4 ms·
That really doesn't match actual aircraft design history though. Like were the wright brothers in 1900 thinking about how to make their first flier safe?
by gretch 7y ago
That really doesn't match actual aircraft design history though. Like were the wright brothers in 1900 thinking about how to make their first flier safe?
- leoedin 7y agoThis isn't 1900 though. Helicopters have been a thing for 70 years. Everyone knows you can make an unsafe multirotor. They're everywhere. Colin Furze made one in his shed. You can buy general aviation aicraft today with fully autonomous autopilots, including a completely hands-off "land at the nearest airport because the pilot's having a heart attack" button. The absolute bottom line offering of any small aircraft has to be that its safe (or at least, the failure rate is acceptable - which means at least comparable to modern helicopters). That's the innovation that anyone entering the market needs to bring.
- matz1 7y agoNo? not safe + working is more useful than safe + not working. Beside they are not building helicopter, they are building new kind of aircraft.
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoThis isn't Skunkworks where they're developing experimental aircraft for extremely well trained pilots in the military. They're trying to make these for consumers who don't even want to get a pilot's license. They should be designed to be far safer than what is available today if that is their target audience.
- matz1 7y agoDoesn't matter if it military or end user. First you have to make it work then make it safe. A not safe but working consumer multirotor plane is still much better than safe but not working plane.
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoWe have decades of experience to learn from in the aviation industry, that is what we should be iterating on and benchmarking against. Making a new type of aircraft that is significantly more dangerous and requires significantly less training (so it is unrealistic to expect the consumer to understand the risk) is just valuing profits over human lives - full stop. Are you still okay with unsafe flying machines when they start falling out of the sky and killing people on the ground? As mentioned previously, these aren't even supposed to require a pilot's license, so you can't expect the customer to be trained like a pilot. The FAA rules are written in blood. If people want to experiment with new types of aircraft responsibly, that's fine! There is even a specific process for that, it's called an experimental certification. https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/airworthiness_certification/sp_awcert/experiment/ https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/airworthiness_certific... But selling these things to untrained consumers is just completely, utterly, reprehensibly irresponsible. That's probably why Kitty Hawk returned deposits - they realized the machines just weren't safe enough to sell to people.
- GVIrish 7y agoNot safe + 'working' means people will die. When people die due to negligent engineering, the company goes bankrupt at best. Safe + not working eventually leads to bankruptcy too, but people don't die in that case. Not to say that advancing aerospace engineering should be totally without risk. But these folks are not building space vehicle or fighter planes, they're building commercial aircraft. In that sector, tolerance for risk is far lower, as it should be.
- matz1 7y agoSure, there are always risk of people dying. Safety is an iteartive process.