the process took a very long time)—they changed the game.
Maybe Airhart fails or maybe they just manage to change the game.