Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbr | Hacker News Reader

     15 minutes? If you flew in a small aircraft regularly,
     you would know it takes 40-60 minutes to prep a plane
     from park to airborne in zero traffic

How much of that prep is eliminated by going full automation? Isn't most of the prep the pilot running through a checklist?

If there is unavoidable time consuming checking, you could do that in advance and provide the plane as an autonomous taxi. So it shows up, picks you up, drops you off.

View on HN

> Isn't most of the prep the pilot running through a checklist

Yes, but...

Things like "check your propeller for cracks", or "verify that the control surfaces are actually moving when the controls say they should have moved" should not be skipped.

But you can skip a lot of things just by virtue of this being an electric vehicle - like "visually verify fuel level without using the gauge", or "check oil level", or "test carb heat" or "verify dual magnetos" etc.

If these are automated, though, they can be done in parallel. A camera pointed at the propellers can be checking them for cracks at the same time that another camera is checking that control surfaces actually move.

there are better ways to detect aileron deflection via automation than with a camera, but I take your point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com