10 ms·

I'm of two minds on this one, but the mind that says 'glad it's being shut down' is winning. I'm a private pilot / IFR with around 250 hours of pilot-in-comman

I'm of two minds on this one, but the mind that says 'glad it's being shut down' is winning. I'm a private pilot / IFR with around 250 hours of pilot-in-command time in single engine planes (I'm guessing that's square in the middle of this company's target pilot demographic). I have a full-time job and fly recreationally. On numerous occasions I've flown friends and relatives e.g. from Palo Alto to the LA area and asked them to split flight costs. Also, while I've never done this personally, it's pretty common for pilots to seek out other pilots on message boards and the like to "split time" on some flight, where cost is split and both pilots can log some flight time. So on the one hand, if this app were just an enhancement of that same basic pattern ... I'm flying to LA who wants to look down at I-5 traffic from 4500 feet ... then I would think it's great. The problem is that this service is clearly intended to be more than that. And when you start getting customers who don't understand general aviation and have expectations that my Flyte(?) will run like an airline (or at least air taxi) when it will not be, you have a bad situation. To give one concrete example, once after promising to take someone on a tour of the golden gate bridge area, dragging her to the airport, doing a pre-flight inspection, and taxiing all the way to the runway, I made a last minute decision to cancel after a new weather report freaked me out a bit. She understood, and we rescheduled. If the person next to me were not a close friend but in fact a "paying customer", perhaps business person with a meeting that afternoon in LA, would I have felt pressured to fly into an unsafe situation? Probably! This is one of several scenarios where the service just seems like a bad idea, from both a pilot and passenger perspective. I really hate being on the side of 'regulators' in any dispute, but flying is meaningfully different from driving a car. General Aviation already has a reputational problem with sloppy, low-experience pilots putting themselves and their families in danger, and frankly I don't think adding unwitting customers to the mix is going to help the situation at all.

imglorp 11y ago
Historically I think the FAA has been spot on with most of its regs, which are, as the saying goes, written in blood. Their general theme for GA aviation seems to be, we'll let you go play around on weekends and kill yourself, but as you begin to involve more people, and especially the public and paying customers, we're going to keep an increasingly close regulatory eye.
- acslater00 11y ago
  If anything FAA regulations for recreational pilots can be absurdly lax. You can get a private pilot certificate with iirc 25 hours of flight if you go to a flight school in the middle of nowhere, and as far as the FAA is concerned as soon as you pass your flight test you can go transition SFO airspace at 1000 feet that same day (I have done this). You can go 20 years without touching an aircraft, and as long as you have a valid medical, a flight instructor can give you a 1 hour checkout flight and do 3 landings and you're officially a fully current pilot. Some people refer to the first 100 flight hours after you receive your first license as the 'death zone' because the pilot is generally so unprepared that even a minor problem becomes life threatening.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
    I was a Private Pilot student some 20+ years ago and I was surprised to read this so I investigated. It's still 40 hours for PP but 30 for Recreational. That really surprised me. I stopped my training when I had just short of 40 hours. The only required procedure I hadn't completed yet was the night flight time. But no way would I have felt comfortable flying passengers at 30 hours. Hell, it was around that time that I ran into problems both with an engine refusing to shut off on the ground (student using the airplane after me didn't read my notation in the log and broke the throttle cable trying to shut the engine off), and on another airplane, the engine hesitating when I throttled back up during a stall recovery. Minor details, but it's coming across stuff like this and learning to deal with it that makes the extra flying hours valuable. Like the GP, I'm generally against regulation, but I agree that the FAA seems too lax in this case.
    - pavel_lishin 11y ago
      > Like the GP, I'm generally against regulation, but I agree that the FAA seems too lax in this case. Are there other fields where you're very familiar with where you're still against regulation? It seems odd to me that you're for regulation in a field where you recognize the reasons for it, but are against it in general, implying areas where you don't have much expertise. (Reminds me of when someone in Profession X sees the news get stories and facts about their profession wrong all the time, but continues to trust the news on stories about other fields. I forget what that phenomenon is called.)
asift 11y ago
The problems you described seem fairly easy to remedy through means other than an FAA ban. As a customer, I have zero interest in taking an excessively risky flight. I would seek companies that provide internal safeguards, such as weather restrictions, that take this decision out of a pilot's hands.
- diabeetusman 11y ago
  How do you imagine they would implement these weather restrictions? Something automatic? Because that scares me more (the Algorithm says it's safe, therefore, you should fly!) than something manual. I'm not sure of a good way to handle this.
  - asift 11y ago
    There are a myriad of ways companies could develop and implement internal controls. I have no particular knowledge that would make qualified to proclaim the single best way for handling these problems, but from a historical and empirical standpoint, the world is full of examples of companies solving complex problems previously thought to be too difficult by the majority of people. >Something automatic? You seem to be assuming pilots and passengers have no regard for their own well-being. Just like the discretion shown by the OP in their story about canceling a flight, pilots have strong incentives to not fly if there is an increased likelihood they can't do so safely. I would see the "automatic" aspect likely being conditions which prohibit flying while even further discretion still being available to pilots.
    - gamblor956 11y ago
      I have no particular knowledge that would make qualified to proclaim the single best way for handling these problems, but from a historical and empirical standpoint, the world is full of examples of companies solving complex problems previously thought to be too difficult by the majority of people. These companies already have internal processes and mechanisms for handling these problems, which they impose in addition to FAA procedures. The purpose of the FAA regulations and the ban in this case is to address pilots operating outside of this system. Essentially all commercial pilots employed on passenger flights have hundreds of hours of flight time, as an implicit condition of even getting such a job. The air taxi startup would have allowed pilots with almost no flight time (~40 hours) to take on passengers, which is an untenable safety hazard, given that new pilots are the cause of most accidents. It's not that these pilots have no regard for their own well-being; it's that they don't know enough to even know when it would be dangerous to fly.

imglorp 11y ago

Historically I think the FAA has been spot on with most of its regs, which are, as the saying goes, written in blood. Their general theme for GA aviation seems to be, we'll let you go play around on weekends and kill yourself, but as you begin to involve more people, and especially the public and paying customers, we're going to keep an increasingly close regulatory eye.

acslater00 11y ago
If anything FAA regulations for recreational pilots can be absurdly lax. You can get a private pilot certificate with iirc 25 hours of flight if you go to a flight school in the middle of nowhere, and as far as the FAA is concerned as soon as you pass your flight test you can go transition SFO airspace at 1000 feet that same day (I have done this). You can go 20 years without touching an aircraft, and as long as you have a valid medical, a flight instructor can give you a 1 hour checkout flight and do 3 landings and you're officially a fully current pilot. Some people refer to the first 100 flight hours after you receive your first license as the 'death zone' because the pilot is generally so unprepared that even a minor problem becomes life threatening.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
  I was a Private Pilot student some 20+ years ago and I was surprised to read this so I investigated. It's still 40 hours for PP but 30 for Recreational. That really surprised me. I stopped my training when I had just short of 40 hours. The only required procedure I hadn't completed yet was the night flight time. But no way would I have felt comfortable flying passengers at 30 hours. Hell, it was around that time that I ran into problems both with an engine refusing to shut off on the ground (student using the airplane after me didn't read my notation in the log and broke the throttle cable trying to shut the engine off), and on another airplane, the engine hesitating when I throttled back up during a stall recovery. Minor details, but it's coming across stuff like this and learning to deal with it that makes the extra flying hours valuable. Like the GP, I'm generally against regulation, but I agree that the FAA seems too lax in this case.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    > Like the GP, I'm generally against regulation, but I agree that the FAA seems too lax in this case. Are there other fields where you're very familiar with where you're still against regulation? It seems odd to me that you're for regulation in a field where you recognize the reasons for it, but are against it in general, implying areas where you don't have much expertise. (Reminds me of when someone in Profession X sees the news get stories and facts about their profession wrong all the time, but continues to trust the news on stories about other fields. I forget what that phenomenon is called.)

asift 11y ago

The problems you described seem fairly easy to remedy through means other than an FAA ban. As a customer, I have zero interest in taking an excessively risky flight. I would seek companies that provide internal safeguards, such as weather restrictions, that take this decision out of a pilot's hands.

diabeetusman 11y ago
How do you imagine they would implement these weather restrictions? Something automatic? Because that scares me more (the Algorithm says it's safe, therefore, you should fly!) than something manual. I'm not sure of a good way to handle this.
- asift 11y ago
  There are a myriad of ways companies could develop and implement internal controls. I have no particular knowledge that would make qualified to proclaim the single best way for handling these problems, but from a historical and empirical standpoint, the world is full of examples of companies solving complex problems previously thought to be too difficult by the majority of people. >Something automatic? You seem to be assuming pilots and passengers have no regard for their own well-being. Just like the discretion shown by the OP in their story about canceling a flight, pilots have strong incentives to not fly if there is an increased likelihood they can't do so safely. I would see the "automatic" aspect likely being conditions which prohibit flying while even further discretion still being available to pilots.
  - gamblor956 11y ago
    I have no particular knowledge that would make qualified to proclaim the single best way for handling these problems, but from a historical and empirical standpoint, the world is full of examples of companies solving complex problems previously thought to be too difficult by the majority of people. These companies already have internal processes and mechanisms for handling these problems, which they impose in addition to FAA procedures. The purpose of the FAA regulations and the ban in this case is to address pilots operating outside of this system. Essentially all commercial pilots employed on passenger flights have hundreds of hours of flight time, as an implicit condition of even getting such a job. The air taxi startup would have allowed pilots with almost no flight time (~40 hours) to take on passengers, which is an untenable safety hazard, given that new pilots are the cause of most accidents. It's not that these pilots have no regard for their own well-being; it's that they don't know enough to even know when it would be dangerous to fly.