[matt_morgan]

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.

[ineedasername]

>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=....

[kragen]

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]

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.

[outworlder]

It is not going to explode any more than a car will.

It may catch on fire, though.

[Dylan16807]

> I don't mind regulations and oversight of such things

Do you think anyone is arguing against the existence of plane regulations?

[kragen]

surely the optimal level of regulation is not zero but in this case probably the status quo (including wrongful death torts, etc.) has killed and brain-damaged more people than zero regulation would have, by halting progress 50 years ago

compare progress in aviation from 01923 to 01973 with progress from 01973 to today. we could have ultra-efficient ornithopters, mass-produced gossamer condors (maybe electric), mars-pathfinder-style airbags, ejection seats in coach class, suborbital commuter rockets to anywhere in the world in 45 minutes, and things we can't even imagine yet or don't know to be feasible

instead we have slight variations on the 50-year-old 747 and the 85-year-old piper cub (still running grossly inefficiently on leaded avgas), dramatic regression in crewed spaceflight capabilities, plus interesting experiments in hang gliders, jetpacks, hoverboards, and more conventional ultralights that have been unable to reach mass adoption

oh and uncrewed quadcopters and stealth bombers because those were unregulated

[eternityforest]

They are trying to eliminate the leaded gas too though. No idea why they didn't just subsidize new planes that didn't need leaded gas, rather than spend decades looking for substitutes.

[KennyBlanken]

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]

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]

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.

[ericbarrett]

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.

[outworlder]

> 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.

Others have touched on the probability thing.

The issue with motorcycles is that a some of it is under your control (driving safely, protective gear, bike maintenance) but there's a lot that isn't: potholes, other drivers, animals and so on.

Flying, almost everything is under the pilot's control. That includes most plane failures. Good preflight and maintenance takes care of most issues. The rest is taken care of by the flight planning – for example, engine failures. You should always have a place to put down the plane at any moment if you lose an engine - and general aviation aircraft land pretty slow.

Newer advancements have made it even safer (see also, whole frame parachutes).

That basically leaves freak accidents; they are a minority. Go spelunk the NTSB database, you'll find most accidents were preventable.

In a nutshell, you are probably going to find the risk is very skewed by complacent or otherwise irresponsible pilots.

[ahelwer]

This is exactly how it is in the rock climbing community. People still die, including very experienced people. You only need to mess up a rappel weight transfer once, but you have to execute it successfully thousands of times over the course of your life. People cope by saying they're careful and it's the irresponsible people who die. It isn't true. No reasonable safety system can rely on you acting perfectly every time. A low-probability-lethal-failure activity that you many many times can get you eventually, no matter how careful you are.

I don't say all this to disparage GA, or rock climbing. I rock climb and intend to do so well into the future. But saying these sorts of things mean you aren't treating your hobby with the seriousness it deserves imo. It could happen to you; thinking otherwise is self-deception.

[p1necone]

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?

[cmeacham98]

The distance comparison does make sense, because the point of getting on a plane/car is to travel. People don't say "I'm going to drive for 30 mins", they say "I'm going to drive from Los Angeles to NYC". Comparing how dangerous that is on a plane requires comparing by distance, not time.

[anamexis]

I would guess the majority of time in general aviation is not for the purpose of travel. It's a hobby.

[cmeacham98]

If you're assuming it is a hobby then comparing it to car/motorcycle usage for travel is useless/invalid.

[anamexis]

Yes, exactly.

[hollerith]

A lot of it is to give pilots the experience they need to qualify to fly commercial airliners, also.

[bitdivision]

Agreed.. Though it's an often used metric: fatalities per billion kilometers (f/bnkm).

Someone told me that risk per unit distance was higher when walking than riding a motorcycle, which I thought sounded like it could be possible. Sadly it seems its not true [1].

Interesting how f/bnkm is so low for driving vs walking though.

[1]: https://www.normalizecycling.com/risk-in-cycling/units-of-ri...

[p1necone]

Eh, not really. Distance travelled !== quality of destination.

I can travel X minutes on a plane for Y cost to one set of destinations, or I can travel A minutes in a car for B cost to a different set of destinations. The actual distance between my current location and my destination means nothing to me, although the potential destinations do, which certainly are more varied with plane travel.

But I live in a pretty nice place, so travelling locally is pretty good too.

[cmeacham98]

We're comparing safety, not "quality of destination".

If you were to travel from point A to point B, and wanted to know whether driving or flying was safer, then the correct metric to look at is the "per distance" one.

[p1necone]

Yeah but most travel isn't to a fixed, "necessary" destination. About the only place like that for me is work, and I certainly can't fly there.

Or to put it another way - comparing two different modes of travel to one specific destination doesn't make much sense when the destination is partially fungible. I want to know what the safest way to get to (any sufficiently nice place) is, not to (one specific nice place).

[tormeh]

The point is, being a hobby pilot is extremely dangerous.

[TylerE]

Being a lazy hobby pilot is dangerous. The majority of GA crashes are pretty basic pilot error/"gotta-get-there-itis".

Motorcycles are the same way, actually. An overwhelming amount of fatal motorcycle accidents involve alcohol at night, usually in combination with not wearing proper gear.

[someweirdperson]

Bikers frequently get killed by other forms of traffic (at least as a major contributing factor), pilots typically kill themselves (usually unintentionally, of course), with rare exceptions.

[fijiaarone]

Getting killed by running into a semi because you were weaving in and out of traffic at 90 mph and ran a red light is not really the traffic’s fault.

[anamexis]

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.as...

[oldgradstudent]

Assuming all hours were flown at Cessna 172 cruise speed of 140mph, that gives about 2e7 * 140 = 2.8e9, divided by 332 gives about 8.4 million miles per fatality.

Compared to 85 million miles travelled per fatality on the roads in general, and about 4 million miles travelled per fatality on motorcycles.

2X better than motorcycles, 10X worse than road fatalities in general.

And that's being quite generous about the mileage.

[anamexis]

I don't think miles travelled per fatality is a useful point of comparison for general aviation. This puts it about on par with pedestrian deaths per mile travelled, and I don't think most people would call walking "extremely dangerous."

[ineedasername]

>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-motorcyc...

[anamexis]

Ok, so per hour it is comparable to motorcycles. But consider also that the average private pilot only flies 100-150 hours per year.

I don't disagree that it is more dangerous than automobiles or commercial flight. But I wouldn't characterize it as "extremely dangerous." Nor would I characterize motorcycles as such.

[ROTMetro]

Have you even looked into the history of aviation and why we have the FAA? Thes homebrew airplanes were falling out of the sky all over the place. A lot of people were dying.

[pdonis]

> 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]

Cars and planes have significantly different impacts on the engine.

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.

[cduzz]

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.

[dsfyu404ed]

So de-rate and conservatively tune the engine to a peak HP that can be sustained indefinitely. This is SOP when putting automotive engines in industrial uses. Just because you don't know of it doesn't mean it's not dirt common and well practiced in industry.

2000hr equates to, generously, like really generously, a 150-200k service life. It really drives me up the wall to see you acting like this is a big number when in any other context you'd be happy to pop in and tell us about how your you're so smart because you bought a Toyota and it's guaranteed to make it that far.

[ceejayoz]

> So de-rate and conservatively tune the engine to a peak HP that can be sustained indefinitely. This is SOP when putting automotive engines in industrial uses.

Those industrial uses don't crash into a random person's house if they fail, and "conservatively tune" means you've changed the engine's behavior. The FAA likes you to demonstrate safety when you change safety-critical things.

> 2000hr equates to, generously, a 150-200k service life.

At a much higher cruising RPM, which is the entire point of the article.

[xyzzyz]

> Those industrial uses don't crash into a random person's house if they fail,

It is highly unlikely to crash into a random person’s home due to engine failure. Planes don’t drop out of the sky like stones when their engines fail. You can still fly them and pick a spot to attempt emergency landing or controlled crash.

For comparison, cars crash into people’s homes all the time, but i don’t believe it is ever a result of car engine failure. No reason to expect plane engine failures to cause these.

[p_l]

Considerable amount of plane crashes, including deadly ones, involve engine failure - often due to things that aren't present at all in automotive (or marine or industrial) use.

[Sebb767]

> At a much higher cruising RPM, which is the entire point of the article.

Looking at their demo videos, they seem to be running the engine at something like 3000 RPM, which is not that far from cruising RPM on a car.

[aeternum]

This is often achieve by simply derating the engine. You redefine redline to be 75% of what the engine was designed to produce. Then your takeoff becomes 75% power and cruise is more like 56%.

[bischofs]

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]

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]

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?

[voldacar]

Hence why they used a marine engine.

[moremetadata]

Its a little more complex than that. Vehicles (cars, trucks) can rely on the engine power being transferred to a high friction surface (the road) with help from gravity with immediate effect. Where as boats and aircraft are transferring engine power to a low friction medium (air and water) where gravity is important for aircraft otherwise you die when you hit the ground unless you can auto rotate in a helicopter or glide in a plane, but where gravity is not so important in the scheme of things, if those extreme risk situations are catered for.

I bet they could have got the costs down more if they had used a Toroidal Propeller.

Here (already cued for you) https://youtu.be/s_J1OYcCPms?t=23 the footage shows less vortices generated with the Toroidal propeller seen in the top half of the frame of the two boat propeller underwater.

Its these vortices in water which generate cavitation on a traditional style propeller, which leave little pits on the surface of the propeller eventually leading to its replacement as its surface contributes to more friction and thus less fuel economy.

If the friction from the pitted surface is ignored, then it can lead to parts of a blade becoming more like swiss cheese with holes that results in parts of the blade breaking off.

Wind Turbines could generate more electricity if they used toroidal blades, but currently the engineering skill does not exists to scale these blades up in size, and have the ability to "detune" a blade in gale force/storm force winds to minimise damage to the generators and the unit itself.

However the use of these wind turbines also means, the state have a stealth population control mechanism as these wind turbine blades can also be altered to generate plenty of infrasound which can be used to make large parts of the population in the vicinity feel anxious, something that's documented in the Disney sound engineering labs in the 40's/50's when the sound engineers inadvertently made themselves all feel very ill for a few days. Ergo you will probably see less people striking in future!

[stenius]

I personally don't know what will happen, but I figure that type of test is easy to do in a lab environment.

[ceejayoz]

Easy, but quite expensive to have a meaningful sample size.

[aeternum]

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]

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/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]

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.

[gocartStatue]

Ha! Classic Theory of Constraints: most constraints come from rules that used to accomodate for some limitations. Most of those limitations are long gone, but we’ve come to not question the rules; we mistake them with reality.

[rlpb]

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.

[tysam_and]

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]

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.

[vkou]

> 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]

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.

[stackedinserter]

There would be fewer crashes if FAA allowed us to fly modern planes instead of those relics from 60's

[voldacar]

You are demonstrating a lot of status-quo bias

[rippercushions]

Obligatory link to why the FAA maybe should have a couple of special exceptions.

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/06/16/revitalizing-th...