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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

#581

Post by lovecg »

aeternum wrote: post #337
sokoloff wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the vast majority of GA accidents could be completely avoided with slightly better avionics. Reading accident reports or the annual summary McSpadden Report (previously called the Nall Report), I get a different view: if pilots would keep fuel in the airplane and flowing to the engine(s), not fly into weather beyond the capability of the airplane and crew, and divert or not takeoff at the onset of signs that an air…

Most cars give you significant warnings that you're about to run out of gas and as a result very few people do. Improved avionics could warn you that you're flying into a storm or that the airplane is not airworthy or that you are converging with other traffic. Complacency kills because it sneaks up on pilots, but it doesn't have to be that way. We should not accept that the FAA's answer is an IMSAFE checklist. Pilot…

If you’re about to run out of gas in a car it’s usually not a big deal - you find the nearest gas station and go there. Usually. There are exceptions like driving 100 miles of desert with no gas stations in sight and forgetting to put enough gas in. If that was the common driving scenario I’d bet way more people would run out of gas, and no warning light will help.

Flying a plane is often sort of like that - planning mistakes tend to become problems with large time windows where a warning light is way too late to affect the outcome. Flying into a long narrow canyon is another example where your fate can be sealed minutes before you actually fly into the mountain.

All of this can and should be made better with technology, but a lot of flying hazards are more complex than “warn the user about something happening in the next few seconds”.

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

#582

Post by n_ermosh »

lovecg wrote: post #580
n_ermosh wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an interesting dynamic here--we (the industry today) are more okay with flying rickety airplanes from the 70s before flying something built with more modern engineering and production techniques. > As I understand it the idea here is to expand the market and spread certification costs out over more planes. exactly. > There are not enough people interested in a personal airplane at any price to support the cos…

> There's an interesting dynamic here--we (the industry today) are more okay with flying rickety airplanes from the 70s before flying something built with more modern engineering and production techniques. Any insights on why that is? My gut feeling is that it’s some combination of cost (there’s still a huge glut of old and cheap planes that basically work fine) and skepticism towards new, less proven models and tech…

I think there's definitely a "tried and true" and "if it aint broke don't fix it" mentality. Combine that with the fear of trying something new in the face of the FAA and regulatory barrier, many will say it's better to just take the risk on older stuff than make something new and better

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

#583

Post by j_heffe »

indymike wrote: post #454
mattmaroon wrote: post #98

I was shocked when learning to fly how much GA tech was stuck in some weird pre-World War II era state. Everything seems so needlessly complicated. Even small aircraft cost so much that I couldn’t imagine a computer controlled system and fly by wire would be cost prohibitive. Even a new C172 is close to $400k at the low end, and anything you’d actually want to fly is much more. A few grand in electronics seems worth…

> I was shocked when learning to fly how much GA tech was stuck in some weird pre-World War II era state. This is accurate. Between regulations and insurability, pilots have the choice of newer, less expensive, and more innovative experimental aircraft that are expensive to insure, or FAA-approved aircraft that were not even state of the art in 1952. It's so bad that most people are flying refurbished 1970s model pla…

I'm curious - are older models generally less reliable as well? Like driving a 70s Impala vs a new Tesla?

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

#584

Post by tass »

n_ermosh wrote: post #540
bloggie wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you trying that other companies have not tried? Ballistic parachutes are available on several aircraft. If you load up on redundancy - well, electronics redundancy it seems, since the rest of the aircraft seems to be a Sling TSi - you increase cost and weight, decrease speed and useable load, and so on, and now your aircraft costs $800k-1m and $100-150/hr to operate. How many new clients that would not other…

The core innovation here is the fly-by-wire/simplified control scheme. This doesn't exist in any GA aircraft. As our system has been developed so far, it has negligible impact on the speed and usable load of a base TSi, costing $500k for everything.

How do you deal with failures of the control scheme?

You mentioned elsewhere that redundancy means this is unlikely, but is there ever a reversion to "direct law"? Does the plane still have manual trim/rudder/throttle to deal with this, and are the pilots expected to periodically practice using the controls in "direct law"?

Do you have a working plane available for a test flight? :)

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

#585

Post by n_ermosh »

tass wrote: post #584
n_ermosh wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core innovation here is the fly-by-wire/simplified control scheme. This doesn't exist in any GA aircraft. As our system has been developed so far, it has negligible impact on the speed and usable load of a base TSi, costing $500k for everything.

How do you deal with failures of the control scheme? You mentioned elsewhere that redundancy means this is unlikely, but is there ever a reversion to "direct law"? Does the plane still have manual trim/rudder/throttle to deal with this, and are the pilots expected to periodically practice using the controls in "direct law"? Do you have a working plane available for a test flight? :)

You can revert to a "direct law" in an emergency should multiple faults occur that reduce the capability of the flight controller. However, there's a question of is that the right move--if a pilot isn't regularly practiced in flying in a direct control, its probably more dangerous to revert to direct law than to say, pull the parachute, so it would be up to the pilot to determine the best course of action. The system would still be fully "by wire" though, there isn't a mechanical link between the pilot and surfaces/throttle. But, in such a mode, the flight controller is bypassed and the yoke directly commands the actuators, reducing the number of fault points between the pilot's input and the actuator.

We've flown early versions in an test aircraft that we have and are currently integrating the latest version of Airhart Assist (seen in the video) into the Airhart Sling prototype to be flying and giving demos by the end of the year.

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

#586

Post by EncomLab »

baggachipz wrote: post #576
EncomLab wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't inject reason into a conversation that is largely defined by $$. GA is an incredibly tiny market - faa.gov has the current active non-student pilot population in the US as less than 500k. The survival of the companies that rely on that population is predicated on the tight regulatory environment - not in spite of it.

I'm sure you're right, but what if that population of people exploded due to a revamped system? Surely they'd benefit from a looser environment as well? I suppose it's a leap of faith they wouldn't be willing to take.

You know how fast drone legislation was passed? That's the power of the Commercial Aviation sector when it feels threatened. Now imagine how they would react if somehow an affordable aircraft that made flying "easy" hit the market. Icon came close...

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

#587

Post by sdeframond »

FabHK wrote: post #556
sdeframond wrote: post #431

> The problem is that small airplane technology hasn’t innovated and is stuck in the past. Flying a small airplane is complicated, mentally taxing, and dangerous—about 28x more dangerous than driving a car. I am surprised you don't mention fuel efficiency. Flying a small airplane is much less efficient than driving a car, especially on shorter trips due to take off and landing. And cars are already burning too much f…

A Diamond DA40 does around 28 miles per gallon ( The environmental impact is not the main issue here.

> you can go in a straight line rather than following roads

Yep. You also need another type of transportation to bring you to the airport and back. Given the price tag I doubt the target customer would take the bus.

> But it's not outrageously more so

More than too much is way too much.

> in aggregate much less than what cars consume now

The aggregate value is totally beside the point since one could always make up some subcategory for which the aggregate is small. What counts is the unit value per person per year. Unless of course we assume it is ok for some people to mess with climate while the others do more than their part to compensate.

> The environmental impact is not the main issue here

I respectfully and strongly disagree.

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

#588

Post by sdeframond »

yunohn wrote: post #434
AdrianB1 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the case. Driving from Bucharest to Vatra Dornei, Romania. No highway yet, the one in construction (A7) is still going around the Carpathian mountains for 370km, it will make the drive faster but not shorter. Also driving highway speed takes more gas.

> driving highway speed takes more gas Hmmm, in my experience, highway speeds are conducive to ICE efficiency and use less gas than city traffic stop and go results in. It also disperses pollution outside the areas people work/reside in.

Air resistance is not linear, which makes it difficult to be more efficient at higher speed, even if the engine is tuned for this.

In my personal experience with both my current and previous cars, the sweet spot is constant speed about 65 to 80kph.

It does feel slow though.

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

#589

Post by sdeframond »

FabHK wrote: post #564
duped wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't want to make a snarky, unabashadly NIMBY comment until I read this response. For every dollar you lower barrier to entry in aviation, I'm going to be calling my local government representatives to raise it back up by two with taxes and fees. The solutions to environmental problems aren't to grow markets with technology we know is bad so we have the money to make it less bad. The solution is to make it so exp…

Look, go ahead and increase fuel taxes. If you reduce car fuel consumption by just 1%, but this company succeeds and quintuples (!) the fuel consumption by piston engine planes, the environment still comes out ahead. Flying is a tiny environmental factor compared to driving. [Avgas consumption in the US is about 200m gallons a year, car fuel consumption some 130,000m gallons. Car plus planes 130,200m. Car -1%, planes…

> Flying is a tiny environmental factor compared to driving.

That's a common fallacy.

For example, i could say that the environmental impact of driving in my city is insignificant compared to the total. And that if you reduce emissions in others cities by just 1% in the rest of the world, but my citys emissions increase x5, the environment still come out ahead.

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

#590

Post by sdeframond »

n_ermosh wrote: post #110
shafyy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't try to weasel your way out of this. Just be honest and say you like working on cool plane tech stuff and admit it's not great for the environment when more people will fly. No shame in that. Or maybe there is shame, but that's up to you.

maybe I wasn't clear but I completely agree that airplanes are not good for the environment. That absolutely needs to be fixed. But to fix it requires capital and public demand. We are hoping to generate both by getting more people flying so that it's not just a niche people who fly planes and care about the environment working asking for it and spending money in the industry

So, in order to reduce airplanes environmental impact, your plan is to increase it first by putting more airplanes in the sky?

Sounds like some wicked variation of Jevon's paradox.

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