The author posted this project on reddit a few days ago where they mentioned their motivation: "I have a coworker who is constantly talking about the glory days of ShadyUrl, but that website has been down for several years at this point, so I figured I would create an alternative."
The existing electric planes are designed to be trainers. They are primarily for takeoff and landing and flying in the pattern at an airport. Less than 1-hour endurance, and useful load that can barely accommodate two people.
I grew up believing many of the myths that this article addresses. So I'm hesitant to believe it entirely without verifying additional sources. In particular, this quote seems misleading:
> the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland
I quickly verified this statistic. But I know that "forestland" is a specific category of land. What about non-forestland? How many acres of kudzu are there on land that is not considered forestland?
> experts estimate that kudzu covers another 500,000 acres in the South’s cities and suburbs
I found this statistic about 500,000 acres quoted in several places, but didn't find which experts came up with that number. Still, it was very quick to find double the acreage in one specific type of non-forestland.
That doesn't even begin to touch non-forestland countryside (i.e. non-city, non-suburb)
The US Forest Service estimates that kudzu adds 2,500 acres each year. US Department of Agriculture estimates that it spreads by 150,000 acres per year. I don't think this is a discrepancy, just that each agency is looking at specific land types and uses.
It seems like this article is seriously cherry picking data to make it seem like kudzu is less of an issue.
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.
It's also worth noting that if you own above a certain percentage of a company's stock, it's legally required to make your trades public.
Also interesting -- look at the trade volume during the big moves, like 3-June. There's no way retail investors are causing that much volume, especially when it's during pre-market and post-market trading hours.
I guess I'll be pedantic for a moment. A coup, by definition, is a seizure of power from government. If they are not successful at seizing power, then it was not a coup.
If I show up at the capitol building alone and demand to be put in charge, is that also a coup attempt? Obviously where you draw the line is subjective, but this event never had anything close to the requisite backing to become an actual coup, so calling it that feels a bit disingenuous to me. What it was is a riot and and an insurrection, but not a coup.
If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown by autopilot, and have been for decades. It might give you comfort that there is a human pilot in the cockpit for backup, but it's only a matter of time before the human backup moves to a ground station.
The autopilot is still at the control of the pilots, and usually enabled only at higher altitude. Landing/takeoff are still manually flown by pilots most of the time.
I don't have issues with a computers ability to maintain altitude, climb, or turn to a heading. I have a problem with a computer's ability to respond to the unexpected while in the air. For instance, comms failure is a scenario pilots train for and can deal with. I imagine autopilot might have some issues with that.
There is a long list of entirely preventable human-caused accidents. Is there a reason pilot-caused crashes are less scary for you? Computer caused accidents will be fixed and won't happen again. Human-caused accidents will keep happening as long as experience is valuable.
Aeroflot Flight 593 - pilot let his son fly the plane, 63 dead
Germanwings Flight 9525 - (possibly suicidal) pilot deliberately crashed , 144 dead
Air France Flight 447 - pilot caused airplane to stall, 228 dead
Aero Flight 311 - both pilots got drunk, 25 dead
and this is just a random selection, there are long long lists of human-caused aviation accidents.
Therac-25 wasn’t a “it’s not ready yet!”-type issue. It wasn’t an expected or anticipated failure-mode - it only became a (literal) textbook case-study after people died and the industry has learned and improved as a consequence.
They ignored repeated failures and evidence of malfunction by saying it was “impossible” that it could be failing in that way.
Unexpected failure modes are the issue. The Boeing 737 max 8 failure being tied to one sensor would suggest the industry has not fully learned the lesson.
My understanding is that it was a UX issue - the "malfunctioning" was the system working as-directed by the user, but the UX was horrible for informing the user what they were doing.
That isn't really true. It was brought down by stall prevention software that was using input from a single faulty sensor, and there was no way to override the inputs from this software. Further, there were multiple incidents before boeing admitted what was happening, even though in retrospect it looks like they knew what was happening all along.
My point was that it functioned in a manner vastly more similar to a conventional autopilot than what Airbus is proposing to do in this project.
MCAS was a simple algorithm that altered flight controls in a predetermined way upon a limited set of inputs. Airbus is proposing a vastly more ambitious solution that includes additional inputs from computer vision and a global view of the state of the aircraft.
If a relatively simple algorithm was not safe because of bad engineering decisions (or bad management incentives, whatever the case is) - then wouldn't a much more complex system be even more likely to have hard to discover corner cases and failures?
In this instance, the simplicity of the system was its down fall.
I think the use of human pilots complicates a system. You are relying on a component to the system that is susceptible to tiredness, distraction, threats, rage, revenge, self destruction, and sudden death. Complete automation would replace one extremely complex and unpredictable component, with a less complex and more predictable component.
Merriam Webster dictionary says, "insect, noun, any of numerous small invertebrate animals (such as spiders or centipedes) that are more or less obviously segmented —not used technically"
I couldn't help but wonder if Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was chosen intentionally as a fake source. WHOI can be pronounced "hooey", which is slang for a fake assertion.
