i wish they would put some of those money to adjust FAA rules for the modern development - drones, human carrying multicopters, and whatever others things may come if the rules become friendly for innovation
Aviation is fucking dangerous. I know, I knew many private pilots of experimental aircraft growing up, some of which died in accidents.
One guy died when his seat slid backwards while climbing out from takeoff causing him to pull back on the yoke and cause a stall. This is a stupidly common way to go.
Another died when his twin lost engine power on one side, again during takeoff, and he spun into the ground.
The list, unfortunately goes on. Neither of those particular two on the list died in experimental aircraft, although the pilot of the twin did survive an earlier crash in an experimental during landing, where he misjudged the time it takes to spool up a jet engine.
Do not take private companies putting things I to the sky lightly.
in particular because many aspects of it is technologically half a century behind. Stone age regulations prevent any meaningful advancement. It is like all the cars would still be manual transmission, no ABS, nor traction control...
>pull back on the yoke and cause a stall
VTOL multicopter wouldn't have such a stall
>Another died when his twin lost engine power on one side
Instead of cemented in time by regulations twin, having say 10 electric engines would mean that loss of one would result in just small automated readjustment of trust/power distribution.
Most of the new aircraft development would contain a lot of automation to the point of self-flying. The dense network of automated traffic control for such new aircraft would be another thing that only billionaires could really do. That would allow to take out of equation a lot of human errors that make current aviation dangerous.
And the liability is inherently far greater than ground vehicles. For example, right now it’s practically impossible to accidentally drive a ground vehicle, certainly not something less than a ton, into highly sensitive places like the pentagon/nuclear weapons storage facility/military base.
But it’s very easily imaginable that an automated aircraft less than a ton could fly itself into such a place, accidentally or intentionally, and cause a serious kerfuffle.
Or to put it another way, it’s thousands of times more costly to protect airspace from intrusion than ground space.
To cover the possibility of the owner being unable to pay out to cover the costs of disruption, liability insurance similar to car insurance would likely be mandatory, just thousands of times more.
If flying vehicles became deregulated and instead had a mandatory minimum insurance requirement for $1 billion of liability then it’s effectively the same. Because that’s the realm of very serious folks with large legal teams anyways.
Imagine that you have to explain to drone pilots that even a very small drone is completely unacceptable in an airport vicinity. Yes, your 0.5kg drone can seriously damage the compressor of an engine!
> in an airport vicinity
GP's and parent's strawman fallacy based line of argument reminded a video where Putin was explaining why it is so hard to get a protest permit in Russia - "Imagine if your protest happens in front of a children hospital, and thus it can block a live saving delivery."
But there are lots of cases where people fly cheap commercial drones around an airport, and that is completely unacceptable. It could easily result in a criminal charge and even prison time.