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Comment by SR2Z | Hacker News Reader

> I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people.

On the balance, the FAA has saved more lives than it's cost just because big jetliners hold SO MANY PEOPLE.

But otherwise I fully agree with you.

It's deranged that students these days are taught to manually lean the mixture until the engine sputters (i.e. the engine begins to DIE), then bump it back up.

It's incredibly stupid that an aircraft flying in 2025 has multiple solid state accelerometers and gyroscopes on board as part of people's phones - but the only certified one is a vacuum-powered analog instrument from 1981.

And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?

Don't even get me started on the DPE or medical systems.

These changes cannot come soon enough, because the entire GA world has slipped through the cracks as the FAA has become a disaster.

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> And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?

Unleaded avgas is a thing now. But it won't work with many legacy aviation engines. I hope this new rule will finally enable some engine (and thus fuel) innovation.

It's actually wild that you actually CAN manually lean the mixture. What's the last car that was sold without closed-loop EFI?

If they were cars, most GA planes would qualify for 'antique' plates. Most of the rest are not technically antique, just antique technology.

I think it was only in the last 5? years you can no longer buy a brand new helicopter with manual throttle control right on the collective. Not even RPM control, just a stupid manual linkage going straight to the carb :|

The massive effects of lead poisoning are still seen on a large scale near airports and in areas with lots of avgas powered traffic. That most of it is for essentially recreational purposes makes it even more infuriating.

> It's deranged that students these days are taught to manually lean the mixture until the engine sputters (i.e. the engine begins to DIE), then bump it back up.

Why? That is essentially an engine check. I think you want pilots to understand their machines and to do that you need to operate the engines.

I'm not sure I see the value of doing an engine check while flying the plane, or flying carbureted engines without automatic mixture control in general.

Pilots will understand their engines' quirks better, but those quirks are stupid and obviated by newer technology.

Forget mixture, carb ice keeps killing people in 2025. Even just moving everyone to dumb mechanical fuel injection will be a big step forward at this point…

.......attain strait and level flight, reduce airspeed to 65knots.....pull main controls aft till they hit the stops while applying full rudder......bieng able to recover from the "unusual attitude" quicky and cleanly is the skill needed to procede to all of the technological fiddling and gadgetry.....or is this all just a song and dance working up to just eliminating general aviation and making one of the passengers sit up front and wear a nice hat? if not, then what on earth are all of these fancy accelerometers for?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zgfna12Rt-k

For flying in the clouds mostly. These air driven gyroscopic contraptions were fine engineering for their time, but trusting one’s life to one of these when we can have a multiply redundant solid state alternative? No thanks.

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