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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#71

Post by n_ermosh »

purplerhino wrote: post #69

What are the environmental implications of transitioning people traveling by car/train to small planes? In addition to being louder and dispersing pollutants over a wider area, don't small planes generate significantly more GHG emissions than cars over the same number of miles? Also, given that planes are not nearly as easy to electrify as cars and trains (energy density is significantly lower in batteries than liqui…

Today, airplanes are not great when it comes to their environmental impacts. If we are successful in our bet that we can grow the GA market, we'll have the resources to invest into greener propulsion technology. That space is currently evolving quickly, with hybrid-electric, hydrogen, full electric and others all being explored. So it's in our plans to address that as well.

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

#72

Post by _jss »

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 ?

Take a look at the more economical modern GA aircraft. A Cirrus SR22 can run at 10 gallons per hour, with a ground speed of 160+ mph.

Yes, it’s more total fuel consumption than a car (but in an hour covering 2x the distance, and allowing to travel more directly) but not at all close to turbine or turboprops. At the extremely cheap (accessible to more pilots) side for pressurized planes, fuel burn is going to be 40gph and it just goes up from there.

There are many variables, and winds work for or against—but by doing good flight planning you use the winds to your advantage.

There is also a lot of research on better aviation fuels (100ll :(((). I’m excited about that part of it, more so than the current electric planes (although electric self-launching gliders are pretty neat)

MOSIAC is going to make light sport aircraft more useful, which will also help in this area.

Tons of interesting stuff happening here!

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

#73

Post by stetrain »

rglullis wrote: post #41
n_ermosh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreed. I'd love a high speed rail system in the US. but we're engineers not politicians :)

[flagged]

Even just analyzing it on a person-mile-efficiency basis, moving from personal cars to personal aircraft is the wrong direction.

Trains obviously do well at that metric, but I'm not opposed to exploring other options on that side of the spectrum.

Pitching a market move towards smaller, less-efficient vehicles is anti-sustainable.

The better pitch for this kind of technology is probably on the order of modernizing flight training to improve safety and relevance of the pipeline that creates commercial aircraft pilots, rather than significantly expanding personal travel by personal aircraft.

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

#75

Post by n_ermosh »

michaelmior wrote: post #60

This looks really cool! I'm curious if you're able to share any details on how you plan to manage autonomous landing. There are obviously a lot of moving parts there from communicating with ATC, finding a safe landing zone, actually bringing the plane down, and I'm sure many other things I haven't thought of as a non-pilot.

our system has a complete picture of what airports exist in the vicinity and can plan a path to get their fairly trivially. ATC communication can be done by the system automatically as a "broadcast only" emergency message with it's intentions and rely on ATC to give the airplane priority (though we'll have obstacle avoidance as well to avoid other traffic that ATC can't get out of the way). There are other systems on board that let ATC know that your airplane is in an emergency and needs to full priority.

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

#76

Post by kspacewalk2 »

n_ermosh wrote: post #36
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #14

Wondering what you think about this video[0], which (if one ignores the clickbaity and colourful language and focuses on the substance of the argument) frames problems with mass adoption of "flying cars" as fundamental and idea-killing non-starters, rather than hurdles to work hard on, and overcome. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fcWOivJ6bs

I love this guy. trains solve all the worlds problems :) His discussion is focused a bit more on europe which I think is a very different environment than the US. We don't have trains and want to go larger distances more regularly. We also have a much larger airport infrastructure and a complex airspace system that handles the issue of flying over populated areas and flying approaches safely quite well. So as long as…

>We don't have trains

If you take optimizing transportation options as a holistic problem, rather than focusing on any individual user who needs to travel those 50-500 km distances, more trains is a far more straightforward and efficient investment than flying cars, no?

>We also have a much larger airport infrastructure and a complex airspace system that handles the issue of flying over populated areas and flying approaches safely quite well.

Well, yes, at the scale of our current number of commercial aviation flights and a very small number of private planes. You're proposing to kick it up how many orders of magnitude, if we're talking number of air vehicles simultaneously in the air? You need to build an entirely different traffic control system for that, and noise pollution becomes a far more vexing problem. That last one, I'm guessing, is the idea killer if we're talking more than a small number of flying cars. If you ever get to a point where this is an actual concern, i.e. there are actually a lot of them in the air, wait until those rural voters get their hands on you and start contacting their state lawmakers, and until those representatives start law-making.

> So as long as things aren't falling of the plane over someone house (which really isn't a problem even with todays airplanes)

But it is a problem that increases with the number of vehicles in the air.

>I think until we get high speed rail, small airplanes are the next best thing

Is it though? Building good passenger rail (no need for actual HSR) is a solved problem with proven solutions, tested for decades all over the world. How many decades will it take to actually develop a "production-ready" small airplane operable by very quickly trained sorta-pilots, and then deploy the infrastructure needed for N of them to safely operate in an M-kilometer radius? I don't have a good feel for what you think N and M will be, so it's hard to tell. But I'm gonna go ahead and guess it's a far less well-defined question than "how long will it take to connect two cities with 200 kmh rail link".

edit: yes, I'm nay-saying, playing devil's advocate while rooting for the devil just a tiny bit, but I'm not trying to be a jerk, and I am open minded and looking forward to your responses.

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

#77

Post by nurple »

Digitalization of aircraft is a really interesting space right now! Even local legislatures are talking to media about "vertiports" (ostensibly to justify the CEOs flying to the office, we promise it's coming to you), though I really wonder how they'll drop an R44/66/Bell505 sized aircraft into a business park because of the noise.

I'm watching two companies in this space(I guess 3 now!):

Hill Helicopters[0] is working on a ground-up build of an aircraft, turboshaft engine, and an avionics suite that you can "drive like a car". It's an enormous undertaking, and I'm not sure if they'll pull it off or not.

The second one is Skyryse[1] and their SkyOS. They're focusing on the avionics like you guys, and putting it in an R66 initially, though they plan fixed-wing versions as well. It is also intended to be a single-stick input which can handle emergency situations automatically; they've already demonstrated their first automatic manned autorotation.

I do think that one of the bigger problems in aviation is cost. Most people can't afford an aircraft whether it flew itself or not. This leads to people not flying enough to become excellent and safe pilots. I've been working on my rotorwing addon and the R44 time is $750/hr!?! If you look at the cost of aviation indexed against median income, it has increased over 5x since the cessna 172 era. In cities, another big problem is hangarage, these have waiting lists currently in the decades and costs in the range of a new home.

Another area I'd really like to see more innovation in is aircraft design. Besides Mr Ruttan, everyone just builds tried and true designs and rarely explore the edges of what is possible.

I will also say, while I think that the range you're targetting is smart, and the mass of mostly unused airfields is staggeringly sad to me, there are a lot more issues than just getting there that need to have infrastructure that I'm not sure will be easy to scale.

I think the reason we see gov talking about vertiports now is because in medium-to-large cities they are completely lost on how to solve the traffic issues (hence rich powerful people asking for them). One area that I don't think aviation looks at enough is relatively short-range travel. If you think of a time-topography map of a city, you could make a much larger city, by area, if you can shrink the time it takes to travel (i.e. same QoL if I can go 50mi in 15min vs 10).

0. https://www.hillhelicopters.com/

1. https://www.skyryse.com/

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

#78

Post by n_ermosh »

_jss wrote: post #72
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 ?

Take a look at the more economical modern GA aircraft. A Cirrus SR22 can run at 10 gallons per hour, with a ground speed of 160+ mph. Yes, it’s more total fuel consumption than a car (but in an hour covering 2x the distance, and allowing to travel more directly) but not at all close to turbine or turboprops. At the extremely cheap (accessible to more pilots) side for pressurized planes, fuel burn is going to be 40gph…

yep! lots of interesting stuff indeed!

Our plane will be ~7 gph at cruise burning unleaded fuels and fly ~170mph over the ground (with no wind)

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

#79

Post by n_ermosh »

newsclues wrote: post #57

Could this enable a cheaper flight as a service? Short hops from city to city or the cottage, with cheaper pilots it could be lower cost.

I hope so! That's definitely a use case we want to see happen, but when you start charging people for flights things get... complicated

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

#80

Post by chinathrow »

michaelmior wrote: post #60

This looks really cool! I'm curious if you're able to share any details on how you plan to manage autonomous landing. There are obviously a lot of moving parts there from communicating with ATC, finding a safe landing zone, actually bringing the plane down, and I'm sure many other things I haven't thought of as a non-pilot.

Autoland for higher range GA planes is nothing new, but still impressive.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/aviation/five-ways-garmin-...

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