> 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
In practically every example so far in aviation, adding automation makes things harder, not easier. In general, the more complex the automation, the harder it is to understand and safeguard against failure.
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?
> In practically every example so far in aviation, adding automation makes things harder, not easier.
While somewhat unsatisfying as an answer, I think the industry has done it wrong, exactly because the result was harder, not easier. the UI/UX of modern glass cockpits is incredibly unintuitive and difficult to use. It's extremely opaque as to what the system's actually doing, if much. And no one has truly tackled the core problem of stopping our less trained, less rigorous part 91 pilots from losing control of their airplanes.
We definitely recognize that this creates a new failure mode. However, we're address those failure modes with redundant systems and following the same engineering standards as commercial aircraft. Many of them fly pure fly-by-wire and rely on the probably of a total electrical failure to be extremely low. We are doing the same.
If everything really does fail, there's the full airframe parachute to bring the airplane to the ground as a final layer of safety
> the UI/UX of modern glass cockpits is incredibly unintuitive and difficult to use
Be careful here :)
The current UI/UX is the best that design had to offer ... at one point. That design is then solidified in concrete; It was once considered to be intuitive but the world's design of interfaces always moves on. Touch/swipe based UX drives many design decisions today but those practices can fall over in turbulent situations. That is to say, the "intuition" is not an innate factor of the interface itself. Rather, it's culturally informed.
Any UX design you create will likely seem unintuitive to either the previous or to the next generation. Either way, current pilots will likely just view it as something that needs training to adopt. I don't envy your task of making a new UI that is modern and timeless! It will be fun to see what you come up with though. :)
> 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
In practically every example so far in aviation, adding automation makes things harder, not easier. In general, the more complex the automation, the harder it is to understand and safeguard against failure.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?