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I disagree with your assessment. I think that the core problem with GA is that most people in the United States want to travel distances beyond what an afforda

I disagree with your assessment. I think that the core problem with GA is that most people in the United States want to travel distances beyond what an affordable GA aircraft can in a single flight. I live in the midwest and I generally want to travel to the East or West coast or Southwest or Florida and the range of a Cessna just isn’t going to cut it. The only practical vehicle would be a Phenom 300 or Honda Jet II, but I don’t have $8 million lying around. Reality is that without North American continental range, it just isn’t worth it to go get a pilots license and buy a plane for the few trips that I can just easily drive. Maybe if I lived in Boston, General Aviation would be great, but for many Americans who live in areas in the middle that aren’t near large airports, the range of these aircraft just make them expensive toys that aren’t very useful for the size of North America.

mritchie712 2y ago
I might be over estimating, but I'd also think taking off and landing will tack on a few hours to the start and end of your trip. Fueling, safety checks, dealing with the control tower, etc. all seem like they'd effectively take your time savings to zero.
- n_ermosh 2y ago
  once you get to wanting to travel about 150 miles, the time savings do start kicking in, even if you assume 30-45 minutes of getting to the airport, preflight, etc. The benefit of a small airplane is that at small airports, getting from walking up to the airplane and then into the air can be pretty quick. And part of our goal is the automate as much of the prelight process as possible, wherever we can do it safely
  - dwighttk 2y ago
    If you succeed in making this all easy, won’t these small airports fill up with planes?
    - n_ermosh 2y ago
      We will eventually hit a limit to the current infrastructure, but based on where the GA market was in the 70s when a lot of the small airports were built, we estimate we can handle ~10x the number of planes we do today.
      - dwighttk 2y ago
        So we can go from half a million pilots to 5 million? Then what?
- restalis 2y ago
  "dealing with the control tower" I know little to nothing about GA, but... it only makes sense to take time if the procedures are still done somehow manually, like speaking with human operators out there. It true, the dependence on a fallible human attention for something that can be automated, that right there is a safety hazard to me.
n_ermosh 2y ago
You're definitely right that the cross continental trip is a big and common one. however, 90% of long distance trips are made by car in the US with a median trip distance of about 200 miles. If we can make flying as easy as driving, the ability to make that trip in half to a third of the time, we believe that's a big win and incentive for a lot of people. There are 19,000 small airports in the US and 300M people live within 15 miles of at least one. So we totally think it's reasonable for that medium distance trip to be done by GA airplane rather than car.
- BWStearns 2y ago
  I've found my GA flying to really be about trips that you _wouldn't have made otherwise_, but the biggest barrier is cost. I've done little adventure trips with my wife that were super fun and without a PPL we wouldn't have done the equivalent. But when it comes to boring stuff it's just too expensive to justify flying so the trips don't happen (since I have to rent). My suspicion is that the middle of the Venn diagram between "can afford a $500K aircraft" and "doesn't fly GA because they're not going to stay proficient enough to be safe" is vanishingly small. The doctors who fly their Cirrus once a year think they're Maverick so they don't care about the safety features. The guys who fly every chance they get aren't the ones stall spinning on base to final.
  - n_ermosh 2y ago
    Cost is definitely a barrier and our long term goal is the get down to a plane that costs <$100k. getting there is incremental, this is just our first product to start wedging our way into the market.
- daft_pink 2y ago
  I guess I don't see a whole lot of value in spending thousands and thousands of dollars for a few short trips. I think that the underserved market is the well to do person that doesn't live near a major hub international airport like Ohio or Nebraska or Iowa and they want to be able to fly direct on their schedule and they can't just head to the airport and fly direct wherever they want for a few hundred dollars instead of having to bounce through a hub and being at the mercy of the airlines schedule. But I think the main reason why people don't do that who can't afford a multi-million dollar private jet is that if you take a compass circle and draw it around your location with the range of your average GA aircraft anywhere that's not on the east or west coast you get 4 or 5 cities that you aren't likely to travel to anyways. America is just too big a place for these types of aircraft. Plus, while there may be all these airports that you are mentioning, can you really count on getting fuel to take you back at these minor airports or the FBOs to service outside a much shorter list of airports? That cuts the range away even more.
cameldrv 2y ago
The other problem beyond range is dispatch reliability. Most light planes can’t go very high or fast to get around thunderstorms, and they can’t fly in icing conditions, and flying in low visibility with a single amateur pilot is still dangerous even with avionics improvements. This means that if you don’t want to die, you have to cancel a lot of flights at the last minute, which makes it only useful for trips where you have a viable alternate means of transportation. From a speed perspective, one thing that would make a lot of difference is speeding up the preflight. Now you have to pull the plane out of the hangar, go to the fuel pump, fill multiple fuel tanks, check the oil, sump the fuel tanks, etc. Electronic sensors for oil and water in the fuel, a simpler fuel system, and a built-in electric motor for getting out of the hangar might save 20+ minutes per flight, which would actually be better than even a faster plane because these tasks are annoying and dirty. Another thing that would be great is a bigger baggage compartment with electric power for folding e-bikes or scooters. America is amazing in the number of small airports we have, but most of them have no rental cars and are outside of town.

mritchie712 2y ago

I might be over estimating, but I'd also think taking off and landing will tack on a few hours to the start and end of your trip. Fueling, safety checks, dealing with the control tower, etc. all seem like they'd effectively take your time savings to zero.

n_ermosh 2y ago
once you get to wanting to travel about 150 miles, the time savings do start kicking in, even if you assume 30-45 minutes of getting to the airport, preflight, etc. The benefit of a small airplane is that at small airports, getting from walking up to the airplane and then into the air can be pretty quick. And part of our goal is the automate as much of the prelight process as possible, wherever we can do it safely
- dwighttk 2y ago
  If you succeed in making this all easy, won’t these small airports fill up with planes?
  - n_ermosh 2y ago
    We will eventually hit a limit to the current infrastructure, but based on where the GA market was in the 70s when a lot of the small airports were built, we estimate we can handle ~10x the number of planes we do today.
    - dwighttk 2y ago
      So we can go from half a million pilots to 5 million? Then what?
restalis 2y ago
"dealing with the control tower" I know little to nothing about GA, but... it only makes sense to take time if the procedures are still done somehow manually, like speaking with human operators out there. It true, the dependence on a fallible human attention for something that can be automated, that right there is a safety hazard to me.

n_ermosh 2y ago

You're definitely right that the cross continental trip is a big and common one. however, 90% of long distance trips are made by car in the US with a median trip distance of about 200 miles. If we can make flying as easy as driving, the ability to make that trip in half to a third of the time, we believe that's a big win and incentive for a lot of people. There are 19,000 small airports in the US and 300M people live within 15 miles of at least one. So we totally think it's reasonable for that medium distance trip to be done by GA airplane rather than car.

BWStearns 2y ago
I've found my GA flying to really be about trips that you _wouldn't have made otherwise_, but the biggest barrier is cost. I've done little adventure trips with my wife that were super fun and without a PPL we wouldn't have done the equivalent. But when it comes to boring stuff it's just too expensive to justify flying so the trips don't happen (since I have to rent). My suspicion is that the middle of the Venn diagram between "can afford a $500K aircraft" and "doesn't fly GA because they're not going to stay proficient enough to be safe" is vanishingly small. The doctors who fly their Cirrus once a year think they're Maverick so they don't care about the safety features. The guys who fly every chance they get aren't the ones stall spinning on base to final.
- n_ermosh 2y ago
  Cost is definitely a barrier and our long term goal is the get down to a plane that costs <$100k. getting there is incremental, this is just our first product to start wedging our way into the market.
daft_pink 2y ago
I guess I don't see a whole lot of value in spending thousands and thousands of dollars for a few short trips. I think that the underserved market is the well to do person that doesn't live near a major hub international airport like Ohio or Nebraska or Iowa and they want to be able to fly direct on their schedule and they can't just head to the airport and fly direct wherever they want for a few hundred dollars instead of having to bounce through a hub and being at the mercy of the airlines schedule. But I think the main reason why people don't do that who can't afford a multi-million dollar private jet is that if you take a compass circle and draw it around your location with the range of your average GA aircraft anywhere that's not on the east or west coast you get 4 or 5 cities that you aren't likely to travel to anyways. America is just too big a place for these types of aircraft. Plus, while there may be all these airports that you are mentioning, can you really count on getting fuel to take you back at these minor airports or the FBOs to service outside a much shorter list of airports? That cuts the range away even more.

cameldrv 2y ago

The other problem beyond range is dispatch reliability. Most light planes can’t go very high or fast to get around thunderstorms, and they can’t fly in icing conditions, and flying in low visibility with a single amateur pilot is still dangerous even with avionics improvements. This means that if you don’t want to die, you have to cancel a lot of flights at the last minute, which makes it only useful for trips where you have a viable alternate means of transportation. From a speed perspective, one thing that would make a lot of difference is speeding up the preflight. Now you have to pull the plane out of the hangar, go to the fuel pump, fill multiple fuel tanks, check the oil, sump the fuel tanks, etc. Electronic sensors for oil and water in the fuel, a simpler fuel system, and a built-in electric motor for getting out of the hangar might save 20+ minutes per flight, which would actually be better than even a faster plane because these tasks are annoying and dirty. Another thing that would be great is a bigger baggage compartment with electric power for folding e-bikes or scooters. America is amazing in the number of small airports we have, but most of them have no rental cars and are outside of town.