Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplane

Instrument-rated pilot (and engineer) here.

First - congrats on the launch! I think you're working on an interesting set of components that will prove useful to GA aircraft technology. Bringing fly-by-wire, and lowering the cost of maintenance/manufacturing are both great efforts.

That being said, my personal view is that stick-and-rudder control is one of the less critical components to improving GA safety. Everything else - flight planning, comms, automation, navigation, weather, inspections, procedures, regs, and most importantly - working in the federal airspace system - are the "hard" parts of flying and where problems tend to occur. It's common belief that single-pilot IFR is the most challenging type of flying, because of how much you have to do all at once.

It may sound snobby - but I'm not super excited about the idea of lowering the barrier to entry for GA on a foundational skill basis. Like the light-sport rating, it encourages more people to be in the (already congested) airspace system who haven't really gained all the other skills necessary or experience to be there.

To be clear - I think improving technology and lowering costs = good. Lowering early-skill requirements for pilots and pushing more people without all the other skills into federal airspace = very bad. In general, I'd frame this effort more as an effort to raise the bar for system technology, not lower the bar to become a pilot in the first place.

It's insane the length we go as humans (in the US at least) to not invest in the easiest, most cost-effective and environmentally friendly mode of transportation: trains.

Hyperloops, wider and wider highways, now personal airplanes.

Anything but goddamn trains.

It's mental to me.

Wish the best to the startup, after all they are filling a void someone else would, but still, not happy with the direction transport is going, which seems backwards sometimes.

What are the environmental implications of transitioning people traveling by car/train to small planes? In addition to being louder and dispersing pollutants over a wider area, don't small planes generate significantly more GHG emissions than cars over the same number of miles?

Also, given that planes are not nearly as easy to electrify as cars and trains (energy density is significantly lower in batteries than liquid fuel), it seems unlikely the planet will ever be able to support significant volumes of personal air transit. What are your thoughts on that?

In the US, trips that are 50-300 miles are almost all done by car because that distance is too short for commercial airlines and too far for public transportation.

A bit off-topic but this is a political problem, not a technical one. Trips of 50-300 miles are certainly within the operating range of fast and efficient rail travel as demonstrated in multiple places around the world outside of the US.

While I think the project is pretty cool, I can't shake the pollution side of things out of my mind.

Air transport is one of the most polluting ways to travel, and I would expect a single person airplane is even worse than a full A380.

Is there anything you're doing to alleviate this issue ?

We want people who don’t think about airplanes as a mode of transportation to start flying

It really depresses me that in 2024 we have some of the smartest, most privileged people in the world deciding that this is what they’re going to dedicate their life to

Shouldn’t we be doing exactly the opposite? Getting people to stop flying

I was shocked when learning to fly how much GA tech was stuck in some weird pre-World War II era state. Everything seems so needlessly complicated. Even small aircraft cost so much that I couldn’t imagine a computer controlled system and fly by wire would be cost prohibitive. Even a new C172 is close to $400k at the low end, and anything you’d actually want to fly is much more. A few grand in electronics seems worth it and can probably easily save itself back quickly in added fuel economy and maintenance, not to mention any monetary value you might place on your safety.

But then I watched as the ADS-B mandate (or whatever you want to call it) came into effect and GA enthusiasts started tossing around concentration camp metaphors. So many of the people in the industry are very old and just don’t want anything to change.

Also shocking is how expensive everything is. It’s like new blockbuster prescription drugs, and perhaps for similar reasons (FAA testing is maybe very expensive?) but with no expiration date. At least in 25 years that new drug will be cheap, adding a simple GPS to your plane is still going to cost more than your Lexus.

It feels like the real problem in this industry is lack of competition. There’s a chicken and egg problem: planes are expensive because so few people buy them, but so few people buy them because they’re expensive.

Light sport aircraft were supposed to be the solution, but the difficulty of flying (which you’re addressing) seems to have precluded that.

All of which is to say: you’ve got a wide open field here and I hope you do well at it, aviation needs this.

Great ideas - all destined to wither and die on the vine of certification and regulatory approval. A certified Dynon autopilot for a Cessna 172 starts at $26k just for the components - you expect a similar amount for installation and then ongoing maintenance, calibration, and servicing.

Designing and building the technology is the easy part - pushing that technology through testing and certification is the very hard (and very expensive) part. Even if certification is accomplished, all of the follow on risks of determining maintenance standards, component life cycle, and periodic inspection and replacement schedules has to be defined as well.

Then a doped up former major league pitcher decides to hop in your plane and fly it into the ocean and everything you have done is called into question and you end up buried in lawsuits.

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.

As a paraglider pilot (unpowered), I will say that the technical aspects of flying the aircraft are only a small part of what's involved in a flight - as you point out.

It's a bad idea to get pilots in the air with less training. People can't safely pilot cars in two dimensions.

Making the avionics easier to use and more affordable sounds like the actual winning product.

So basically a GA Airbus. I think this is a pretty cool project, and while it may not achieve the lofty goals you’ve set forth, any improvement in safety is worthwhile.

As other commenters have point out though, where this stuff falls short is ultimately still the human. Ok, great… your aircraft won’t stall in Normal Law. However you’ve now lost a generator and a whole FCC and you’re in direct law. The 400 hr pilot hasn’t actually flown a plane with direct input since their primary training 5 years ago. They also don’t remember what the different flight envelopes do and do not provide. Essentially the system is more complex but normally it works so the complexity is hidden. They’re not equipped to handle flying the airplane anymore.

This is where GA really ultimately falls short IMHO, proficiency. Airlines are the safest they’ve ever been because the pilots make an entire career out of being prepared for every contingency. People using airplanes as a personal travel tool can be trained and proficient to the same degree but often they are not because flying an aircraft is ancillary to their primary mission.

  > Flying a small airplane is complicated, mentally taxing, and dangerous—about 28x more dangerous than driving a car.

  > Our system makes it impossible to lose control of the airplane, potentially solving 80% of today’s fatal accidents in general aviation.

The problem is that small airplane technology hasn’t innovated and is stuck in the past. Flying a small airplane is complicated, mentally taxing, and dangerous—about 28x more dangerous than driving a car.

I am surprised you don't mention fuel efficiency. Flying a small airplane is much less efficient than driving a car, especially on shorter trips due to take off and landing.

And cars are already burning too much fuel, so...

This looks really cool! I'm curious if you're able to share any details on how you plan to manage autonomous landing. There are obviously a lot of moving parts there from communicating with ATC, finding a safe landing zone, actually bringing the plane down, and I'm sure many other things I haven't thought of as a non-pilot.

Super ambitious project that you are attempting - kudos to that!

What do you think of 1. Licenses 2. Air traffic control & routing for personal crafts 3. Landing / Takeoff / Turbulence (weather) - where typically most of the human skill today is used in for commercial flights. 4. and probably the one for interface design and overall autonomous systems - human decision making + autonomous systems really have a difficult time working in tandem - fully autonomous is less risky at an aggregate level but puts onus and more of the blame on the company / maker versus human-in-the-loop.

Wondering what you think about this video[0], which (if one ignores the clickbaity and colourful language and focuses on the substance of the argument) frames problems with mass adoption of "flying cars" as fundamental and idea-killing non-starters, rather than hurdles to work hard on, and overcome.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fcWOivJ6bs

Sounds a lot like the Airbus's "normal law" flying!

My $0.02 - I'm a CPL ME/IR who gets wet a lot, and is upside down half the time. Background is Automotive and Mechanical Engineering, been in software since 2007.

Want to shake up GA?

  - 150kt Cruise, 4h endurance  
  - 400kg "useful" load for pax/luggage @ 4h endurance / batteries  
  - 3-axis AP that'll do coupled approaches + autoland  
  - BRS, FIKI, Oxy/Pressurized  
  - $100k fly away

Garmin, Rotax, Vans etc ... the avionics, materials, plans and tech already exists. It's needing a few hundred million dollars to set it up to be produced at scale so the $100k avionics package can be had for $10k. The $100k equivalent Rotax or Lycoming can be had for $10k. Maybe it's electric vs avgas.

Foreflight, Garmin Pilot etc do so much of the planning - and integrate well with the "Connext" or Dynon etc already. They've like racked up millions of hours now, I know I've thrown in a few hundred hours worth of feedback to them.

Your closest competitor is Cirrus who are already very successful using off the shelf components customized (eg Perspective+ vs 1000Nxi) to their liking, and are running a pretty substantial wait list for their planes. Their training is top notch, customer service is excellent and have thousands of airframes now flying over the past 20+ years.

I'm glad you guys trying to shake up this space, and I'd like more than anything to be proven wrong - I genuinely hope there's enough runway and capital to setup manufacturing to bring these component prices down and actually deliver a plane at a comparable cost to a car.

This reminds me of programming languages designed with an English-like syntax in the hope that people would be able to develop software without learning to code. It also reminds me a bit of the Ercoupe, an airplane designed in 1937 with the ailerons and rudders mechanically coupled so that pilots would have fewer controls to operate and reduced ability to put the airplane into uncoordinated flight.

Neither approach has remained popular into the modern era. Of course it also reminds me of Airbus, which has a similarly simplified fly-by-wire control system that abstracts away the details of controlling the aircraft under normal conditions. Airbus promised that system, introduced on the A320 would make planes uncrashable, which pilots promptly disproved on that aircraft's first passenger flight[0].

Helping people get pilot's licenses without learning to fly coordinated turns does not strike me as particularly useful, but there is no doubt room for improved avionics and planning software.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296Q

Former pilot (now paragliders) and founder/engineer here-

I'm not sold that this approach - eliminating the need for coordinated flying- really removes the big barriers to flying. I'm surrounded by aviation lovers who don't fly PPL, and the big barriers are cost, time, and fear.

The Ercoupe tried this exact approach in the 30s in one of the big GA booms and it just wasn't borne out.

I'd love to see more GA pilots, but this won't get us there as quickly as say, comprehensive medical reform or a production aircraft that's cheaper than $50/hr to fly would.

A few thoughts:

- Enable fall back controls where the pilot can input "traditional" controls when the more advanced system is degraded, even though it's all fly by wire their should still be inputs that fully mimic a traditional cockpit and ability to use this system should be allowed if the pilot requires it.

- Drop any focus or marketing on getting more people flying, if the ease of use of your aircraft is such that pilots who otherwise would not be qualified to fly now can fly, this is a recipe for disaster.

- Instead, focus on bringing a higher quality aircraft to market for pilots who want a more capable system, this cannot do any harm imo.

- Any system that lowers mental workload so that more focus can go into other areas of flying is welcome, just ensure there is always a method to fly the aircraft without the "auto" magic, there should always be controls that give raw control if needed even modern fly by wire commercial airliners have this fall back ability.

Howdy! FI(H) here. Looks very cool, I watched the video too.

Many students get the hang of hovering within 10 hours - "learning to fly" really isn't that hard? I see the rest of the course as "learning to become a pilot." That means the background knowledge and practice to allow decision making & dealing with emergencies etc.

I think if you could improve just a single one of the problems you touch on (difficult controls, navigation, mass and balance, fly by wire etc) you could make a lot of money...

... But improving all of them in one shot... that sounds unreasonable to me? Are they really connected?

Our system makes it impossible to lose control of the airplane, potentially solving 80% of today’s fatal accidents in general aviation.

I'd love to see details on how you achieved this... or at least your definition of "impossible"...

In the US, trips that are 50-300 miles are almost all done by car because that distance is too short for commercial airlines and too far for public transportation.

About once a month, I make a 90 mile (180 round trip) drive to see family. The drive is usually 90-100 minutes.

Would GA really save time? It's half an hour for me to get to a GA airport, and then roughly half an hour to get to my family from the other GA airport. And then, we'd need to arrange ground transportation.

Presumably anyone who wants to fly this would still have to go through a traditional pilot qualification with an old-school plane? So this is actually targeting people who do fly airplanes, but want to be more comfortable and more able to focus on the navigation and general enjoyment of the air while reducing the actual risk of flying, rather than having to, as you put it, micromanage the aircraft. As someone who likes nothing better than to look out of the window of a passenger jet with the GPS and map on my phone in my hand to see where I am, and to know which geographical features are unravelling below, I kinda get it.

Always happy to see new GA aircraft, and the tech here looks very cool. The emergency autoland and chute will definitely be lifesavers. If your system can reliably prevent base-final stall spins then that would clearly be awesome.

One thing that jumped out at me is what are you trading to get that protection? While I have no issues with fly by wire, I'd be nervous about a GA aircraft that's overly opinionated about what it should be doing vs how to do it.

* Can I put it into a forward slip, or will it refuse or return to coordinated flight? This could be critical in an engine related emergency where you're too high and can't or don't want to risk getting farther from the airport.

* If I need to make a steep turn to avoid someone heading the wrong way on base is it going to let me?

I see the value in stall prevention but, outside of stall spin on final, that's largely been solved in GA via passive aero design characteristics making it tough to stall and harder to stay stalled.

I understand the excitement on a technical level, and your plan sure sounds neat; and I definitely have a lot of respect on a personal level.

On the other hand, humanity is rolling head-first into a climate crisis, won’t stop emitting way too much CO2, and people generally refuse to adapt their lifestyle even a modicum in face of an exponentially growing list of problems.

Do we really need even more personal aviation in the situation we’re currently facing? Is that what talented engineers should work on, are personal planes in addition to personal cars really what people should be buying?

As you probably know, there is actually a lot of innovation already going on in the Experimental category. Fuel Injection, FADEC systems, advanced engine computers, terrain avoidance, synthetic vision, electronic trim, and so on. I built a Van's two-seater, and the technology I have up with me is night and day different from where we were 20 years ago, let alone 40.

Are you going the experimental / kit build route, or will you be the certified manufacturer? If it's the latter, how do you plan to navigate the FAA? I think a lot of aspirational "GA innovators" ultimately die climbing the regulatory hill.

I have a silly question: my dad got his private pilot a few years back and in watching him I learned is that, even with engine failure, pilots train to be able to glide the aircraft safely. On a Cessna 150 this is purely mechanical.

In this case, how does the pilot have control to be able to land in a field in the case of engine failure?

(Not a pilot myself, so pardon the naive question!)

Unlike a traditional airplane, it becomes impossible to command the airplane into a stall, a spin, unsafe attitudes, or other bad states.

Interesting product and definitely different from most YC startups we see!

However, I am curious how the above will be impossible. Since it is fly-by-wire it seems like there is always a chance your sensor/servo fails and causes bad input. Or a software defect causes bad input with no manual overrides to just fly the airplane.

My worry is the noise pollution. I'm always surprised at how loud it is when a small airplane flies over.

Congrats on the launch!

The core of what makes a good pilot isn’t stick and rudder skills; it’s good decision making and risk management.

At best, this is only half of the story. What separates GA operations from airline operations in terms of safety is much more involved than that:

- GA (Part 91) flight hours are not recorded so safety data can only be estimated

- Part 91 incidents follow much less scrutiny than part 121 or part 135 incidents

- Part 91 lacks consistent checklists/flows and rigorous training for many particular aircraft

- Passenger airlines in the US (Part 121) have

  - pilots that go through rigorous training and check rides on a schedule

  - chief pilots that oversee operations

  - chief pilots that continuously refine procedures 

  - data collection and monitoring for many variables of flight

    eg: exceeding an accepted bank angle while under manual flight control

  - ... and so much more that part 91 lacks

One safety factor in a lot of small GA planes is that pilots can often lose all power (engine, electrical, etc) and still fly and land their aircraft. Fly by wire removes that ability. Not being able to competently fly the plane coordinated also removes that ability.

The question I think you are not addressing is: there has been a lot of effort to do exactly what you are doing. What sets your approach apart from those efforts?

Freedom of Flight for Everyone

*The full price of the Airhart Sling pre-tax is $500,000 with availability predicted for January of 2026.

"Everyone" is quite a stretch. It's hard for me to see this as anything but a new toy for rich people.

I love the concept, as an aviation nerd (and hopefully future GA pilot). However I'm a little cautious - understanding weather particularly is massively different from moving in 2 dimensions and you can't land "anywhere", unlike how you can pull over. And the average person who doesn't know much about the weather isn't likely to know what a microburst is or why it's dangerous.

I'd recommend pitching this to (new) pilots instead at least for starters.

First of, so nice to see someone solving hard problem. Best of luck to you and your team.

Do you see the overcrowding of airspace as a concern at all?

This is commendable, people who travel 50-300 miles do not use an Aeroplane because you need a car on the other end regardless, so I rather take my car.

For example, SF to Tahoe is demonstrated as a route I could fly, but I need a car on the other end for sure. I could rent a car which is a pain.

I could arrange a driver service, but at that point I could get driver to drive me from San Francisco.

It is too expensive for folks who want to fly themselves and save money, it is not a great deal better for those who can hire drivers.

...three flight controllers ... two different sets of sensors ... independently compute the desired actions to take, and vote on what to do. Each ... has its own power source, backup battery, networking hardware, and set of critical sensors.

You didn't mention activators. Do all the redundant components you mentioned connect to a single voting system, and single set of actuators? How do you avoid your voting system and actuators being another single point of failure?

Or does each redundant system have it's own set of actuators, and enough of them to tolerate failure of one set? (e.g. three sets sized such that two working ones can overpower one erroneous one)

How much of GA accidents are caused by the high prices of training? Like, there are minimum hour requirements to get a license and then minimum yearly hours for proficiency but I can see the high cost of training and flying to cause pilots to just do the bare minimum.

My wish would be that prices go down and we'd see more pilots training more often and becoming better as a result.

The cost per trip seems to be about on par with commercial flight prices. Can an airplane like this ever be made electric, with similar range?

Digitalization of aircraft is a really interesting space right now! Even local legislatures are talking to media about "vertiports" (ostensibly to justify the CEOs flying to the office, we promise it's coming to you), though I really wonder how they'll drop an R44/66/Bell505 sized aircraft into a business park because of the noise.

I'm watching two companies in this space(I guess 3 now!):

Hill Helicopters[0] is working on a ground-up build of an aircraft, turboshaft engine, and an avionics suite that you can "drive like a car". It's an enormous undertaking, and I'm not sure if they'll pull it off or not.

The second one is Skyryse[1] and their SkyOS. They're focusing on the avionics like you guys, and putting it in an R66 initially, though they plan fixed-wing versions as well. It is also intended to be a single-stick input which can handle emergency situations automatically; they've already demonstrated their first automatic manned autorotation.

I do think that one of the bigger problems in aviation is cost. Most people can't afford an aircraft whether it flew itself or not. This leads to people not flying enough to become excellent and safe pilots. I've been working on my rotorwing addon and the R44 time is $750/hr!?! If you look at the cost of aviation indexed against median income, it has increased over 5x since the cessna 172 era. In cities, another big problem is hangarage, these have waiting lists currently in the decades and costs in the range of a new home.

Another area I'd really like to see more innovation in is aircraft design. Besides Mr Ruttan, everyone just builds tried and true designs and rarely explore the edges of what is possible.

I will also say, while I think that the range you're targetting is smart, and the mass of mostly unused airfields is staggeringly sad to me, there are a lot more issues than just getting there that need to have infrastructure that I'm not sure will be easy to scale.

I think the reason we see gov talking about vertiports now is because in medium-to-large cities they are completely lost on how to solve the traffic issues (hence rich powerful people asking for them). One area that I don't think aviation looks at enough is relatively short-range travel. If you think of a time-topography map of a city, you could make a much larger city, by area, if you can shrink the time it takes to travel (i.e. same QoL if I can go 50mi in 15min vs 10).

0. https://www.hillhelicopters.com/

1. https://www.skyryse.com/

Could this enable a cheaper flight as a service? Short hops from city to city or the cottage, with cheaper pilots it could be lower cost.

In the demo, on what is the system's assumption that you want to land based?

In your video, what flight simulator engine are you using? Is it something you created or is it something like Xplane or MSFS?

First of all: great that you’re working on bringing innovation to general aviation! During training I also wondered about some technical aspects, as a lot of the tech in an airplane is from almost 60-70 years ago.

However, as a PPL holder myself I think that understanding weight and balance, aerodynamics, flight planning, ATC, airlaw, principles of flight etc. is paramount to keep yourself and others safe.

In the air you cannot simply drive to the side of the road and have a look at what’s going on. As a pilot you must be able to make decisions on the spot. To be able to make those properly, you have to understand what’s going on from first principles. In aviation safety is the primary goal. Statistically more than 80% of aviation accidents can be traced back to human error. Anything that facilitates bringing people in the pilot seat suggesting they need less training is something i strictly oppose.

Despite, anything that helps to simplify aircraft operations may decrease cognitive load and is therefore welcome.

I guess you're aware of the ICAO/FAA hoops you have to jump through to get anything of what you're developing beyond experimental certificate but having seen how long it took e.g. Volocopter to gain their (still incomplete) type certificate it is a long road.

If you'd be able to simplify avionics and create an affordable standardized fly-by-wire kit that alone would be a great innovation for GA especially in the ultralight and light sport aircraft category.

I wish you all the best!

Very excited about this. I've been flying curious for years, but haven't actually done it. Some of the cons that have held me back...

A few of the places I'd want to travel to have consistently bad crosswinds. Crabbing looks complex and you have to get 5 things right or you die. For the non flyers check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca0V5q4XSb8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ri0D_0DdIU and how to do the maneuver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92K8s-vppDI&t=3s

It greatly limits your available flying days if you think "hey 30mph crosswinds are super sketchy, I don't want to fly today." So that means delayed trips or delayed returns. Hard to plan around.

I realize this isn't part of the current iteration and requires lots of regulatory hoops... But in future with automation, it would be amazing to know you could fly in clouds or evenings easily with only a basic private pilot's license.

Aviation self driving is so much older and reliable than automotive self driving, it's frustrating that it isn't generally available. It's awesome that you are working to bring it to low cost flying, thanks for working on this and congratulations on the launch!

I'll add that I think the "easy to drive as a boat or car" size of the market is easily 10x the existing private pilot market. (And the easy as a car and the price of a pickup truck size of the market is probably 1000x the current market). So I think you are on to something big.

Wow, that flight sim demo is inspiring - almost looks obvious like it’s how it always should have been.

I never saw learning to fly enjoyably die to the immense respect I had for the work piloting takes to do well.

If this type of aircraft could also help organize fractional usage and ownership it would create even more beginners.

The video and the pitch strike me as odd. The value proposition here is to grow the market for small planes by making them easy. You still need to be rich so this is basically an expensive toy. I'm not sure comparisons to what came before matter, the people who will buy this don't know or care about the existing way to control a plane.

All you have to do is show how easy your system is. To which end, why the hell would you put two separate hand controls rather than a steering wheel that also goes in and out and some pedals for speed up and slow down. It it's as easy as a car, make it like a car.

This is fascinating.

Other, smarter commenters will undoubtedly point out potential issues…but since I am a decidedly uninformed groundling, I hope you succeed.

Ambitious, complicated, probably-impossible challenges create space for the kind of projects which could actually change the world.

Sounds tough…good luck!

I hope you succeed

Another Icon A5 then, but non-amphibious and FBW?

Really cool to see people working on tough problems.

Are you building your own FADEC system, or working with existing engine control systems?

I got my PPL a while ago, and I'm super excited about this! Though, I'm mostly a renter, so I may not be of much support to purchase at $500,000.

This would be quite the upgrade from a 1980's Cessna.

I guess we'll have to wait for the new standards, but things like learning about the engine, stall recovery and crosswinds are a pretty major part of aviation training. Though the plane can do these things, I'm not sure how much training will be abstracted away (since it's a generic curriculum and we can fly most ASEL).

Few questions:

1. Does the flight controller have a back-up?

2. What does the override for controlling rudder and aileron look like. How about spin recovery or taxing with headwinds?

3. Would you sell your avionics set-up so I can retrofit and replace a Garmin System. I've always found Garmin's to be tricky and hard to read. Yours looks waay better

4. Love the Live ATC transcriptions

Best of luck! Hoping I get to fly one of these some day.

As a layman, I have a question about the mass market appeal aspect (or as you call it, making it sexy). Is there any hope that your vessel wouldn’t require earmuffs and a comm system? Or is that only possible after a million bucks of exotic materials?

MEMS gyro for fly-by-wire airplane using “ clever sensor fusion math” does not sound reassuring

At $500,000 why not use the laser-ring gyros that’s hardly cost prohibitive

No mention of the environmental impact of this, which leads me to assume it would be bad. Any comments on this?

My positive encouragement to your success. Personally, I believe in a futuristic vision of transport like this for 50-300 miles, trains for 3-150 miles, and bicycles and ebikes for < 10 miles. Without roads, we could breathe so much more.

It may seem unrealistic, but just visit the Netherlands, or visit the airports around the UK and Western Europe. It's ridiculously cheap to get around by bike, and healthier. Yes not all or even most environments are not suitable for cycling. But enough city-like or nature environments are and can be connected. The world cries from the concentration of people and tourists to the same, accessible spots. You see this if you every go 40 miles off course in the US, or even 20 in Europe. Amazing spots, waterfalls. If unaccessible, an hour walk away from car access... such beauty is open. Wouldn't we all benefit from distributing people more widely, sharing experiences more affordably?

This is super great, glad to see you-all up'ing the ante for safety. As you say a good percent of accidents are pilot error based loss of control events (https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...). There's a lot be said for getting multiple safety technologies in one package, as you seem to be doing.

I'm interested in your approach to certification. I've heard the LSA limits are increasing dramatically, but how sure are you that MOSAIC is going to turn-out as you hope for fly-by-wire control? Are you prepared for the regulatory environment as it is today by going with an experimental platform like the Sling? Usually there's a mandate for a home-builder to build "51%" of the aircraft, so I'm also wondering how that works for a characteristics augmentation system such as yours. What percent of the control laws fit into the 51%?

On the certified side, Piper is shipping the Pilot 100i trainer aircraft with Electronic Stability and Protection (ESP), preventing students from doing some wild stuff while flying solo, using the Garmin G3X certified avionics. Garmin has also been working on auto-land. With a continued development of these certified platforms, combining a ballistic parachute, how much room is there for you with an experimental aircraft?

I looked at the prescribed spot at Oshkosh and sadly couldn't find your booth as I was excited to meet you-all.. Previously I enjoyed flying Joby's sim which is a great example of Simplified Vehicle Operations (SVO). While they're in the powered lift space, I'm curious how much overlap you two have in the control-law certification path of your SVO aircraft.

Finally, as an aviation startup founder myself (FlyShirley.com - Your AI Copilot from Sim to Sky), I'm approaching this from a different angle for a lot of the same reasons, including how task saturation, fatigue/distraction are contributing factors in many accidents.

Super excited to see more aviation startups on hn. Hope to chat at some point. Cheers!

Aero-engineers: why can't we make airfoil kits to make certain vehicles 'air worthy'? A 10k addon to your current sedan to make it short take off and landing sounds way more fun than anything else.

I understand that weight on ground for stability is completely different than air travel... but why not create a whole class of vehicles around this premise?

The only one I can remember is the SkyCar from Moller. He was a little ahead of the game with petrol based quad motors.

As someone who lives very near to a small airport with many small planes taking off and landing every day, and also has a young child, I have grown increasingly concerned with the use of lead in the fuel of these planes.

Do these planes you are building burn fuel containing lead? If so, how can you justify a 10x increase in small plane traffic, as you have stated is the goal or at least the potential capacity elsewhere in this thread?

I am so sorry to see this. The absolute last thing we need is yet another fossil guzzling vehicle. Please stop what you are doing immediately and go back to the drawing board and help save our planet by inventing a craft that uses solar power to charge batteries to fly. I am sure I will get down voted to hell for this. But tough shit. The planet is chocking and we simply do not need more people burning fossil fuel for fun and pleasure. Stop. Please. Stop and rethink this.

I recently found this YouTube channel - https://youtube.com/@bryceangell, which showcases the exact demographic that would buy this sort of aircraft. Very interesting to learn about their use cases and POV.

This is a terrible idea. A waste of talent

Worsening the systemic problems that are burning the planet

We need more high density transport for the 500 mile range, not more individual aeroplanes- each with one passenger

Drones are easy to control from iPhones. I look forward to a flying car that is as easy to control declaratively and letting the computer fly the plain

"With Airhart Assist (that’s what we call our system), you just push a control stick to the right and the flight computers do all those steps to put you into a coordinated level turn."

Somehow I'm reminded of the staggering amount of continuous calculations the onboard computers had to do to keep the F-117 (the aerodynamic equivalent of trying to fly an Egyptian pyramid) from augering in.

Using a Rotax 915 iS no thanks

Congrats! I was an angel investor in a regional transit airline (https://www.surfair.com/) - there are a lot of wonderful places out there especially in the US that folks aren't traveling to because of logistics. As someone with a family as well, I'd love to learn to fly if it could be made safer and easier. Hoping you guys succeed!

I think you’re trying to solve the wrong problem, though with a lot of the right tech.

Basic stick and rudder skills aren’t that hard, save perhaps for crosswind landing/takeoff.

Envelope protection and emergency auto land are good, but I think already done by other companies.

Taking existing controls (stick and throttle) but giving them different names and making them command inputs rather than controls, but ones that vary what that command is subject to the IMPLICIT mode the aircraft believes it’s in (TOGA, land, cruise, taxi etc) are sowing the ground for confusion - look at all the analyses of Airbus incidents due to pilots not understanding what modes the aircraft thinks it’s in due to combination of control and sensors and control law fallbacks due to failures. The idea is sound but pilots lulled into complacency with normally simplified handling get into wild and sometimes fatal rides when things go amiss. Spend time on Mentor Pilot’s excellent channel.

Personally I think one of the biggest improvements to safety would be a decent AoA display and warning system for all aircraft.

Next up a solution to VFR into IMC, with subsequent loss of control or terrain / obstacle impact, which is effectively a use case of envelope protection and emergency autoland.

This tech exists, it’s just not in most of the fleet and not triple redundant.

Finally, rather than trying to make an aircraft more like a car, or only being confident flying your aircraft within a narrow regime, go do some aerobatics and unusual attitude training so you get a feel for how the wing really flies.

First, Soylent names their company after a famous product made out of humans.

Then iRobot and now an aviation company named after the most famous dead aviator.

Seems... not ideal.

super cool, and if this works you'll bring a big part of what we dreamed of as "the future" into the present!

It was awesome meeting you guys way back in 2022 during our YC batch. I’ve always loved this idea and I’m so stoked that you’ve made it a reality. Would love to try it out :)

This is a really great idea that i would love to be a part of. although i dont own a aircraft not even a simulator. How are you guys planning to accomodate the large number of people who will simulatneously would want to travel the same route at the same time?

I am sometimes flabbergasted by some of the things YC will fund. This is one of them.

I don't know where to start, other than to say I would never make some of these assertions in public. Doesn't YC provide legal support to the startups it funds?

For example:

"Unlike a traditional airplane, it becomes impossible to command the airplane into a stall, a spin, unsafe attitudes, or other bad states."

This is categorically and absolutely false and wrong. There is no such thing as "impossible". Do not ever say things like that or you will find your own words used as weapons against you in the inevitable court case when something does go wrong. Too late now, it's already out there.

Attorney: Sir, your plane stalled and became uncontrollable. The pilot had no controls because you removed pedals and any industry-proven direct control mechanisms. Your company asserted this failure mode was impossible, yet, it happened. Exhibit A, in your own words.

"we can use MEMS gyroscopes that cost <$100 instead of laser-ring gyros that cost $1000 if not $10k"

Attorney: Sir, your aircraft killed all four of its passengers, destroyed three homes, killed an additional three people on the ground --two of them children-- and sent half a dozen others to the hospital in critical condition. Why did you use cheap sensors instead of industry-standard, battle-tested, fully-vetted, qualified, susceptibility-tested hardware?

"We’ve developed our own control surface actuators"

Attorney (following-up to the previous question): Control surfaces failed to actuate controls as required. You used cheap self-designed actuation hardware that did not have extensive engineering design, testing and qualification pedigree as industry-standard products...to save money...

"own radios and GPS hardware (an aviation grade GPS can cost upwards of $10k, but it’s the same hardware as in a $20 consumer grade GPS)"

Attorney: I repeat the question. Your cheap $20 GPS just killed half a dozen people. How could you justify placing such little value on human life?

"The only real single point of failure is the engine."

False! A triple-redundant design, will, at best, mitigate a single failure and ZERO in the case of common-mode failures. Triple modular redundancy requires, at a minimum: Triple redundant power, triple sensing, triple compute, triple actuation and no common-mode failure mechanisms. Once a triple-redundant system experiences a single failure, it turns into a system with two possible sources of truth, which means it is impossible to know who might be right.

My free advice is to stop talking and get out of this business before you kill people. Seriously. You are not at SpaceX with hundred-billion-dollar budgets launching craft that fly so far away from population centers that they could explode and nobody gets hurt. Before Crew Dragon flew for the first time billions of dollars went into evolving the systems that made it possible.

Then again, what do I know? I could be wrong.

This is so epic. One of the fundamental challenges in mainstreaming personal aviation is the difficulty of learning to fly. If you can make it 10x easier, it will be a massive step forward. Good luck and congrats on the progress so far!

I'm shocked YC would fund this. The idea alone is irresponsible on multiple levels as others have mentioned.

Is this where the techbros 'went too far'?

You will not succeed. Guaranteed.

Cool concept, I hope you're able to make it work.

Do you plan to integrate auto GCAS functionality into the flight control system?

Does the flight control system automatically detect ice buildup? (One common cause of GA crashes is inadvertently flying into icing conditions with the autopilot engaged. The autopilot compensates for the ice buildup to a certain level, then it reaches its limit and disengages at which point loss of control may be inevitable.)

Will the autoland system use Garmin Autonomi or are you building your own?

Will you attempt to detect possible pilot deviations and give them an alert?

If we already have the infrastructure and the technology, why isn't everyone flying planes?

Because driving a car 50-300 miles is cheaper, easier, and may even be faster in some scenarios.

Oh, and when I get to my destination, I have a car.

I’m not a pilot and this couldn’t make me one. Too expensive, too much work, too inconvenient. Very cool but everyone isn’t going to be flying any more than they already are. It’s for people who already are or already want to be pilots.

Would be great if you can make CFIT difficult/impossible to accomplish by default as well.

I see Electric flight "taking off" to for small airplanes, right here in my backyard in Europe. I've been on a few flights and the adventages are huge,l. Range is still an issue. But for small stuff, I wouldn't bet on jet fuel anymore.

Since this view seems underrepresented here, I'll say I'd just as soon see the number of aircraft in the sky stay at right about what it is now, not more.

Having random tech bros flying overhead is not an anxiety reducing phenomenon.

On the other hand, taking the other side of this, what you're working on seems long overdue.

I would suggest building for the future (electric). Yeah as you said batteries are not ready yet, but think about it, you should be thinking forward to a time when they are. As an analogy, people in YC today are not just designing products that will be using today's AI. They are designing products that will be using the AI of a year, two years, from now. And you should be working this way too. And with electric, the drivetrain will be way more reliable and people like me who wonder if you're going to dribble gas on my house will have less to worry about.

I love the idea & I love to fly but building and operating air planes is a shitty business.

Technology wise we could have fly by wire fully automated planes, vtol, and helicopters easily (at least in limited areas first). The problem is not tech it's regulation, insurance, backwards compatibility and scale.

Sadly scale is the killer. You would need a Toyota for airplanes but your market to sell is tiny. You just cannot spread your dev costs over huge volumes of planes. I have seen aero dynamic designs which are comparable to fuel efficient cars but travel at 200mph. But it's very expensive and risky to build a company around it.

What you might be able to break into is Garmins market but hard! Maybe new markets like electric planes or vtol.

I hope I am wrong and you are right. I wish you guys succeed bc GA aviation is stuck in 1970s.

Congrats Nikita. What about the regulations from the government for private aviation? What kind of hurdles are you seeing in getting approvals for this project?

The only way this can turn profit is if you make it into rideshare and recruit hobbyist pilots to become Uber drivers.

My $0.02:

- The stick-and-rudder skills aren’t hard and not the main reason people die. It’s the decision making that kills.

- The “faster to fly” than drive for me starts at about 3 hrs drive (wind, preflight time, takeoff / climb / landing time, deviations by ATC, etc). My indicated airspeed is roughly your true btw.

- Looks and feels like Cirrus with AI. I am missing barn doors for luggage and dogs; 200 kts cruise; 6 hrs with tip tanks; and gross to actually do it. I’ll stick with my Bonanza.

- Main problem you will face is insurance. It will be expensive if even obtainable for low experienced pilots.

As someone interested in learning to fly this is very cool. Congrats on the launch!

an aviation grade GPS can cost upwards of $10k, but it’s the same hardware as in a $20 consumer grade GPS

I think the cost of aviation hardware might be much higher because of issues with precision, insurance, updates, redundancy and the very small volumes compared to consumer volumes. Is there a way to certify consumer hardware for aviation applications or are there essentially monopolies and regulatory capture that limit cheaper alternatives from entering the market?

As a pilot and tech professional, I completely resonate with your observations. However, the fly-by-wire concept concerns me a bit. I imagine it significantly complicates the onboard technology and makes maintenance more complex and costly. Additionally, I assume the training will need to address potential malfunctions, such as alternate law and direct law scenarios, which might make the rating process more complicated rather than less. How do you plan to tackle these challenges?

I want all of this and it really shouldn't be hard. In fact, many have tried at least parts of this but failed because of the regulatory hurdles. Taking 10 years to bring a product to market while spending a huge amount of $$$ testing and certifying it just to sell to a small GA market is a very hard business model to make work. How do you plan to get over those hurdles? I think the only real way to break into aviation is to start in a space that isn't overly encumbered with regulation. What about ultralights? paramotors? maybe even electric? Innovating in these spaces may be able to get you the market that could side-step the problems with testing and certifying in the GA space.

Guessing you guys have already read it but here is a good related book for others in the thread: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42036377-where-is-my-fly...

Project sounds like an ambitious exciting idea and i'd take the pessimism/skepticism as a positive sign that you are on the right track. It feels like something has changed in tech for a lot of people with regards to tackling really ambitious projects compared to years past.

I'm curious how the relative difficulty of fully automated driving would compare to fully automated flying. I'm no pilot but it seems in a lot of regards flying might actually be easier with regards to the number of possible scenarios cars can be faced with.

I imagine trying to compare the risk between flying and driving is pretty interesting. I would think in flying risk is significantly more dependent on the individual vs the tremendous risk in driving posed by every other car on the road. That and I would guess the accident vs fatal accident balance is completely different.

Considering we fairly easily are willing to give basically any 16 year old a car license and just accept a rather high risk rate with driving I wonder how much the gap between driving and flying could be closed. That and the financial gap as well -- from a raw materials perspective could we in theory have a honda civic of the sky that a significant percentage of Americans (say 30-40%) could find accessible?

There’s a plethora of other problems that make flying cumbersome

How about CO2 emissions?

"*The full price of the Airhart Sling pre-tax is $500,000 with availability predicted for January of 2026. This purchase secures a production slot in the limited first manufacture of the aircraft."

Is this statement accurate? "Airhart Assist provides a combination of (car like) cruise control as well as automatic rudder control." If correct, does it do anything else?

A lot of people will likely wonder: “isn’t removing stick and rudder skills going to make worse pilots”? Short answer: no. The core of what makes a good pilot isn’t stick and rudder skills; it’s good decision making and risk management.

I find it's easiest to just ignore this mindset. These are the people who claim that a manual transmission is "real" driving. (Unlike the people who enjoy driving stick and aren't snobs about it.) The market will favor you and everyone else will see those people as snobs.

Getting cheaper and better planes is good. But this is not a correct way of solving traffic problems in US. We need high-speed railroad network, not one airplane per household.

Super awesome, love the vision, exciting to try something in this space, and agreed with your core observations and conclusions. My only criticism is that the interior / package needs to look way cooler to tempt people across. Working with a decent industrial design firm and making some sexy renders would go a long way!

I’ve often thought this kind “do what I mean” control could expand to a lot of machines where currently it takes potentially years to develop an intuition around how moving various levers/pedals actually results in things moving physically in space the way that you intend.

A few years ago I rented a mini excavator whose levers are directly connected to hydraulic valves that control the motion of the bucket in a weird polar coordinate space. It’s extremely tricky as a beginner to even e.g. make the bottom of a trench level, and it seems like just a bit of intelligence would make this trivial. Even a bit of force feedback would do wonders for controllability.

Congrats on launch! Definitely interested to see where you go with this. What I was looking for on the site was more about what the differentiators are compared to the standard planes in the category. A bit more about that and the mission would go a long way (some of what you say here should be on the site). Live reaction here: https://youtu.be/oklA3qnTbsc

If there’s no rudder controls, how does one do cross wind landings?

Kudos on not going with a Garmin for the software and glass cockpit. Super ballsy.

This is dope! Go S22

I used to fly the same type of plane like a decade or so ago.

very fun plane, easily carried away by the wind. for people that are not pilots surely sling will cause a lot of panic.

I also built autonomous aircraft when I was a student at Cornell

You should urgently pivot to strictly autonomous vehicles, airborne or otherwise. Waymos are here and now, they are at least as impactful as GLP-1s and LLMs.

In the US, trips that are 50-300 miles are almost all done by car because that distance is too short for commercial airlines and too far for public transportation.

How can the solution be worse cars rather than better public transport?

Isn’t a better solution for the given distance - rail transport? It’s more affordable, ecological and can serve higher number of people from different economical layers. This seems more like an enthusiast toy rather than an alternative for 50-300 miles travel options.

Do you view passenger drones as a competitor?

Photography and hobbyist drones are easy enough to control, and I would expect a manual passenger drone to follow that consumer model.

How are you going to address the insurance, ownership costs, and FAA certifications for this?

Atm, the real barriers to entry in the market are the insanely high regulatory and liability compliance costs--not flight aides, pilot training, or folks with the desire to fly.

- Look at the long path that Cirrus had to take with it's "Safe Return" auto-landing feature.

- Look at the decades-long adoption curve of even basic/obvious tech like 100LL avgas.

- Look at Bye Aerospace's struggles bringing a simple "go-kart" electric training aircraft to market

I'm not optimistic for ANY substantive innovation in this space without a serious overhaul of the regulatory environment.

Congrats on the launch and kudos on building on bold ideas.

I think car rides are "good enough" for a certain distance vs short flights. Short flights (tiny aircrafts) are so expensive because they have to compete with the good enough option and I am not sure that can ever happen.

The more important point is that flight accidents can affect people or buildings that are far away from roads - practically anywhere within a certain range of a flight path. This will have huge effect in people's mindset about safety and work against the popularity of such flights.

Are you familiar with the Pivotal Aero?

https://pivotal.aero/

This unusual aircraft seems to be a move in the right direction, apropos making flight simpler - because its flight dynamics are designed, inherently, to be forgiving to non-trained pilots.. Its landing mode is a function of its wing pitch and air speed, so it will 'automatically' transition from flight to landing modes based on air speed - there is no need on the part of the pilot to get heavily involved in the approach to landing, and so on, beyond the usual 'is it safe to go down there' decision-making process.

I'm curious what you think of the Pivotal Aero Opener concept, and how long you think it might be until similar designs arrive on the scene. It seems to me that the Opener is a bit of a leapfrog ahead of traditional plane design decisions, intended for non-pilot use .. from your perspective, what are the pros'/cons' of the Opener, as a design, and would you consider similar concepts in the future of Airhart Aeronautics?

Exciting project, good luck!

Ok I can think of a thousand things that could go wrong, but ultimately, this is some real damn innovation. Well done! Can’t wait to see how this evolves.

flying is worse for the environment, as few people should fly as possible, not more

Have you engaged with the FAA yet? Even if you're going the experimental route, it's useful to have an active and ongoing dialog with them. And they are tremendously more receptive to working with companies on new technologies than they were 10 years ago. It's a different regulatory environment than you would have been dealing with at SpaceX.

These are the kinds of problems, when I was younger, I always imagined the tech industry would be solving. This is just so cool. Congratulations to you and your team and I really hope a future of small, safe, and affordable personal aircrafts becomes a reality!

Sounds awesome! Are you guys hiring at the moment?

Smart approach partnering with an established light aircraft manufacturer with a good safety rating (South Africa’s Sling Aircraft) rather than trying to reinvent the wheel on the base platform. That gives me more faith in the rest of the engineering decisions made on this project.

Wishing you all the best! Anything that improves the safety of flying GA aircraft like this is a good thing.

Nitpick: "Manual lever" not level.

No offense, but:

The only real single point of failure is the engine

Sounds like a dangerous statement to make. There is multiple more: software, flaps/alt controls, pilot failure, etc.

And also "lever sensor fusion math" - personally being software engineer I am not a big believer in "clever"

I also wanna mention that I really like the idea, and looking forward to where it gets you; hopefully such skeptics like myself will have enough trust into what you're working on!

How does this compare to the 200k + engine https://www.darkaero.com/aircraft ?

I’m not sure it’s a great idea to name your product/company, who’s goal is to make it easier to fly, an homage to one of the most famous disasters and mysteries in the history of flight.

It's awesome to bring some innovation into the airplane market. That being said, changing the control scheme seems like a bad move. Stick and rudder are not that complicated. Lots of aspiring pilots will not buy this thing because they are all going to have been trained on conventional controls.

I even ran into this when making my unrealistic VR space flight sim (roguestargun.com)

The first thing people complained about was the fact that I didn't setup the controls with conventional pitch and yaw axis. I watched videos of folks crashing repeatedly. I finally gave in and a bunch of 4 star reviews turned into 5 star reviews.

Honestly, I love the idea of a more modern GA airplane… but I think that for most people, stick and rudder skills are the least of their worries. Don’t get me wrong, people do stupid stuff all of the time, but I think the real improvements that you can bring are in the flight planning and monitoring software. A moving map with range heatmap at present conditions, warnings as options get closed out, airfields within glide range under present conditions, audible warnings and stick shaker if you do some kind of stupid cross control fuckery or need to lower the nose of the aircraft, etc. Sort of a co-pilot system that keeps you up to date with options, conditions, checklists, vectors, etc.

Most accidents are a result of bad planning, and even an overweight or poorly functioning aircraft could be detected early in the takeoff roll with accelerometers. If you had a system that could keep up on realistic plans under the circumstances of the flight, it could go a long way towards improving flight safety.

I find this whole concept somewhat disturbing. It sounds like he is trying to democratize aviation by creating an airplane that just about anybody can fly without any pilot training. This is so far removed from the reality of the FAAs perspective, that I do think it is destined to fail. This aircraft will never be certified by the FAA, it would cost hundreds of millions to do so and will certainly not allow automotive grade hardware. The FAA will never lower their standards for Pilot training, and hardware certification, so that any pilot that does fly this airplane will still have to meet airman certification standards (ACS) as all other pilots, and that means learning to mitigate the things that this company is trying to eliminate. Although our technology has certainly advanced significantly, history has shown that this so-called “airplane for everybody” is doomed to failure. This has been tried many times before, but the reality is that Pilot training and experience is the most significant factor and the greatest hurdle to creating more pilots in our world. This idea of anybody simply getting in an aircraft and going anywhere you want to go, much like you would get into a car, may indeed happen, but it will not be with a human pilot, this will happen when we have autonomous drones and everybody inside the aircraft is simply a passenger, not a pilot. Sorry to be a party pooper, but don’t expect this concept to really materialize, I think the people working on this are young dreamers who have yet to learn the reality of aviation law. All too often, the pace of technological innovation, drastically exceeds the pace of legal change and oversight by the FAA (and for a very good reason). Yes, there are indeed a lot of things that can improve in general aviation, but that change will happen at a snails pace, It will be very expensive, and I do not see that changing anytime soon. On a more positive note, we are seeing significant technological changes in our general aviation cockpit. Also, if you look at statistics and something called the Nall report, the last 25 years has shown a drastic reduction and accident and fatality rates in general aviation, something we need to be proud of!

E Chipps ATP CFI CFII

I'm particularly impressed by your commitment to building the hardware and software in-house, which allows for greater control and optimization.

Nice. It's certainly do-able. NASA funded efforts in this direction from 1994 to 2001, with their Advanced General Aviation Transport Experiments (AGATE) consortium. [1] Around 2011, they tried again.[2]

There were two main goals - better avionics capable of handling large numbers of small aircraft in busy airspace, and small jet engines for small aircraft. The Cirrus Vision Jet is partly an outgrowth of that effort. It is capable of finding an airport and landing automatically in an emergency. Plus it has a back-up parachute. It costs $2.3 million, though.

Cost, as usual, will be the problem. Many have set out to build modern low-cost general aviation aircraft. Some nice high-cost aircraft have resulted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_General_Aviation_Tran...

[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110000757/downloads/20...

Sport pilot with ~10 years of experience and a few hundred hours: I would never fly such a plane. Not only it does not solve any real problems I have with flying planes, but I think it is the most insecure place to be when (not if) the s hits the f.

Biggest 2 problems I see with flying these days are engines and overall cost. Archaic engines with mixture adjustment are a thing that needs to go away (fuel injection anyone? 2024 is calling) and the ginormous cost of planes needs to change in order to sell. There is also the problem of decent avionics costing way too much, but this is included in the second main problem - it is 20 times cheaper to fly with an iPad than a decent glass cockpit, while the reliability can easily be compensating by having 2 iPads onboard, even a third as a backup.

We want people who don’t think about airplanes as a mode of transportation to start flying

Oh yeah that's just what we needed. I love flying but rarely do it because it's not like airplane transport is underused compared to our available resources to run this system. It's not sustainable to keep using the limited amount of atmosphere as a dumping ground for combustion products so the big task ahead of us is finding workable alternatives as well as installing facilities (there are several options today) that remove the extraneous greenhouse gasses and other emissions within a reasonable amount of time. We can make transportation sustainable but there's a long way to go yet

In the meantime, I don't see that flying being too underutilised is a problem any one of us benefits from solving, even if that requires thinking beyond the immediate "I get somewhere faster" and "it is fun and beautiful in the sky" benefits which I fully recognise

It sounds amazing! Let us know if you are hiring, working on this type of problems must be exciting! (Though I personally have no related experience I bet it'd be great and challenging!)