Denial Among Pilots

Some have the idea that the ultimate flying experience is a high tech, brand new and shiny thing that brings you safely across the skies with the push of a “start” button. Then lands by pushing a “land” button. A fool proof concept where every safety aspect is handled by automatic triple redundant systems.
Others have the idea that the ultimate flying experience is a vintage Cub or a homebuilt or similar, a microlight where stick and rudder is the only thing needed and hand propping is just an added experience. The word safety does not exist, airmanship is all that counts.

This is a caricature, and suggesting that vintage and/or spartan planes would be less safe. Even, that for the owners/operators/pilots of such, “The word safety does not exist”. Utter nonsense and I hope it will not remain to pollute these pages.

At the very least, show us some kind of statistic to confirm vintage/spartan/homebuilt/microlight planes are less safe. Otherwise please kindly s__t _p.

have a suspicion that within my lifetime most general aviation will be exactly that – you log on to Baidu maps, touch where you want to go and read a book whilst the autonomous vehicle takes you there in spectacular safety with no further input required.

I guess it exists to a point in the kind of aircraft at the top of the tree in this forum group. While it’s nice to have (I know from my experience 4 hours in a light aircraft would be hard work without some automation), I would never want to lose the manual controls. It reminds me of a story from a Concorde route check Captain who passed the Captain being assessed for his London to New York flight, but said at the end “You know old bean (OK thats a guess that bit), you can use the autopilot if you wish”. Gone are the days where a commercial flight could be in the majority hand-flown, but it would be sad if that was enforced into GA either by policy or technology.

No problem with it being there (like the auto-braking, auto line yourself up in the middle of the white lines automobile technology), but so long as there are a sufficient amount of ‘off’ switches, allowing you to do it your way.

I have a suspicion that within my lifetime most general aviation will be exactly that – you log on to Baidu maps, touch where you want to go and read a book whilst the autonomous vehicle takes you there in spectacular safety with no further input required.

My lifetime with a little luck might continue 30-40 more years. I have a strong suspicion that GA will be pretty much the same as it is now, then. There will be new planes for sure, and some new technologies, but the old and new will co-exist just as they have in the past. The only time this hasn’t been the case in GA was when Cubs etc replaced radial engined biplanes in the 30s, and that was driven by the dire economy at that time. Now, 80 years later radial engined aircraft of all kinds make a lot of the (enjoyable) noise while I’m in my hangar. Many restorations occurred after people earned more money again, and some of the planes are Russian – they didn’t get the memo for a while. Freedom works like that, and unless freedom ends or the world economy crashes, different people will keep making different choices based on a wide variation of individual values.

You read all kinds of nuttiness about ‘what should be done’. Earlier I read a bizarre post elsewhere in which a guy expressed the idea that if C152s are proven safer than C150s, then C150s should without discussion be removed from flight training. I can only assume the guy has a history of working for the military or some other place where money grows on trees and/or individual judgement, type certification and property rights aren’t relevant, quite apart from the C150 being one of the best trainers.

The word safety does not exist, airmanship is all that counts.

I understand that to mean that operational risk with most kinds of planes can be mitigated greatly by a proactive approach to individual risk management by the pilot and owner.

I’d agree.

Silvaire: exactly what I mean.

Jan: please read again you are bending my words in ways they are not meant to be bended.

I give up.
I herewith formally promise I will never again try to understand anything you write – far less to respond to it.
In the days of usenet, the term was “plonk”

What I meant was that we can make private flying fool proof if we:
1. Remove pilot errors out of the equation altogether.
2. Create autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft with triple redundancy as the default in all systems.

This is perfectly doable today, but very few could afford such an aircraft. Just think about what kind of industry development this will need. Besides, it wouldn’t really be flying, you would just be a passenger. A vintage Cub has none of these safety systems. The number one safety “system” is in the head of the pilot and it is called airmanship.

For example, Garmin G3X or Dynon Skyview are so much safer than the crap we’re forced to fly with but are banned. This is the problem.

True. I once had the chance to fly a Dynon equipped plane, if that stuff was allowed to be used on our planes I´d go for it immediately. But you can´t even have it as backup.

It’s not a flawed design, it’s just manual, and it is dead simple.

In your opinion. In my opinion it is a flaw, however simple it may be to operate. The fact that it needs to be operated at all is the flaw.