| Flying the plane is the easy part. What makes getting a pilots license hard and expensive is all the complex rules and regulations you have to know about and the complex engine operation that you have to be proficient in to fly safely. And what makes keeping a license expensive is the requirement to stay current, which means flying a certain amount of hours. Which is not cheap. In my opinion, general aviation is due for a little disruption. Basically current cost, rules, training and practices are appropriate for planes that are half a century old, have a combustion engine, and require a lot of micro managing to fly safely, and regular and expensive inspections to keep airworthy. The electrical drones and more or less autonomous planes currently being designed by dozens of companies are very different in nature. Cheaper to manufacture (less moving parts). Cheaper to operate (less maintenance, electricity is cheap). Fly by wire; you just point them in the right direction and they go there. They are orders of magnitude easier to deal with for pilots. Less buttons, dials, switches, etc. Some of these things can operate without a pilot even. There are going to be a lot of experimental planes with electrical engines and a small enough battery that you might even operate them without a license. It will take a while for these to get very cheap as the high end batteries with > 500 wh/kg still are a combination of very hard to get and expensive. But they are getting to market. At least two companies have announced they are shipping such batteries this year. One of them is CATL. Better batteries might follow in a few years. But 500wh/kg is good enough to improve ranges quite a bit of currently already flying planes. And it also enables smaller form factors. Electrically propelled para gliders already exist, for example. It will take a while but the rules are likely going to have to be adjusted for these new types of planes. And since they are much cheaper to operate, there will also be a lot of pressure for the current ATC system to be modernized to keep up with the growing number of planes. |