My understanding of the UK CAA is that it isn’t as liberal as the US FAA when it comes to amateur-built experimental aircraft airworthiness. I would still be surprised if a 3d-printed intake manifold on a homebuilt passed an airworthiness inspection in the US without a number of detailed questions being answered to the satisfaction of the airworthiness representative.
It seems reasonable and prudent to go through decontamination after this sort of thing, but if the worker had just gone home to their family soaking wet without changing, there would still have been close enough to zero risk to anyone (again, cleaning up and making sure this is the case is a very reasonable thing to do).
This sort of place is safe enough to bring your kid into without significant precautions (I got to do this as a kid—it was really cool). The biggest risk by far is drowning.
This is a pretty narrow take on aviation safety. A heavier airplane has a higher stall speed, more energy for the brakes to dissipate, longer takeoff/landing distances, a worse climb rate… I’ll happily sacrifice maneuvering speed for better takeoff/landing/climb performance.
Again, just nitpicking, but if you have the right approach speed, and not doing a super short field landing, you need very little wheel brake if any. ;)
Sure, as long as you stick to flying light aircraft on runways designed for commercial air transport. I would also recommend thinking about how you would control speed on a long downhill taxi with a tailwind, even if you didn’t need brakes on landing.
- that the gains come primarily from the 2 hour learning platform
But actually:
- the gains come from the high quality and large quantity of adults
- only 10% of the benefit comes from the platform (according to Matt Bateman, an education thinker who now works there)
- there are definitely large selection effects, too
I like the idea of it. But AFAICT there's nothing special about the execution. It's just that public schools (both government-run, and charters):
(i) can't choose their students, and
(ii) aren't trying to maximize learning, and
(iii) have parents who want something 'normal'.
So it's easy to do something better, if you can get a few folks to pay you a lot of money, and you have investors willing to burn additional money.
(BTW at their new school in San Francisco, opening this fall, they're planning to charge $75k/year, so probably no need for VC subsidy)
They might iterate to something that can scale. But right now they're making claims that I don't think would stand up to scrutiny.
Regarding their charter school application in Pennsylvania: the fact that they're trying to get taxpayers to pay so much for their software (which Matt acknowledges only accounts for 10% of the gains) seems like a trick to extract money from a taxpayer-funded 'not for profit'.
Separately: if I were paying $75k/year for a school for my child, I'd be disappointed if they were using IXL and ALEKS for math, instead of Math Academy.
Excluding room and board that's more expensive than Harvard[0]. I feel like if you're spending that much money on a child then it should be freaking amazing. You could employ a private tutor full time for that sort of money.
0: $59,320 for the 25-26 year according to their website.
I really want to believe that MOSAIC will usher in a revolution of safe, affordable airplanes, but I'm not holding my breath. A lot of the stuff you mention has existed for decades in experimental aviation (electronic ignition, EFI/FADEC, non-TSO avionics, the ability to import factory-assembled but otherwise non-certified light sport aircraft...), and none of them seem to offer compelling cost, performance, and safety advantages over legacy systems.
My cold take is that the only significant, short-term effect will be slightly lowered training standards for low-to-moderate-performance aircraft. It's unclear that this will have any practical effects, since personal airplanes will remain prohibitively expensive to own and operate for the vast majority of us.
Garmin charges an extra $1275 for their G5 instrument if you’re putting it in a certified aircraft vs a light sport. $1850 vs $3095. I’d call that a compelling cost advantage.
FADEC means one less knob the pilot had to worry about in flight and one fewer item on the landing checklist. Probably not a massive performance difference, but I’ll call the sum of the marginal fuel efficiency and engine longevity gains along with the additional safety reduced cognitive load a compelling advantage overall.
Cheaper, modern three axis autopilots are compelling. Repeat this exercise twenty more times with areas all over an airplane and you make a huge difference. Cheap planes aren’t going to swamp the market overnight, just like most of the original LSAs were over $100k when they first came out. But a $100k LSA sure was cheaper than a new SR20 or C172. But they trickled in, and now you can buy a few year old LSA at a decent price. The new crop will start to trickle in over the years too and maybe I’ll be able to afford one when I’m at retirement age.
You’re right about the reduced training standards, but doing it with the old light sport pilot restrictions didn’t cause a massive increase in incidents, so maybe this won’t be that bad. If you fly around rural airports you’ve already been flying around sport pilots and people on BasicMed for several years, so you would have already seen the difference.
In the experimental homebuilt world, just the fact that you (the builder) can choose to equip your plane with < 50 year old technology is compelling. All those things OP mentioned involve trade-offs that the builder needs to consider, but I’d rather have the choice than not (which is the case for certified airplanes).
>far safer than a certified aircraft than the statistics will tell you
I share your frustration with the technological stagnation of general aviation, but this is completely damning. Cirrus added all of the features you mention, at great expense and in a fully certified aircraft, and took decades to show any kind of clear safety advantage over clapped-out Cessnas (as I understand it, the vast majority of improvement came from intensive training in when to deploy the parachute, which was wildly less intuitive than anyone originally realized and likely remains so for pilots without specialized training). Digital instruments, weather displays, and automation have significant benefits for many use cases, but it's unclear that they're inherently safer than legacy systems for amateur aviators.
Not only it took a focused training campaign to get people to use the chute, all the increased training did was take the plane from having some of the worst safety statistics in the first decade to somewhere around average to slightly better than industry average.
A confounding factor here is that when a shiny new "safer airplane" is on the market you know who it attracts? The least safe pilots. All the doctors and dentists bought Cirruses.
Risk compensation is real... they put themselves into marginal situations because they're telling themselves they can always just pop the chute.
> wildly less intuitive than anyone originally realized and likely remains so for pilots without specialized training
AIUI the specific problem was that humans are bad at "calling it" and the parachute isn't magic. If you used the chute on time you're saved, if you spend that time working through all other options which don't save you, then deployed the chute with no time, you're still dead. So the training was to teach people to call it - yes maybe I could restart the engine (but if not I die), maybe I could keep looking and see that state road (but if not I die), however I could pull the chute right now and almost certainly live so I need to make sure I do that before it's too late.
Suppose in a board game you have three choices. One is worthless, we'll lose, one is 80% chance to draw but otherwise lose, one is a utter gamble maybe 5% chance to outright win otherwise lose. Many players will take the 5% chance. In fact in professional sports not taking that risk often annoys fans - they're here for the thrill. But flying an aeroplane isn't a game, the "outright lose" case is you die and if you have passengers they die too. You should take the draw when it's offered, and if we have to train people to do that then I guess that's what it takes.
It's true! I have only ever flown my Cirrus, in which I did ALL my training. I have no idea how to do an engine out landing. They don't teach it. The solution to nearly every major problem is pull the chute.
You can get an instructor to teach you almost anything sensible to be taught in aviation. If the instruction you’ve had up until now didn’t cover it, call up a flight school and ask to be instructed on simulated engine outs.
I can understand (and even agree with) why Cirrus teaches to “pull early and pull often”. It’s not a terrible policy, Cirrus doesn’t exactly suffer financially from a chute pull, and some Cirrus occupants died who could have lived if the chute were pulled earlier or at all.
I’m struggling to see the nefarious angle here—-this seems like a case where both ethical and efficiency concerns are well-aligned, for a modest increase in cost that may disappear with scale. How is this anything other than a win?
I'm not sure what "engineering control" means. Just put it in front of the door to the MRI room. Alarm goes off, you do not get to enter, it should be as simple as that.
An engineering control is how your microwave works—if the door isn’t physically closed, it can’t run. The way many (most?) hospitals currently operate is called an administrative control—analogous to a sign on the microwave door telling people not to run the microwave with the door open or open the door when the microwave is on.
But MRI machines can't be turned on and shut off that easily. As someone here explained, it takes up to 15 minutes for the magnet in an MRI to "shut down", and costs $50,000 each time.
Why not just control access to the room behind a metal detector? It would be really simple, but effective. I don't think any MRI should be allowed to operate without this basic level of protection.
Sure, an engineering control for MRI room access would be implemented differently--that's just the canonical example that people are familiar with. One possible implementation for MRI access is the airlock method, where the inner access door would only be allowed to unlock with the outer door locked and no metal detected in the space between (also the outer door would be prohibited from unlocking when the inner door is unlocked, except for some kind of inner emergency override that might also be tied to the emergency quench).
Literally no one disagrees with you on this, and most (if not all) hospital administrators will say they already do it the way you suggest. I'm pointing out that the actual implementations I'm aware of are often ineffective because they use administrative rather than engineering controls, and this is a critical distinction people need to be more aware of when interacting with dangerous systems. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to wildly overestimate compliance rates with administrative controls, even ignoring any possibility of deliberate noncompliance.
This is already a common practice. One of the issues with the standard implementation is that it’s set up as an administrative control rather than an engineering control (which would be significantly more difficult/expensive/space-consuming). At least one other comment thread has discussed the airlock implementation that I’m sure a very large number of people have independently thought of.
I love that this is a thing, but man am I disappointed by the lack of a quantitative methodology (especially in terms of ranking problems by probability, severity, and cost) and specific, actionable recommendations. In aviation for example, some of the recommendations include
>Understand and adopt new and emerging technologies...
>Embrace proactive approaches to address sustainability, resiliency, and risk...
>Support and encourage airports to look at their systems holistically...
I can't disagree with any of those things, but at the same time nothing in this report helps clarify where we should allocate our ever-more-finite resources.
