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Agree. This is the same reason why I'm skeptical on flying cars. There's so many fender benders. I don't want a Jetta crashing through my roof. Sure, general a

Agree. This is the same reason why I'm skeptical on flying cars. There's so many fender benders. I don't want a Jetta crashing through my roof. Sure, general aviation is safer than driving (e.g. less accidents per vehicle, and less accidents per hour/mile), but general aviation is more dangerous than commercial aviation. I suspect there's something going on with maintenance, training, and available safety features. Seems like lowering the barrier of entry to flying is simply going to increase the accident rate because there's just more less skilled people flying. Of course most flights crash on takeoff and landing, and conceivably that would be automated, so maybe I'm just being paranoid. Still seems impractical, if for no other reason space restrictions on the ground.

lazide 5y ago
Commercial aviation gets to pick from the cream of the crop and fully professionalizes it’s pilots - it’s all they do, all the time. That means staying current (keeping habits fresh, remembering key details, etc) happen easier. Considering how low the frequency is for your your typical GA pilot, it’s honestly a wonder it works as well as it does.
- throw827474737 5y ago
  Flying is not simple and for everyone - it is complex, but many things are.. and when mastered it is actually not that hard - so disagree, no wonder here.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Flying is easy, flying safely is very difficult. GA inherently allows a great many things that significantly increase risks. Going solo inherently makes you a single point of failure so for example many significant but survivable health issue basically guarantee your death. And that’s just the start. Pilots run out of fuel, fall asleep, they land on the wrong runway/field, and so forth across lots of very small risks that end up killing people. I am not saying GA should be more regulated, it’s just important to understand the trade offs in terms of freedom vs safety.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      We can also get away with lower GA regulation because there’s relatively few aircraft. If you scaled 1346x to equal the number of automobiles, we’d probably have even more than 1346x accidents, simply because of a self selected pilot skill bias. We’d have to have more regulation then.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - Retric 5y ago
        Even just 1346x as many accidents is ~1/2 million deaths per year which is unlikely to be considered even remotely acceptable.
- AYBABTME 5y ago
  My understanding was that most GA accidents occur in the 50 to 350 flight hours of pilots. By this, perhaps the issue isn't of handpicking the best of the best, but more that they, by definition, survived the early filter.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Getting a basic (entry level) commercial pilot’s license requires 1500 hrs. What I mean by the ‘cream of the crop’ is you have to be more experienced and pass far greater hurdles (including a far more demanding medical exam) than any GA pilots need to, just to be licensed to try to get hired as a commercial pilot. It doesn’t mean there aren’t great GA pilots out there - there are! It just means that only the top x percent of GA pilots could pass the requirements to be a commercial pilot.
    - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
      > Getting a basic (entry level) commercial pilot’s license requires 1500 hrs. That's not correct. For a US commercial pilot's licence, the hours requirement is 250. It's 1500 hours for an airline transport pilot's licence.
      - lazide 5y ago
        Thank you much! Got my wires crossed apparently. Applicable FAA Regs btw [https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-61/subpart-F https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...]
carabiner 5y ago
GA is actually less safe than driving. It's about as safe as riding a motorcycle: https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/ https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/ GA aircraft crash every day in the US. They don't make the news outside of aviation circles because only 1-2 people are affected. Often the occupants survive.
- owenversteeg 5y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of those statistics because "deaths per 100k hours" isn't really an appropriate way to compare driving vs. motorcycles vs. GA. If you're comparing driving vs. GA, I think one possible appropriate measure is "deaths per mile"; let's say the average speed of a GA craft is 150mph and the average speed of a car is 37mph, that means that GA is 6 times more deadly than driving a similar distance. Even that is a flawed measure, however. Few people use GA as a replacement for driving. I think in general, an appropriate measure to use is to estimate the (negative or positive) expected DALYs associated with an activity over a lifetime. That said, this measure does (in my opinion) penalize moderately-unhealthy things worse than very risky activities. For example, BASE jumping has a fatality rate of 0.04% per jump. If you do a handful of crazy BASE jumps, that's only a slight DALY difference - very roughly comparable to not brushing or flossing as far as I can tell from this study [0]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484374/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484374/
greggman3 5y ago
I would expect drone like tech so a computer will keep whatever it is easy to steer, drive, and land, and/or just self drive.
- nradov 5y ago
  That tech doesn't handle mechanical or electrical failures very well. The mishap rate for drones is far higher than for manned aircraft.
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    And drones don't scale linearly. Small unmanned "toy" drones can get away with RPM control of their props to maintain level flight. RPM control is easy with brushless DC motors and it's mechanically simple. But drones big enough to carry people can't do that (in general) because you cannot change RPM on a big prop nearly as quickly as you can on a small prop, because of inertia. So big props often need collective pitch just like helicopters. Collective pitch is far more mechanically complicated than RPM control and it thus presents more avenues for failure. The good news is that multirotor drones (even big ones) usually don't need cyclic pitch which is even more complicated than collective pitch, so that makes them less complicated than helicopters, but big drones are still not as mechanically simple as toy drones.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      Can't you build an array of smaller (say brushless DC motor) propellers to achieve the same thing? I could have sworn I saw a guy on Youtube do that and hover around his backyard in a home-made frankendrone comprised of a ton of props
      - nradov 5y ago
        You can, and hobbyists have done exactly that. But such aircraft are extremely inefficient and only have enough battery power for a few minutes. It's kind of like that guy who tied a bunch of little helium balloons to his lawn chair and went flying. It sort of works but it's pointless and dangerous.

lazide 5y ago

Commercial aviation gets to pick from the cream of the crop and fully professionalizes it’s pilots - it’s all they do, all the time. That means staying current (keeping habits fresh, remembering key details, etc) happen easier. Considering how low the frequency is for your your typical GA pilot, it’s honestly a wonder it works as well as it does.

throw827474737 5y ago
Flying is not simple and for everyone - it is complex, but many things are.. and when mastered it is actually not that hard - so disagree, no wonder here.
- Retric 5y ago
  Flying is easy, flying safely is very difficult. GA inherently allows a great many things that significantly increase risks. Going solo inherently makes you a single point of failure so for example many significant but survivable health issue basically guarantee your death. And that’s just the start. Pilots run out of fuel, fall asleep, they land on the wrong runway/field, and so forth across lots of very small risks that end up killing people. I am not saying GA should be more regulated, it’s just important to understand the trade offs in terms of freedom vs safety.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    We can also get away with lower GA regulation because there’s relatively few aircraft. If you scaled 1346x to equal the number of automobiles, we’d probably have even more than 1346x accidents, simply because of a self selected pilot skill bias. We’d have to have more regulation then.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 5y ago
      Even just 1346x as many accidents is ~1/2 million deaths per year which is unlikely to be considered even remotely acceptable.
AYBABTME 5y ago
My understanding was that most GA accidents occur in the 50 to 350 flight hours of pilots. By this, perhaps the issue isn't of handpicking the best of the best, but more that they, by definition, survived the early filter.
- lazide 5y ago
  Getting a basic (entry level) commercial pilot’s license requires 1500 hrs. What I mean by the ‘cream of the crop’ is you have to be more experienced and pass far greater hurdles (including a far more demanding medical exam) than any GA pilots need to, just to be licensed to try to get hired as a commercial pilot. It doesn’t mean there aren’t great GA pilots out there - there are! It just means that only the top x percent of GA pilots could pass the requirements to be a commercial pilot.
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    > Getting a basic (entry level) commercial pilot’s license requires 1500 hrs. That's not correct. For a US commercial pilot's licence, the hours requirement is 250. It's 1500 hours for an airline transport pilot's licence.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Thank you much! Got my wires crossed apparently. Applicable FAA Regs btw [https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-61/subpart-F https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...]

carabiner 5y ago

GA is actually less safe than driving. It's about as safe as riding a motorcycle: https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/ https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/ GA aircraft crash every day in the US. They don't make the news outside of aviation circles because only 1-2 people are affected. Often the occupants survive.

owenversteeg 5y ago
I'm not a huge fan of those statistics because "deaths per 100k hours" isn't really an appropriate way to compare driving vs. motorcycles vs. GA. If you're comparing driving vs. GA, I think one possible appropriate measure is "deaths per mile"; let's say the average speed of a GA craft is 150mph and the average speed of a car is 37mph, that means that GA is 6 times more deadly than driving a similar distance. Even that is a flawed measure, however. Few people use GA as a replacement for driving. I think in general, an appropriate measure to use is to estimate the (negative or positive) expected DALYs associated with an activity over a lifetime. That said, this measure does (in my opinion) penalize moderately-unhealthy things worse than very risky activities. For example, BASE jumping has a fatality rate of 0.04% per jump. If you do a handful of crazy BASE jumps, that's only a slight DALY difference - very roughly comparable to not brushing or flossing as far as I can tell from this study [0]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484374/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484374/

greggman3 5y ago

I would expect drone like tech so a computer will keep whatever it is easy to steer, drive, and land, and/or just self drive.

nradov 5y ago
That tech doesn't handle mechanical or electrical failures very well. The mishap rate for drones is far higher than for manned aircraft.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  And drones don't scale linearly. Small unmanned "toy" drones can get away with RPM control of their props to maintain level flight. RPM control is easy with brushless DC motors and it's mechanically simple. But drones big enough to carry people can't do that (in general) because you cannot change RPM on a big prop nearly as quickly as you can on a small prop, because of inertia. So big props often need collective pitch just like helicopters. Collective pitch is far more mechanically complicated than RPM control and it thus presents more avenues for failure. The good news is that multirotor drones (even big ones) usually don't need cyclic pitch which is even more complicated than collective pitch, so that makes them less complicated than helicopters, but big drones are still not as mechanically simple as toy drones.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Can't you build an array of smaller (say brushless DC motor) propellers to achieve the same thing? I could have sworn I saw a guy on Youtube do that and hover around his backyard in a home-made frankendrone comprised of a ton of props
    - nradov 5y ago
      You can, and hobbyists have done exactly that. But such aircraft are extremely inefficient and only have enough battery power for a few minutes. It's kind of like that guy who tied a bunch of little helium balloons to his lawn chair and went flying. It sort of works but it's pointless and dangerous.