10 ms·

What the FAA has done to this guy is disgusting, they don't respond to requests and treat him like a little guy despite the impressive engineering here. I'm not

What the FAA has done to this guy is disgusting, they don't respond to requests and treat him like a little guy despite the impressive engineering here. I'm not a republican but this is a great example of government destroying innovation and progress through bureaucratic nonsense.

matt_morgan 4y ago
My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes. It's like the textbook case of when regulations work, and I don't think the FAA has a department of special exceptions. We can wishfor it, but it's not easy to handle someone who wants to do something different.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes Many of them do, but that certainly doesn't mean all of them do. It's really hard to see how using decades old engine designs with leaded gas is necessary to prevent crashes, or how updating a proven airframe to newer engine designs that have a lot of operating time in cars needs to be an extremely onerous process to avoid crashes.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Cars and planes have significantly different impacts on the engine. https://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft-do-car-engines-make-good-airplane-engines/ https://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft-do-car-engines-make-good-... > Car engines are designed to provide quick bursts of relatively high power output for acceleration, and then only modest power output for steady-state cruising. It’s unusual for an auto engine to operate anywhere near its redline rpm or max-rated power output. Airplanes, on the other hand, usually take off and climb near 100 percent power output, followed by steady-state cruise often at 75 percent power. Aircraft engines are designed to sustain this punishment reliably over a typical 2,000-hour service life. Try running your car’s engine at or near redline rpm all the time and see what happens. Of course, we don’t know what will happen, and in an airplane we can’t pull over to the side of the road when it does.
    - stenius 4y ago
      I personally don't know what will happen, but I figure that type of test is easy to do in a lab environment.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Easy, but quite expensive to have a meaningful sample size.
    - bischofs 4y ago
      the 24 hours of Le Mans, and tens of thousands of runabout marine applications with automotive engines disagree with you. The real question is would you prefer a 1950s Lycoming engine with a mechanical fueling system, or a modern car engine that has been proven in millions of vehicles?
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Le_Mans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Le_Mans says "Racing teams must balance the demands of speed with the cars' ability to run for 24 hours without mechanical failure", which implies a slightly shorter lifespan than you'd want in a plane.
      - aredox 4y ago
        As if running an engine for 24 hours was good enough for a plane! And le Mans is not an oval track: engines don't run at 100% all the time. And how many le Mans cars break down during the race?
    - cduzz 4y ago
      The story suggests they used a marine engine, which in turn is an automotive engine modified to run under marine conditions, which among other things includes "run at full load for hours" or "run at partial load for hours". Typically, of course, you're not seeing a lot of elevation changes in a marine application, but with modern fuel injection that's probably not such a big deal.
    - 4y ago
  - aeternum 4y ago
    The problem is that regulations are often a knee-jerk reaction without consideration to the second order effects. When a crash happens, add a rule to prevent it from happening again. Eventually however you have so many onerous rules that it becomes incredibly expensive to design a new aircraft engine and thus are suck with decades old tech that lacks modern innovation and safety features. It's very rare to do a pass over regulations to try to simplify them. From a regulatory POV, there is little glory in that and lots of risk.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      Exactly. This is similar to medical context, where it is found that decreasing regulations typically improves safety, both because it is easier to innovate and bring better products to market, but also because it increases liability of manufacturers: in a highly regulated market, they can say “sure, our device have caused you harm, but it operated exactly as FDA (or FAA) required, so take it up with them”. See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/fda-deregulation-increases-safety-and-innovation-and-reduces-prices.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/fd... for example. FAA overall has done a lot of good for the safety of the flyers (and I respect it much more than other regulatory agencies tasked with protecting us). The problem is that very often there is a trade off between safety and other things, and regulatory framework prohibits the people it is meant to serve from deciding on their own where exactly they want to be in terms of this trade off. For example, if motorcycles were invented today, they would almost certainly be banned as way too unsafe to operate. That would suck, because I love riding motorcycles.
      - ryandrake 4y ago
        Almost all of the innovation that's going on in light, piston airplanes today is happening in the experimental category. I've got newer, better, and safer avionics, sensors, lighting, and engine systems in the E/A-B category airplane I built in my garage than I would on a 1970's Cessna. The richness of inputs I have in the cabin, including a big moving map GPS, ADS-B traffic, satellite weather, carbon monoxide detection, a vast array of engine monitoring signals, AOA, and so on provide so much more in terms of safety and situational awareness. Pilots in the USA are truly lucky that we have this option.
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  Commercial aviation, sure. General aviation, e.g. a private pilot flying a Cessna 172 as in the article, is about as deadly per-mile as riding a motorcycle: far more dangerous than driving a car the same distance.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    The usage of 'per-mile' stats for aircraft safety irks me a little bit. It's certainly not how I think of safety when I hop on a plane - my internal comparison is more based on time - like, I'm about to spend 30 minutes on a plane, how much safer/less safe is that vs 30 minutes in a car? The distance comparison also doesn't make sense because it's not like you could drive across the ocean even if you tried. I guess it makes sense in terms of aggregate safety for a population for transport planning, but on an individual level it just doesn't communicate what I want to know. Edit: for an analogy - imagine if someone invented faster than light space travel, but 25% of passengers don't survive the trip. The deaths per 100 miles statistic would be amazing compared to both car and air travel, but would you sign up for a ticket?
    - tormeh 4y ago
      The point is, being a hobby pilot is extremely dangerous.
      - anamexis 4y ago
        Is it? In US General Aviation, there were 332 deaths in 19,454,467 flight hours in the year 2020. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...
        ineedasername 4y ago
        >Is it? Yes, it is. Very similar to how dangerous motorcycle riding is. Work out approx. hours of operation from miles driven (say avg. 30-50mph) and from there use annual fatalities. [1] Given that, death-per-hour for 332 deaths/19M in flight hours is roughly comparable to the 6000 deaths seen in motorcycle accidents. Much higher than automobiles, much higher than commercial flight. [1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcycle-crashes https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  The crash/death rate for piston general aviation is staggeringly high and a lot of it has to do with how unreliable ancient systems in the planes are, and task saturation from pilots still expected to manage stuff like fuel mixture settings by hand. It's almost entirely about protectionism of a massive industry of rebuilding and servicing companies for ancient engines and electromechanical systems, not safety or reliability. Compare a modern electronic gyro to its electromechanical cousin. The electromechanical version is unreliable, power-hungry, and extremely expensive to service. The modern electronic equivalent is ultra-reliable, can self-test, needs no servicing or repair, can contain its own battery to self-power in an emergency, and be networked with other devices in the cockpit. Want to put the electronic version in your plane? Ooooo, sorry, no can do, Mr. Airplane Owner, says the FAA. Can't hurt the profits of an entire industry dedicated to emptying your wallet of thousands of dollars every time your gyro needs to be rebuilt. A modern fuel-injected, water-cooled airplane engine can run constant self-diagnostics and logging, and provide highly useful, actionable information to both the pilot and mechanic. It's single-lever, increasing reliability and reducing task loading during the most critical phases of flight, and reducing emissions substantially, too. It doesn't have special considerations in terms of flight profiles; air-cooled piston airplane engines require a gentle descent profile or they will be "shock cooled" and undergo high wear or outright seize. There are no issues with carb freeze. Starting is a breeze, instead of a chore. The list goes on. We should be encouraging the hell out of EFI conversions and EFI engine options...but instead the FAA buries them all under mountains of paperwork and regulations to protect Lycoming and the like.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    What drives me nuts about those auto engines loaded with sensors is that all that info gets hidden behind the "check engine" light in cars, even in modern cars with big LCD displays. No, I don't want to plug something into an OBD-2 and bluetooth to a phone/laptop. Put the FUCKING INFO ON THE SCREEN. Speaking of protectionism, don't want your customers knowing what is actually wrong with the car...
    - jabl 4y ago
      Adding insult to injury, the standard OBD2 protocol provides parameters like engine rpm etc., and thus with the usual ELM323 OBD-bluetooth adapters you can get for cheap on aliexpress and the usual bunch of phone apps you don't get to see the error codes, or what the actually mean. Those error codes are manufacturer specific and the manufacturers don't tell the world what they mean, preferring you to go to their brand shop in order to read and decode them. For VAG (Volkswagen, Audi etc.) there's a software shops can use called VAG-COM that sells officially for a few $thousands, but you can get it very cheap from aliexpress (I'm quite sure it's pirated, so..). I guess something similar exists for other brands too.
- tysam_and 4y ago
  GA is extremely dangerous, piloting runs through part of my family and single-engine aircraft are for the post-midlife/retirement crisis that many pilots go through. It also is their deathbed. One family member was at breakfast that morning with several other pilots, all of whom had private aircraft except him (he is a voracious pilot, though). Every single one of them apparently had some extremely harrowing stories about engine failure, etc. Every one of them. It's not a game, and the FAA is really sleeping on the private sector as far as I understand. Its dying under bureaucracy. To respond to the parent comment as well -- I don't think this is a 'Republican', 'Democrat', or even a 'Libertarian' issue. All three of those parties have weaknesses that tend to screw over this kind of organization -- the first two with extremely bloated processes, and the second with perhaps far-too-little regulation. This is the kind of org that just needs good leadership with integrity and funding that focuses on getting the little guys up and out there, as well as promoting development and having _very strict_ best practices for safety. It's a very hard blend to do right, I think. Sorta a combination of reducing bloat and inferred/accidental corruption, etc, I think. (not to get terribly political, I do not like politics at all personally. Just talking through the technical points of the matter as much as I can. Much love! <3 <3 <3 <3 :)))))) :D :D :)))))) )
  - BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4y ago
    Mechanical engine failure is not a major factor in GA fatalities, mind you running out of gas is a big chunk of engine failure accidents. Weather exceeding pilot and/or airframe capability is the big killer. That includes black hole takeoffs where failure to use the instruments kills quickly. There's a bunch of fatal loss of control accidents where the pilot stall/spins out of a low level turn to the runway - which can happen when the engine quits on takeoff. With urban development crowding runways, you might just have to land on a roof. I have been fortunate in not needing to use such airports. Flying gliders I don't always make it back. I keep landable areas in reach. In one case a dark cloud over the hills blocked my way back and I had to retreat 30 km to an airport.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  >must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes Yes, at least somewhat: 1) The safety record of flying is often cited but that safety record pertains to commercial aircraft, not private aircraft. For hours of travel, private aircraft are significantly more lethal commercial flight and even more than driving [1] 2) The article mentions having to jump through regulatory hoops in the same sentence as literally putting out engine fires. Maybe the two are unrelated but I can see a strong public to regulatory hoops on something that, if done wrong, amounts to a small homemade fuel air bomb with 1,000lb+ of cessna debris added in to the mix if things go wrong. [1]https://www.wijet.com/private-jet-crash-statistics/#:~:text=In%20terms%20of%20numbers%2C%20less,and%20faster%20travels%20they%20do https://www.wijet.com/private-jet-crash-statistics/#:~:text=....
  - kragen 4y ago
    a fuel-air bomb is very much more difficult to build than you think it is it isn't going to happen by accident right now lots of people are getting exposed to fumes from both leaded gasoline itself and the combustion products from the engines, which probably kills more people than faulty civil aviation engines ever will
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      Yes sure, it's not literally a military-grade thermobaric explosion. It's a few hundred lbs of fuel strapped to a 1,000lb+ airframe and I don't mind regulations and oversight of such things when people want to propel them through the air. As for the rest, I agree...? I'm not sure how that was related. I think a dislike for leaded fuel is not incompatible with my comments indicating that some regulatory hoops are reasonable when creating customized aircraft.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        > I don't mind regulations and oversight of such things Do you think anyone is arguing against the existence of plane regulations?
- vkou 4y ago
  > My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes. Very few people die in large commercial aviation crashes, but the hobbyist pilot space is a graveyard. ~400 deaths/year in the US, ~13 deaths/100M miles traveled. Meanwhile, commercial aviation is closer to 0.002 deaths/100M miles traveled. Incidentally, the FAA rules around general aviation are a lot more relaxed than they are around commercial aviation. As a landlubber who occasionally spends a week geeking out about planes, but would never own one, their rules don't really seem to be ridiculous.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    So, about the same as motorcycles, with probably much less danger to the general public. I'd say most of these deaths (for both motorcycles and GA) can be attributed to poor judgement outside the scope of FAA regulations or road rules.
- voldacar 4y ago
  You are demonstrating a lot of status-quo bias
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Obligatory link to why the FAA maybe should have a couple of special exceptions. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/06/16/revitalizing-the-u-s-economy-through-government-spending/ https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/06/16/revitalizing-th...
- rlpb 4y ago
  I had an engine failure the other day. Fortunately I managed to land safely. Turns out that the problem had been brewing for a while. A modern engine design would have told me about the failure before it happened. The 1970's engine design did not. Nor did the retrofitted modern engine monitor that was certified and bought at great expense. The current certification regime makes aircraft more dangerous by preventing modern technology from reaching or replacing the current fleet.
- stackedinserter 4y ago
  There would be fewer crashes if FAA allowed us to fly modern planes instead of those relics from 60's
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

matt_morgan 4y ago

My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes. It's like the textbook case of when regulations work, and I don't think the FAA has a department of special exceptions. We can wishfor it, but it's not easy to handle someone who wants to do something different.

pdonis 4y ago
> all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes Many of them do, but that certainly doesn't mean all of them do. It's really hard to see how using decades old engine designs with leaded gas is necessary to prevent crashes, or how updating a proven airframe to newer engine designs that have a lot of operating time in cars needs to be an extremely onerous process to avoid crashes.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Cars and planes have significantly different impacts on the engine. https://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft-do-car-engines-make-good-airplane-engines/ https://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft-do-car-engines-make-good-... > Car engines are designed to provide quick bursts of relatively high power output for acceleration, and then only modest power output for steady-state cruising. It’s unusual for an auto engine to operate anywhere near its redline rpm or max-rated power output. Airplanes, on the other hand, usually take off and climb near 100 percent power output, followed by steady-state cruise often at 75 percent power. Aircraft engines are designed to sustain this punishment reliably over a typical 2,000-hour service life. Try running your car’s engine at or near redline rpm all the time and see what happens. Of course, we don’t know what will happen, and in an airplane we can’t pull over to the side of the road when it does.
  - stenius 4y ago
    I personally don't know what will happen, but I figure that type of test is easy to do in a lab environment.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Easy, but quite expensive to have a meaningful sample size.
  - bischofs 4y ago
    the 24 hours of Le Mans, and tens of thousands of runabout marine applications with automotive engines disagree with you. The real question is would you prefer a 1950s Lycoming engine with a mechanical fueling system, or a modern car engine that has been proven in millions of vehicles?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Le_Mans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Le_Mans says "Racing teams must balance the demands of speed with the cars' ability to run for 24 hours without mechanical failure", which implies a slightly shorter lifespan than you'd want in a plane.
    - aredox 4y ago
      As if running an engine for 24 hours was good enough for a plane! And le Mans is not an oval track: engines don't run at 100% all the time. And how many le Mans cars break down during the race?
  - cduzz 4y ago
    The story suggests they used a marine engine, which in turn is an automotive engine modified to run under marine conditions, which among other things includes "run at full load for hours" or "run at partial load for hours". Typically, of course, you're not seeing a lot of elevation changes in a marine application, but with modern fuel injection that's probably not such a big deal.
  - 4y ago
- aeternum 4y ago
  The problem is that regulations are often a knee-jerk reaction without consideration to the second order effects. When a crash happens, add a rule to prevent it from happening again. Eventually however you have so many onerous rules that it becomes incredibly expensive to design a new aircraft engine and thus are suck with decades old tech that lacks modern innovation and safety features. It's very rare to do a pass over regulations to try to simplify them. From a regulatory POV, there is little glory in that and lots of risk.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    Exactly. This is similar to medical context, where it is found that decreasing regulations typically improves safety, both because it is easier to innovate and bring better products to market, but also because it increases liability of manufacturers: in a highly regulated market, they can say “sure, our device have caused you harm, but it operated exactly as FDA (or FAA) required, so take it up with them”. See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/fda-deregulation-increases-safety-and-innovation-and-reduces-prices.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/fd... for example. FAA overall has done a lot of good for the safety of the flyers (and I respect it much more than other regulatory agencies tasked with protecting us). The problem is that very often there is a trade off between safety and other things, and regulatory framework prohibits the people it is meant to serve from deciding on their own where exactly they want to be in terms of this trade off. For example, if motorcycles were invented today, they would almost certainly be banned as way too unsafe to operate. That would suck, because I love riding motorcycles.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Almost all of the innovation that's going on in light, piston airplanes today is happening in the experimental category. I've got newer, better, and safer avionics, sensors, lighting, and engine systems in the E/A-B category airplane I built in my garage than I would on a 1970's Cessna. The richness of inputs I have in the cabin, including a big moving map GPS, ADS-B traffic, satellite weather, carbon monoxide detection, a vast array of engine monitoring signals, AOA, and so on provide so much more in terms of safety and situational awareness. Pilots in the USA are truly lucky that we have this option.
ericbarrett 4y ago
Commercial aviation, sure. General aviation, e.g. a private pilot flying a Cessna 172 as in the article, is about as deadly per-mile as riding a motorcycle: far more dangerous than driving a car the same distance.
- p1necone 4y ago
  The usage of 'per-mile' stats for aircraft safety irks me a little bit. It's certainly not how I think of safety when I hop on a plane - my internal comparison is more based on time - like, I'm about to spend 30 minutes on a plane, how much safer/less safe is that vs 30 minutes in a car? The distance comparison also doesn't make sense because it's not like you could drive across the ocean even if you tried. I guess it makes sense in terms of aggregate safety for a population for transport planning, but on an individual level it just doesn't communicate what I want to know. Edit: for an analogy - imagine if someone invented faster than light space travel, but 25% of passengers don't survive the trip. The deaths per 100 miles statistic would be amazing compared to both car and air travel, but would you sign up for a ticket?
  - tormeh 4y ago
    The point is, being a hobby pilot is extremely dangerous.
    - anamexis 4y ago
      Is it? In US General Aviation, there were 332 deaths in 19,454,467 flight hours in the year 2020. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...
      - ineedasername 4y ago
        >Is it? Yes, it is. Very similar to how dangerous motorcycle riding is. Work out approx. hours of operation from miles driven (say avg. 30-50mph) and from there use annual fatalities. [1] Given that, death-per-hour for 332 deaths/19M in flight hours is roughly comparable to the 6000 deaths seen in motorcycle accidents. Much higher than automobiles, much higher than commercial flight. [1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcycle-crashes https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...
KennyBlanken 4y ago
The crash/death rate for piston general aviation is staggeringly high and a lot of it has to do with how unreliable ancient systems in the planes are, and task saturation from pilots still expected to manage stuff like fuel mixture settings by hand. It's almost entirely about protectionism of a massive industry of rebuilding and servicing companies for ancient engines and electromechanical systems, not safety or reliability. Compare a modern electronic gyro to its electromechanical cousin. The electromechanical version is unreliable, power-hungry, and extremely expensive to service. The modern electronic equivalent is ultra-reliable, can self-test, needs no servicing or repair, can contain its own battery to self-power in an emergency, and be networked with other devices in the cockpit. Want to put the electronic version in your plane? Ooooo, sorry, no can do, Mr. Airplane Owner, says the FAA. Can't hurt the profits of an entire industry dedicated to emptying your wallet of thousands of dollars every time your gyro needs to be rebuilt. A modern fuel-injected, water-cooled airplane engine can run constant self-diagnostics and logging, and provide highly useful, actionable information to both the pilot and mechanic. It's single-lever, increasing reliability and reducing task loading during the most critical phases of flight, and reducing emissions substantially, too. It doesn't have special considerations in terms of flight profiles; air-cooled piston airplane engines require a gentle descent profile or they will be "shock cooled" and undergo high wear or outright seize. There are no issues with carb freeze. Starting is a breeze, instead of a chore. The list goes on. We should be encouraging the hell out of EFI conversions and EFI engine options...but instead the FAA buries them all under mountains of paperwork and regulations to protect Lycoming and the like.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  What drives me nuts about those auto engines loaded with sensors is that all that info gets hidden behind the "check engine" light in cars, even in modern cars with big LCD displays. No, I don't want to plug something into an OBD-2 and bluetooth to a phone/laptop. Put the FUCKING INFO ON THE SCREEN. Speaking of protectionism, don't want your customers knowing what is actually wrong with the car...
  - jabl 4y ago
    Adding insult to injury, the standard OBD2 protocol provides parameters like engine rpm etc., and thus with the usual ELM323 OBD-bluetooth adapters you can get for cheap on aliexpress and the usual bunch of phone apps you don't get to see the error codes, or what the actually mean. Those error codes are manufacturer specific and the manufacturers don't tell the world what they mean, preferring you to go to their brand shop in order to read and decode them. For VAG (Volkswagen, Audi etc.) there's a software shops can use called VAG-COM that sells officially for a few $thousands, but you can get it very cheap from aliexpress (I'm quite sure it's pirated, so..). I guess something similar exists for other brands too.
tysam_and 4y ago
GA is extremely dangerous, piloting runs through part of my family and single-engine aircraft are for the post-midlife/retirement crisis that many pilots go through. It also is their deathbed. One family member was at breakfast that morning with several other pilots, all of whom had private aircraft except him (he is a voracious pilot, though). Every single one of them apparently had some extremely harrowing stories about engine failure, etc. Every one of them. It's not a game, and the FAA is really sleeping on the private sector as far as I understand. Its dying under bureaucracy. To respond to the parent comment as well -- I don't think this is a 'Republican', 'Democrat', or even a 'Libertarian' issue. All three of those parties have weaknesses that tend to screw over this kind of organization -- the first two with extremely bloated processes, and the second with perhaps far-too-little regulation. This is the kind of org that just needs good leadership with integrity and funding that focuses on getting the little guys up and out there, as well as promoting development and having _very strict_ best practices for safety. It's a very hard blend to do right, I think. Sorta a combination of reducing bloat and inferred/accidental corruption, etc, I think. (not to get terribly political, I do not like politics at all personally. Just talking through the technical points of the matter as much as I can. Much love! <3 <3 <3 <3 :)))))) :D :D :)))))) )
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4y ago
  Mechanical engine failure is not a major factor in GA fatalities, mind you running out of gas is a big chunk of engine failure accidents. Weather exceeding pilot and/or airframe capability is the big killer. That includes black hole takeoffs where failure to use the instruments kills quickly. There's a bunch of fatal loss of control accidents where the pilot stall/spins out of a low level turn to the runway - which can happen when the engine quits on takeoff. With urban development crowding runways, you might just have to land on a roof. I have been fortunate in not needing to use such airports. Flying gliders I don't always make it back. I keep landable areas in reach. In one case a dark cloud over the hills blocked my way back and I had to retreat 30 km to an airport.
ineedasername 4y ago
>must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes Yes, at least somewhat: 1) The safety record of flying is often cited but that safety record pertains to commercial aircraft, not private aircraft. For hours of travel, private aircraft are significantly more lethal commercial flight and even more than driving [1] 2) The article mentions having to jump through regulatory hoops in the same sentence as literally putting out engine fires. Maybe the two are unrelated but I can see a strong public to regulatory hoops on something that, if done wrong, amounts to a small homemade fuel air bomb with 1,000lb+ of cessna debris added in to the mix if things go wrong. [1]https://www.wijet.com/private-jet-crash-statistics/#:~:text=In%20terms%20of%20numbers%2C%20less,and%20faster%20travels%20they%20do https://www.wijet.com/private-jet-crash-statistics/#:~:text=....
- kragen 4y ago
  a fuel-air bomb is very much more difficult to build than you think it is it isn't going to happen by accident right now lots of people are getting exposed to fumes from both leaded gasoline itself and the combustion products from the engines, which probably kills more people than faulty civil aviation engines ever will
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    Yes sure, it's not literally a military-grade thermobaric explosion. It's a few hundred lbs of fuel strapped to a 1,000lb+ airframe and I don't mind regulations and oversight of such things when people want to propel them through the air. As for the rest, I agree...? I'm not sure how that was related. I think a dislike for leaded fuel is not incompatible with my comments indicating that some regulatory hoops are reasonable when creating customized aircraft.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > I don't mind regulations and oversight of such things Do you think anyone is arguing against the existence of plane regulations?
vkou 4y ago
> My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes. Very few people die in large commercial aviation crashes, but the hobbyist pilot space is a graveyard. ~400 deaths/year in the US, ~13 deaths/100M miles traveled. Meanwhile, commercial aviation is closer to 0.002 deaths/100M miles traveled. Incidentally, the FAA rules around general aviation are a lot more relaxed than they are around commercial aviation. As a landlubber who occasionally spends a week geeking out about planes, but would never own one, their rules don't really seem to be ridiculous.
- jojobas 4y ago
  So, about the same as motorcycles, with probably much less danger to the general public. I'd say most of these deaths (for both motorcycles and GA) can be attributed to poor judgement outside the scope of FAA regulations or road rules.
voldacar 4y ago
You are demonstrating a lot of status-quo bias
rippercushions 4y ago
Obligatory link to why the FAA maybe should have a couple of special exceptions. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/06/16/revitalizing-the-u-s-economy-through-government-spending/ https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/06/16/revitalizing-th...
rlpb 4y ago
I had an engine failure the other day. Fortunately I managed to land safely. Turns out that the problem had been brewing for a while. A modern engine design would have told me about the failure before it happened. The 1970's engine design did not. Nor did the retrofitted modern engine monitor that was certified and bought at great expense. The current certification regime makes aircraft more dangerous by preventing modern technology from reaching or replacing the current fleet.
stackedinserter 4y ago
There would be fewer crashes if FAA allowed us to fly modern planes instead of those relics from 60's

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]