Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane
In the US, trips that are 50-300 miles are almost all done by car because that distance is too short for commercial airlines and too far for public transportation. Thanks to the Wright Brothers we've had aerial transport for over 100 years. The US has over 19,000 airports, and large commercial airplane technology has developed to the point that the planes practically fly themselves. If we already have the infrastructure and the technology, why isn't everyone flying planes?
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. Outdated airplanes, coupled with outdated flight controls, lead to regular accidents, often due to some form of loss of control. The planes are expensive and margins are small. There is no incentive to innovate within the current market, so we are looking at the new, untapped market of those who don’t think about flying as an option today and making it an option.
I first came across this when I learned to fly in 2020. I was learning in a “modern” GA airplane but was immediately struck by the fact that an airplane built in 2018 did not have an engine computer and there was a manual level to control the fuel/air mixture ratio. Starting it on a hot day was like starting a stubborn lawn mower. On top of that, my instructor was telling me all the various ways I could kill myself if I’m not running at 100% concentration for hours on end. This just didn’t sit right with me.
At the time I was working at SpaceX as an avionics engineer, leading the development of the avionics for the fairing recovery program. I also built autonomous aircraft when I was a student at Cornell, where I got a degree in electrical and computer engineering. It was clear to me that the core problem is that airplanes are too unsafe and too complicated to operate which is keeping too many people out of aviation. So, I decided to leave SpaceX and was joined by my long-time friend Brendan (he was a software engineer at Apple at the time; we built autonomous aircraft together at Cornell) to start Airhart to tackle this problem and make flying safer and more accessible.
We are developing a full hardware and software package to change how people fly airplanes. It’s a fly-by-wire control system, meaning instead of mechanical linkages between the pilot’s control stick and the control surfaces, it’s a joystick that sends digital commands to a computer that then moves the control surfaces accordingly with servo actuators. We’re developing all of the hardware ourselves: the computers, the sensors, the actuators–and all of the software that actually does the control. But it’s not just fly-by-wire. On top of it, we are implementing a simplified control scheme that reduces flying the airplane to just one action to perform one maneuver.
For readers who aren’t pilots: all flying is basically coordinating the aircraft pitch, roll, yaw, and throttle to coordinate actions. Something as simple as a level turn to the right means you have to 1) roll the airplane, 2) use your feet on the rudder pedals to keep the turn coordinated, 3) pull back to increase your lift since you are now losing lift in a bank, 4) monitor your airspeed (especially if at slow speeds when coming in to land), 5) monitor your altitude as you’re adjusting your lift in (3), 6) monitor your turn coordination as you adjust it in (2). You are now established in a ...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadWhat do you think of 1. Licenses 2. Air traffic control & routing for personal crafts 3. Landing / Takeoff / Turbulence (weather) - where typically most of the human skill today is used in for commercial flights. 4. and probably the one for interface design and overall autonomous systems - human decision making + autonomous systems really have a difficult time working in tandem - fully autonomous is less risky at an aggregate level but puts onus and more of the blame on the company / maker versus human-in-the-loop.
1. today, you need a PPL to fly this plane. However, a new set of regulations, called MOSAIC, is coming down the pipeline that have support for aircraft with simplified control systems and getting licensed in such aircraft, specifically when they are small, light airplanes. Basically, you'll be able to get a license in such a plane, skip the parts of tests that don't apply, and be restricted to only flying that type of airplane (This is my interpretation, I obviously don't speak for the FAA)
2. The current ATC system handles personal aircraft quite well. this is especially true in busy airspaces like LA. Our hope is to create a more automated routing system where you just enter the destination you want to fly to, the system generates the route taking into account, terrain, weather, winds, standard routes, airways, etc, files it with ATC for you, and you just confirm that it's a good path and be on your way.
3. This is the core of our system. In the demo video, the landing I'm doing has a cross wind with some gusts and you can see the system handles it super easily and makes it significantly easier to takeoff and land, even in turbulence. you can barely tell there was any kind of weather at all.
4. This is a tough one for sure. One core thing we are doing is having our joystick be active and have force feedback. So when flying, you can "feel" what the system is trying to do and you can push back on it if you don't like what it's doing. You as the pilot are still in charge of what happens, we just making it easier for you to execute on it. Additionally, there's lots of UI elements that will provide hints to what you are asking the plane to do + what it can do + what it's actually doing. This should help close that loop so that the pilot is still in control, while letting the system handle the aviating elements of flying.
What about the scenario where you are in climb out, 50' AGL, and wind rotor off some trees gives you an immediate 90 degree roll (happened to me in a PA38), does the system auto recover that, does the pilot, what happens if the panicking pilot attempts incorrect controls, ...
Not saying all this isn't solvable, but it's complicated and I'm struggling to see how you are going to get a large enough market to deliver all this tech at an affordable price. Force feedback controllers, flying and engine controls all with redundant sensors and actuators, mechanically robust ...
The GPS and gyroscope reimplementation would appear to be a business opportunity in themselves - presumably there is a reason someone hasn’t undercut those parts already. Small market?
I suspect the answer is simply regulations. Far too many modern things in aviation have been held back by the FAA.
It's a bad idea to get pilots in the air with less training. People can't safely pilot cars in two dimensions.
Making the avionics easier to use and more affordable sounds like the actual winning product.
I think this is a flawed view of the problem, even with an industry-grade FCS to work with. If you're in the air, you should know how to break out of a stall, belly-land in an emergency, or route around turbulence as it crops up. These things happen, and preventing someone from doing a loop-de-loop won't eliminate a category of failure-modes.
This is something I very much wish would be a reality one day, but you'll be kicking yourself with every incident report that blames bad piloting. One can only hope that they wouldn't risk their own life trusting an untrained pilot.
I'd also be deathly afraid of what happens when the automation inevitably fails.
Also, under the upcoming MOSAIC regulations, such airplanes will be LSAs and flyable with a sport pilot license.
"failing to control the airplane" is a little like saying everyone dies of heart failure. Yes their heart stopped - but why!?
The real cause is somewhat earlier. Why was a normally competent pilot in a situation where they no longer adequately controlled the aircraft?
Improve avionics - great. Improve situational awareness - really helpful. Handling should be way down the list - it becomes quite intuitive very quickly.
Garmin is the clear leader in the certified avionics class for general aviation aircraft these days. If you somehow manage to capture a part of their market, you win big time.
Reality is that without North American continental range, it just isn’t worth it to go get a pilots license and buy a plane for the few trips that I can just easily drive. Maybe if I lived in Boston, General Aviation would be great, but for many Americans who live in areas in the middle that aren’t near large airports, the range of these aircraft just make them expensive toys that aren’t very useful for the size of North America.
I know little to nothing about GA, but... it only makes sense to take time if the procedures are still done somehow manually, like speaking with human operators out there. It true, the dependence on a fallible human attention for something that can be automated, that right there is a safety hazard to me.
My suspicion is that the middle of the Venn diagram between "can afford a $500K aircraft" and "doesn't fly GA because they're not going to stay proficient enough to be safe" is vanishingly small. The doctors who fly their Cirrus once a year think they're Maverick so they don't care about the safety features. The guys who fly every chance they get aren't the ones stall spinning on base to final.
But I think the main reason why people don't do that who can't afford a multi-million dollar private jet is that if you take a compass circle and draw it around your location with the range of your average GA aircraft anywhere that's not on the east or west coast you get 4 or 5 cities that you aren't likely to travel to anyways. America is just too big a place for these types of aircraft.
Plus, while there may be all these airports that you are mentioning, can you really count on getting fuel to take you back at these minor airports or the FBOs to service outside a much shorter list of airports? That cuts the range away even more.
From a speed perspective, one thing that would make a lot of difference is speeding up the preflight. Now you have to pull the plane out of the hangar, go to the fuel pump, fill multiple fuel tanks, check the oil, sump the fuel tanks, etc. Electronic sensors for oil and water in the fuel, a simpler fuel system, and a built-in electric motor for getting out of the hangar might save 20+ minutes per flight, which would actually be better than even a faster plane because these tasks are annoying and dirty.
Another thing that would be great is a bigger baggage compartment with electric power for folding e-bikes or scooters. America is amazing in the number of small airports we have, but most of them have no rental cars and are outside of town.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fcWOivJ6bs
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 things aren't falling of the plane over someone house (which really isn't a problem even with todays airplanes) I think until we get high speed rail, small airplanes are the next best thing
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.
maybe. But people are still tied to the trains schedule and don't have the "get in a go" freedom that they do with a car. I don't know the details of what it actually takes to build a train network but my intuition is telling that it's fundamentally more investment because of the land requirements.
> You need to build an entirely different traffic control system for that
probably true. but I think it'll take some time to get there and that gives us the opportunity to invest in that. The more modernized airplanes we have, the more opportunity we have to start creating a more automated ATC system that uses digital communication between the airplane and ATC, rather than the voice system we use today.
> But it is a problem that increases with the number of vehicles in the air.
We (as an industry) have gotten pretty good at knowing how to build an airplane so that parts don't fall off (this is a facetious example, I'm really referring to general system reliability) that revolves around rigorous production standard, and those we definitely must continue to follow.
> Building good passenger rail (no need for actual HSR) is a solved problem with proven solutions
True, but even those solutions are starting to become outdated. Rail also has a very high safety bar because of the consequence of failure, so developing a new rail network is really hard too.
> How many decades will it take to actually develop a "production-ready"...
We expect that we will 10x the number of vehicles flying over the next 10 years, so N is ~10k, and M is 500km. In the US, we already have that infrastructure, and I suspect (based on not much but my own intuition) is that it'll take another 10 years to get that infrastructure updated to support every 3x (sqrt(10)) increase in N
I'd recommend pitching this to (new) pilots instead at least for starters.
Many students get the hang of hovering within 10 hours - "learning to fly" really isn't that hard? I see the rest of the course as "learning to become a pilot." That means the background knowledge and practice to allow decision making & dealing with emergencies etc.
I think if you could improve just a single one of the problems you touch on (difficult controls, navigation, mass and balance, fly by wire etc) you could make a lot of money...
... But improving all of them in one shot... that sounds unreasonable to me? Are they really connected?
> Our system makes it impossible to lose control of the airplane, potentially solving 80% of today’s fatal accidents in general aviation.
I'd love to see details on how you achieved this... or at least your definition of "impossible"...
Basically, you can't command the plane to do anything it can't safely do. If you pull the stick full back, you'll just climb at your maximum safe angle of attack. Hold the stick full right, you'll be turning at a 45 degree bank. Compared to todays planes, which you have to actively be on top of and "ahead of" the entire them they are being flown.
With "traditional" controls and an autopilot failure, you still have control over all the control surfaces.
With your solution, you don't have enough hand axis to fall back to manual flying? How can the computer possibly guarantee safe flight in all conditions?
In the case of an e.g. air speed sensor failure, how do you get on the ground safely? Is the answer "Just BRS"? Or multiple sensors etc. ?
As other commenters have point out though, where this stuff falls short is ultimately still the human. Ok, great… your aircraft won’t stall in Normal Law. However you’ve now lost a generator and a whole FCC and you’re in direct law. The 400 hr pilot hasn’t actually flown a plane with direct input since their primary training 5 years ago. They also don’t remember what the different flight envelopes do and do not provide. Essentially the system is more complex but normally it works so the complexity is hidden. They’re not equipped to handle flying the airplane anymore.
This is where GA really ultimately falls short IMHO, proficiency. Airlines are the safest they’ve ever been because the pilots make an entire career out of being prepared for every contingency. People using airplanes as a personal travel tool can be trained and proficient to the same degree but often they are not because flying an aircraft is ancillary to their primary mission.
you're totally correct that emergencies are where the real issues lie. That's why we've built in multiple layers of fault tolerance so that a generator failure or a flight computer failure doesn't immediately revert you to a direct law control scheme (I'm assuming you're familiar with Airbus control laws given that you're using those phrases)
On top of everything, small GA aircraft have the luxury of being to use a ballistic parachute (which we will have) to bring the entire airframe to the ground in the event of a complete system failure. Which is always better than just letting the airplane crash into the ground.
I agree that proficiency is a fundamental issue. We want to make it easy to be and stay proficient. If flying becomes part of the primary mission, you do it more often and as a result stay proficient. The most dangerous pilots are the ones who haven't flown in 3 years and jump into a plane for an IFR cross country to an airport they've never been to before. We don't want that to happen either.
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 otherwise have gone into GA will you attract? Dual navigation is already commonly available. So what are you doing different that YC was interested in paying for?
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.
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? :)
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.
Our hope is that GA pilots will no longer need to do things like train stall recovery. We are moving into an era of aviation where aircraft (not just airplanes) will be complicated enough that computers have to be in the loop to handle things like that, because it allows us to create more interesting aerodynamic aircraft that are more efficient and have better performance.
regarding something like AF447, the immediate answer is we have the ballistic parachute as a final backup in case the pilot is unable to land the plane, for whatever reason. Realistically, it would depend entirely on the exact situation our plane was in, what systems have failed vs which haven't, and the pilots actual skill level
I hate everything about this thought process. Every pilot should know how to handle stall recovery, for the same reason that every driver should know how to handle loss of traction whether they have traction control or not. Driving the skill bar to the bottom intentionally will just result in more and more people flying without a clue what they're doing, just like we have on the roads today.
Have y'all considered that a fully digitized, fly-by-wire aircraft, of the type that you're proposing to build, would also essentially be a ridiculously high-fidelity flight simulator whenever and wherever it is sitting still with the engine off?
This could be part of your pitch—the pilot could program in a flight plan and then fly it in simulation, practice all the radio work etc., using the actual physical controls they would use to do it for real, then go do it for real all in the same chair.
Especially when it comes to practicing radio calls, it's the repetition that breeds competence and therefore confidence.
So, pilots who aren't legal to fly?
As a software engineer and private pilot, I'll take mechanical controls connected to the flight surfaces and my competency as a pilot to risk my own life, rather than turn it over to other software engineers, hoping they get everything right, leaving me with no real connection to the flight control surfaces when the shit hits the fan.
I'd at least have to know what kind of engineering process and change management practices or functional safety procedures are being followed by the company developing this stuff before I'd even consider going for a ride in such a plane.
A bit off-topic but this is a political problem, not a technical one. Trips of 50-300 miles are certainly within the operating range of fast and efficient rail travel as demonstrated in multiple places around the world outside of the US.
I definitely applaud the goal of improving GA safety, there is certainly a lot to improve in that regard even if the end result isn't a huge increase in the number of family roadtrips taken in personal aircraft.
that's kind of how I see it too, the failed version of this is that GA is safer than it is today.
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.
We want our airplanes to be more efficient than cars, but to get there we need to first scale the market.
Why is it that you think it's feasible to put all this effort to "scale the market", but getting to something like "building efficient passenger rail" or even "offer a comfortable, fast intercity bus" is out of your reach?
The US doesn't "need" flying. It needs a more efficient way to move passengers. To suggest that small planes are ever going to be more efficient than mass transit is delusional. The US needs to move away from "personal" transportation and invest in multi-modal, public mass-transit. And yes, there are still plenty of opportunities for engineers to do that.
Because personal planes will get them the attention and support (and more importantly, money) of wealthy customers and investors, and building rail gets you none of that because you're just suggesting using known technology and resources to solve problems, and that's boooooooring.
Why solve the actual transportation needs of a populace that cannot move efficiently when you can build yet another stupid toy for the rich?
People think of freeways as vital, so it's ok if I-69 through southern Indiana takes over 30 years from initial studies to completion.
If a train route took 30 years to build, it would be lambasted as a boondoggle and abandoned.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-ci...
Even if you build the train some people won't give it a try, sadly. A lot of carbon was spewed in to the air to fly him and his suitcase over the capitol corridor tracks.
They might be more willing to try if the service prices included the cost of the associated emissions.
It would also help if there were integrated ticketing the way there is in, say, Germany. If you buy a plane and a train ticket and miss a connection then you eat the cost of the ticket. Even better would be if luggage were integrated, but that would be asking for a lot more annoying security on trains I think.
It doesn't help that the website is terrible at helping you plan a trip, if you say "I want to leave on Monday" but there are no trains at the station on Monday, it just takes you to a page saying "there are no routes, sorry" instead of suggesting the next day a train is available. I found a download link for the train schedule, and it took me a solid 10 minutes to figure out what I was looking at. (If you're following along at home: the big bold date at the top of the page is completely irrelevant. It's just today's date, so you know when you downloaded the PDF. Because of course that's why you downloaded the PDF in the first place.)
I have a friend who is really excited about trains, and he wanted to take a weekend Amtrak trip. The only way he could make it work was to ride the train up and have someone at his destination who was willing to drive him back. And even then, most of the trip was plodding along in the darkness, because the train only stops at our city in the dead of night.
They're supposed to be putting in some new lines in the coming years, one of which will stop by our city. I'm cautiously optimistic, though I'm not sure how useful those lines will be if there's no trains rolling on them at reasonable hours.
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.
I don't live in Europe, but I was there earlier this year going from Amsterdam to Paris. That's 430km/260mi direct from what I can find. I took the train, it took 3.5 hours, direct from central Amsterdam to central Paris, and no security theatre. And I had leg room!
The train is a superior experience to flying in pretty much every way, the challenge is often cost - trains can be more expensive. And, of course, this is really only possible because flying doesn't have its externalities priced in.
The company is trying to solve transportation for the 50 to 300 mile range (around 80 to 500 km). Trains can easily do this.
Anyway, in China the Beijing to Guangzhou high-speed rail covers the 2200 km distance in 8 hours. Costs $120.
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Do note that — while I do understand there's an environmental impact (and I hope technology improves to eliminate this impact) — I'm not against flying. I love flying. In fact I wanted to become a commercial pilot myself.
I'm happy for everyone to fly to and from work if they'd also pay for cleaning up the pollution it causes. We have several options, carbfix and olivine weathering come to mind but there's also at least one company who turns atmospheric CO2 back into fuel, we just need to start doing it after realising that what we're doing is only possible because the climate hasn't caught up with current habits yet
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 harder to overcome while maintaining an American standard of personal liberty than even the complications surrounding building rail. As a native of San Francisco and the surrounding area I have tried for decades to utilize public transit. The infrastructure isn’t great, but it’s also not terrible or anything. But in years where my job/living situation have me using public transit every day, my rate of exposure to human excrement or someone who wouldn’t even be aware that they physically harmed me was greater than once a week. In phases of my life where I’m driving everywhere that rate is practically zero. That stress takes a toll on my health that I have a natural instinct to avoid.
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.”
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 miles. I can't live where I work, it would triple my mortgage.
I can't go anywhere else on a train. I can't go to the grocery store on a train, there aren't any.
The US is big. It's just the way it is, and it's not going to change.
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”
We have a train network. Amtrak is barely used, costs more than flying, and you still have to rent a car at the end of your multi-day trip on the train. The US is HUGE.
I lived in a mass transit society (Japan) for years. It's fundamentally different, in ways that aren't changeable.
We literally built a nationwide interstate highway system in this country which included bulldozing downtowns and spending the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars to do it. That wasn't that long ago, we're the same country in most ways.
It's a political problem at all levels. Not a technology or physics problem.
Looking at the full scope of the country and saying because the overall problem is large we can't take any steps to improve it is defeatist.
I was specifically responding to a quote that trips of 50-300 miles are too long for public transit. That is demonstrably untrue around the world.
And using that as a justification to try to solve the problem using personal airplanes instead of real working solutions that scale to high capacity at low emissions seems silly to me.
One thing that jumped out at me is what are you trading to get that protection? While I have no issues with fly by wire, I'd be nervous about a GA aircraft that's overly opinionated about what it should be doing vs how to do it.
* Can I put it into a forward slip, or will it refuse or return to coordinated flight? This could be critical in an engine related emergency where you're too high and can't or don't want to risk getting farther from the airport.
* If I need to make a steep turn to avoid someone heading the wrong way on base is it going to let me?
I see the value in stall prevention but, outside of stall spin on final, that's largely been solved in GA via passive aero design characteristics making it tough to stall and harder to stay stalled.
This was actually a core inspiration for this project. A student on his first solo at an airport north of me crashed on his base to final turn.
> Can I put it into a forward slip, or will it refuse or return to coordinated flight?
Yes, you can make if forward slip. It's a bit clever imo--you just "ask" for low speed and a high descent rate and the energy controllers in the flight computer will figure out that a forward slip is the best way to achieve that. We also have independent ailerons that can be used as spoilers for an even faster descent.
> If I need to make a steep turn to avoid someone heading the wrong way on base is it going to let me?
yep! just push the stick full deflection. you'll feel the active stick fight back because it doesn't want to bank that steeply in normal flight, but you are in control of the plane and it will do anything you command up to it's aerodynamic and structural limits.
I keep thinking we need more canard aircraft - they don't stall. Most of them are designed with laminar flow wings and no flaps, so landing speeds are higher which makes them less safe and not good for grass strips. I'd like to see a stall-free aircraft without those drawbacks of canards.
I think a cheaper approach to what Airhart is trying to accomplish (from a don't kill pilots perspective) would be to make an aftermarket smart stall horn that could warn earlier and maybe gives some audio/visual feedback if you're getting uncoordinated at a certain angle of attack.
However, as a PPL holder myself I think that understanding weight and balance, aerodynamics, flight planning, ATC, airlaw, principles of flight etc. is paramount to keep yourself and others safe.
In the air you cannot simply drive to the side of the road and have a look at what’s going on. As a pilot you must be able to make decisions on the spot. To be able to make those properly, you have to understand what’s going on from first principles. In aviation safety is the primary goal. Statistically more than 80% of aviation accidents can be traced back to human error. Anything that facilitates bringing people in the pilot seat suggesting they need less training is something i strictly oppose.
Despite, anything that helps to simplify aircraft operations may decrease cognitive load and is therefore welcome.
I guess you're aware of the ICAO/FAA hoops you have to jump through to get anything of what you're developing beyond experimental certificate but having seen how long it took e.g. Volocopter to gain their (still incomplete) type certificate it is a long road.
If you'd be able to simplify avionics and create an affordable standardized fly-by-wire kit that alone would be a great innovation for GA especially in the ultralight and light sport aircraft category.
I wish you all the best!
> anything that helps to simplify aircraft operations may decrease cognitive load and is therefore welcome.
exactly. decreasing cognitive load is very important and I think we as existing pilots tend to forget how much of their cognitive load goes to just aviating. But the students who drop out certainly don't.
Other, smarter commenters will undoubtedly point out potential issues…but since I am a decidedly uninformed groundling, I hope you succeed.
Ambitious, complicated, probably-impossible challenges create space for the kind of projects which could actually change the world.
Sounds tough…good luck!
Are you building your own FADEC system, or working with existing engine control systems?
initially we'll be working with existing systems (specifically, a Rotax 916iS) which has an almost-FADEC, but we're adding our own systems on top of it to add push to start, full control of the throttle, automated restart in the case of an engine failure in flight, and full data collection to better predict when maintenance is going to be needed.
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 same time as when we begin production, so we hope that new pilots will be able to learn under these new regulations and not have to learn the old-school way of flying at all.
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?
Do you see the overcrowding of airspace as a concern at all?
However, as we get to much larger scales, we can start using our aircraft to actually augment ATC to help handle the traffic. the airplanes can have more intelligent communication systems to coordinate with each other and the pilots and automatically send and receive data to/from ATC with digital comms rather than voice radio. That's an entirely separate project and company though when Airhart is a huge success and we hit this problem :)
This would be quite the upgrade from a 1980's Cessna.
I guess we'll have to wait for the new standards, but things like learning about the engine, stall recovery and crosswinds are a pretty major part of aviation training. Though the plane can do these things, I'm not sure how much training will be abstracted away (since it's a generic curriculum and we can fly most ASEL).
Few questions:
1. Does the flight controller have a back-up?
2. What does the override for controlling rudder and aileron look like. How about spin recovery or taxing with headwinds?
3. Would you sell your avionics set-up so I can retrofit and replace a Garmin System. I've always found Garmin's to be tricky and hard to read. Yours looks waay better
4. Love the Live ATC transcriptions
Best of luck! Hoping I get to fly one of these some day.
1. the flight controller is triply redundant, so it's basically 3 flight controllers and any 2 can fail and the system will still function (though with a greater risk posture as you now don't know if that 3rd one is giving correct information. There's also an emergency reversionary mode to fly the airplane directly without the flight controller in the loop
2. We don't think that a direct override is necessary or even recommended. We're relying on the fact that we have multiple sensors, flight computers, and servos to make sure that the probability of being wrong is < 1e-7. You can't force a spin in the system and the system will always leave enough buffer so that external factors can't initiate a spin. but if one happens, spin recovery is automatic.
3. We are exploring this possibility. If you are genuinely interested, fill out the contact form on our website and we'll talk.
4. Thanks! we are actively debating making this a standalone radio product for any airplane to replace an existing comm radio
Then iRobot and now an aviation company named after the most famous dead aviator.
Seems... not ideal.
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 ?
I would imagine that lead is dangerous for a long as it's being used, whereas CO2 has an annoyingly long half life that we need to actively remove in (currently) time- or energy-intensive processes, while it's reducing healthy years of life for millions of people —speaking of air pollution from combustion in general here, I don't have specific numbers for airplanes but as an airplane company you are surely better aware of this than me
Fact of the lead content, the wishes and the promises of your post have a place here.
However "Green" only sounds good in a marketing pitches. While it might resonate with potential customers who are already sold on the idea, it can come across as vague and insubstantial to those trying to understand your response.
It sounds misleading and deceptive for the individuals who are skeptical of the environmental impact.
our first model will still be a gasoline ICE airplane, but we are building a limited number of them to get our tech out there and get a new wave of people excited about GA. out future aircraft will be able to utilize our fly-by-wire/simplified controls to fly more aerodynamically efficient airframes that will use less energy, whatever that source is. We can do this because these airframes would be too unstable for a human to fly by hand, hence the need for fly-by-wire/simplified controls in the loop.
today, we don't have a good alternative to ICE for airplanes that also meets the mission profile of the vehicle. I personally think hybrid electric is at least the next step, with hydrogen (though that has it's own challenges) coming after.
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!
Our plane will be ~7 gph at cruise burning unleaded fuels and fly ~170mph over the ground (with no wind)
You give consumption of 7 gallons in cruise mode. I don't want to know what is burnt during take-off or landing.
Takeoff constitutes a negligible part of the total fuel consumption. Climb to altitude uses more, but you get that back when landing since you're then using your stored potential energy.
Small-aircraft GA is a vanishingly small fraction of total fossil fuel use, and it will be quite easy to replace that with some renewable fuel solution (compared with the huge amounts of fuel consumed by transport aircraft). For my part, I think it would be a shame to kill GA because of a temporary and relatively unimportant concern.
OP wrote: "We want people who don’t think about airplanes as a mode of transportation to start flying"
They're meaning for this to become a larger fraction, besides that the relevant measure is pollution per benefit or per capita or something rather than absolute amount of pollution
I think we should absolutely keep airplanes as a mode of transportation, because the alternative is that all small airports go away and then it won't matter when renewable fuels become a reality because there will be no longer be anywhere to land and take off. Those airports would not come back.
First off, you've got this backwards. One doesn't have an opinion because one flies or not; conversely, one flies or not because one concludes their situation does or does not warrant the pollution for a particular destination
But equally weird, why are you making this about me personally? If I say I don't fly, that's probably unusual where you're from so I'll be the environmentalist out-group whose opinion is too extreme and can be dismissed. If I do I'll be considered a hypocrite (like what you called someone in the other thread). I can tell you the answer is a middle ground but I don't think it helps anyone here to make this about me. I'd much rather make this about facts and science rather than opinions and feelings
> I think we should absolutely keep airplanes as a mode of transportation
I agree, but since nobody said anything to the contrary, that seems like a given
I asked chatgpt what the average consumption of a car is; the answer was 0.5-1 gallon on a highway.
https://i.imgur.com/4Ik69ki.png
if the consumption is 7 times as high (very conservative calculation) and the speed is about twice as high, we are still at a modifier of 3.5. right?
Too much for me. We should be aiming for the absolute minimisation of fossil fuels.
Look, this is peanuts compared to everyday consumption by the world.
> We should be aiming for the absolute minimisation of fossil fuels.
Should we? We could easily do that. Just stop cars and busses and trains and planes and heating and the production of medicine and everything else.
Oh, our life would be much worse.
As a matter of fact, we should not aim for "the absolute minimisation of fossil fuels". Not at all. It is dispiriting for me to learn that you believe such primitive nonsense.
Seriously, you need to learn the basics of economics and trade-offs and all that.
These models seem to be big (Volkswagen Atlas, Subaru Ascent, Ford F150) or fast (Audi RS5, Porche 911, Kia Stinger). If you can get similar mpg from an airplane that carries four people and their luggage at 100+ mph ground speed on a more direct (shorter) route… that’s very compelling to me.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=noform...
There are about 15m cars sold in the US every year, but around 1500 piston engine planes. That's a factor of 10,000. There are some 210m cars in use in the USA, but around 150k piston engine planes. That's a factor of 1400 (reflecting the fact that planes have a much longer life than cars, further contributing to their lower environmental impact).
Every day, cars burn more fuel than light airplanes burn in a year.
This project is a minuscule rounding error in climate change drivers.
We don’t really have hybrid planes yet, which will likely help in the most inefficient parts of flying (climb).
My comment is to add more information to the discussion to consider many aspects, not to make claims that it’s a fuel-sensible method of travel. I am excited for innovation here, just like I am excited for the continued improvements in hybrid and electric cars.
Not sure where you're from but airport density in the US is incredibly high thanks to WWII and Cold War leftover infrastructure (and a fairly robust GA culture up through the 80s). People just don't notice their little local airports unless they fly.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-determines-lead-emissio... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/aviation/five-ways-garmin-...
Do these planes you are building burn fuel containing lead? If so, how can you justify a 10x increase in small plane traffic, as you have stated is the goal or at least the potential capacity elsewhere in this thread?