Can’t support MOSAIC enough. I’ve owned a composite LSA called a Flight Design for about 5 years, been in arguments with a lot of old timers about the safety aspects but I consider revolutionary and far safer than a certified aircraft than the statistics will tell you.
For example it has a ballistic parachute that will bring the entire aircraft to the ground. Unlike the Lycomings and Continentals the engine wasn’t designed in the 1950s. It’s equipped with real time satellite weather, GPS autopilot, Avionics that would cost you $15-20k to put in a Cessna due to all the red tape.
I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people. If pilots had low cost access to things like glass cockpits, satellite weather, inexpensive autopilot, and a healthy ecosystem of cheap, modern aircraft with modern engines (Basic things like fuel injection) a lot of pilots might still be alive right now.
SR2Z 15 hours ago [-]
> I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people.
On the balance, the FAA has saved more lives than it's cost just because big jetliners hold SO MANY PEOPLE.
But otherwise I fully agree with you.
It's deranged that students these days are taught to manually lean the mixture until the engine sputters (i.e. the engine begins to DIE), then bump it back up.
It's incredibly stupid that an aircraft flying in 2025 has multiple solid state accelerometers and gyroscopes on board as part of people's phones - but the only certified one is a vacuum-powered analog instrument from 1981.
And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?
Don't even get me started on the DPE or medical systems.
These changes cannot come soon enough, because the entire GA world has slipped through the cracks as the FAA has become a disaster.
rightbyte 47 minutes ago [-]
> It's deranged that students these days are taught to manually lean the mixture until the engine sputters (i.e. the engine begins to DIE), then bump it back up.
Why? That is essentially an engine check. I think you want pilots to understand their machines and to do that you need to operate the engines.
dreamcompiler 12 hours ago [-]
> And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?
Unleaded avgas is a thing now. But it won't work with many legacy aviation engines. I hope this new rule will finally enable some engine (and thus fuel) innovation.
andrepd 4 hours ago [-]
The massive effects of lead poisoning are still seen on a large scale near airports and in areas with lots of avgas powered traffic. That most of it is for essentially recreational purposes makes it even more infuriating.
sokoloff 15 hours ago [-]
> equipped with real time satellite weather
Many people have died from believing that their satellite weather was real-time. It’s 3-15 minutes delayed typically.
Go up on a VFR day with widely scattered wet clouds and maybe scattered showers or virga. Fly near some of the wetness and notice they are physically quite displaced from where they are on your weather display. In some cases, your weather display will show weather on the left and clear right, while your windshield will show the weather is actually on your right, having moved during that delay.
Imagine then trying to navigate that in more serious weather and you’ll hopefully get religion that the display is definitely not real-time and must not be relied upon as if it were. It’s a strategic tool, not a tactical one.
TylerE 10 hours ago [-]
More than a few have died in the last few years treating their iPad with GPS as a replacement for a glass cockpit and instrument rating too...
JTbane 43 minutes ago [-]
I ride with my dad in a Cessna a lot and he emphasizes you should always be prepared for GPS and radio failure, and you must be able to safely get on the ground with nothing but a map, compass, and your eyeballs.
Animats 10 hours ago [-]
There are at least five YouTube videos of ATC communications with pilots in trouble because of an IPad failure.
xxr 50 minutes ago [-]
Does this result in a “you get to live but you’re never allowed to fly a plane again” situation?
sokoloff 10 minutes ago [-]
The worst typical outcome for pilots who get these violations is taking training, getting signed off to that effect, and a “709 ride” to get their certificate back. They might also face a short suspension.
Very few pilots manage to earn a lifetime ban.
crinkly 9 hours ago [-]
Doesn't surprise me. I got on a flight that had to go back to gate due to an "iPad failure" about 6 years ago. The captain was apologising as we disembarked. I asked him what happened. He said software issue across both their flight plan iPads. Hardware was fine. Not sure if it grounded other flights but we were back on a different plane about 2 hours later.
TylerE 7 hours ago [-]
To be clear, we're actually talking about two separate things, they both just use an iPad.
You're talking about what's known as an electronic flight bag, which is using a tablet as a replacement for paper maps and charts. This is legal and has been for some time.
What I and Animats are talking about is running an app on a ipad as a "replacement" for equipment or training that is required for safe, legal, operation. NOT legal.
crinkly 4 hours ago [-]
Oh hell why would you use an iPad for that. As a convenience yes but not a substitute for proper instruments and procedure.
darig 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tonyarkles 58 minutes ago [-]
> Unlike the Lycomings and Continentals the engine wasn’t designed in the 1950s.
Rotax 912? :D
I've spent a lot of time getting familiar with that engine over the last two years as part of a large UAS programme. Every time I have to do integration work with it (electrical or CAN) I end up having an even-deeper appreciation of how thoughtful the engineering behind it is.
Edit: also, since people below brought up 100LL... I also deeply appreciate that it runs fine on plain ol' premium mogas. Both because I'd rather not expose my self to tetraethyl lead all the time and because it's really convenient to be able to just load up a few jerry cans on my way out to the field while getting fuel for my truck.
scarier 13 hours ago [-]
>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.
lovecg 12 hours ago [-]
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.
It’s (mostly) not the plane, it’s the pilot.
tialaramex 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
flippyhead 2 hours ago [-]
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.
sokoloff 2 hours ago [-]
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.
TylerE 10 hours ago [-]
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.
HPsquared 3 hours ago [-]
I suppose the safest aircraft is no aircraft.
looping__lui 10 hours ago [-]
You might be in for a bad awakening when comparing the reliability and safety statistics of Lycomings to the Rotax engines in Flight Design planes. Even though I entirely share your enthusiasm in general - these “old technologically outdated Lycosaurus engines” are really reliable in comparison…
Rotax engines have been extremely popular in Europe for LSA equivalents - but boy do I recall countless stories of engine failures. The most crazy one was of a flight instructor that had a total of 12 (!?) before he quit flying. A lot has to do I believe with the “creative ways the engine and its components are stuffed into different airframes”.
nosianu 7 hours ago [-]
I checked and found some numbers from Australia (they fly a lot down there, and use similar airplanes).
Rotax engines were not worse than Lycoming or Continental ones, 1 in 36 vs. 1 in 35. Japiru engines were the bad outlier.
"Engine failures and malfunctions in light aeroplanes 2009 - 2014"
"Over the 6-year study period between 2009 and 2014, 322 engine failures or malfunctions involving light aircraft were reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and/or Recreational Aviation Australia (RA-Aus). These reports involved single-engine piston aeroplanes up to 800 kg maximum take-off weight.
Aircraft powered by Jabiru engines were involved in the most engine failures or malfunctions with 130 reported over the 6 years. This represents about one in ten aircraft powered by Jabiru engines in the study set having reported an engine failure or malfunction.
Reports from Rotax powered aircraft were the next most common with 87 (one in 36), followed by aircraft with Lycoming (58 – one in 35) and Continental (28 – one in 35) engines.
When factoring in the hours flown for each of these engine manufacturers, aircraft with Jabiru engines had more than double the rate of engine failure or malfunction than any other of the manufacturers in the study set with 3.21 failures per 10,000 hours flown."
(When you read on, it appears the Jabiru engine was improved and now has less failures)
looping__lui 4 hours ago [-]
I do not know how widespread Rotax engines are in Australia and how large the GA is there. Also, I do not track standardized failure rates of engine models around the world - but shared anecdotal evidence. Except two instances, ALL reports or stories from friends and acquaintances around engine failures involved Rotax engines (probably 5:1 ratio). Tracking planes with up to 800kg in the study eliminates all Pipers and Cessnas - which I admit I used as a baseline comparison for my statements. I guess the only plane with a Lycoming/Continental engine below 800kg that comes to mind is the Pa18 from the 1940s/1950s.
Now, I definitely do not say that these are bad engines, but there is a lot of chatter in Europe how these engines are plugged into a wide range of airframes and there are more complex system interactions than meets the eye which can cause some problems. Or put differently: C172 and Pa28 are probably among the most common airframes to stuff the Lycomings and Continentals into. I suspect we kind of figured out how to make these work reliably.
Rotax works in MANY many different combinations and many different airframes - so there is that.
tonyarkles 32 minutes ago [-]
Up-thread I was raving about the Rotax 912...
> there are more complex system interactions than meets the eye which can cause some problems
I will grant this for sure. Kind of like modern cars though, it's a double-edged sword. On the UAS programme I'm working on it has been absolutely invaluable to be able to just plug into the 912 ECU's CAN bus and gather a ton of engine telemetry (and send it down to the ground for monitoring at the GCS).
Thank you for posting the links and starting the discussion about 912 reliability. I'm going to have to dig into it a little and see if there's any takeaways I need to bring back to my team.
With zero evidence to support this other than my own experience with N=4 of these, I have a suspicion that part of the problem could be that they're not getting sufficient maintenance and inspection because of how simple they are from an O&M perspective and how robust they are in nominal and off-nominal conditions. When I was first working with it and flipping through the operators manual I was kind of shocked to discover that the only real pre-flight actions are: check coolant level, rotate the prop and make sure the oil reservoir burps. There's a startup and warm-up procedure that we follow to the letter but short-term you almost certainly won't notice if you skip it. Before we had our robust telemetry system and checklists in place, we accidentally flew it with only one ECU lane turned on once and didn't notice until we were on the ground. Engine was already off after landing when someone came on the radio and asked "hey guys... in-flight we're supposed to have both lanes A and B on right?" "Yeah..." "The Lane B switch was off when I approached the aircraft...".
To summarize what I'm getting at: this engine, in my experience so far, has a ton of really robust redundancy features and those redundancy features work so well that you may not notice that you've got issues until you've run out of redundancy. I can only think of two situations where we've had issues bad enough that it caused it to "run rough" and trigger a deeper investigation:
- Because our aircraft is unmanned we have electromechanical relays in series with the Lane A/B switches that we can control from the ground both for engine-start safety (the engine can't be started unless both the crew chief and remote pilot have turned on Lanes A and B) and to be able to kill the engine remotely after landing or in an emergency. We had an electrical issue that was causing the relays to chatter, resulting in Lanes A and B getting sporadic power.
- Somehow in one revision of the ever-evolving full-system checklist the "check water separator" item got dropped and no one noticed. It flew probably 10+ flights on that checklist before we had a really rough start, in an environment that was highly conducive to water accumulation in the fuel (large daily OAT and RH swings). We were horrified at how much water came out when I realized that no one had been checking... and yet there had been zero negative effects until there was a big negative effect.
dreamcompiler 12 hours ago [-]
> Basic things like fuel injection
Don't get me started. It's virtually impossible to buy a car without fuel injection nowadays, but most GA airplanes still use carburetors. And these are vehicles that are constantly changing altitude, so carburetors are even more unsuited for airplanes than for cars.
Okay I lied. You can buy fuel injected engines for airplanes. They are readily available. They merely cost 2x or 3x the price of carbureted engines.
looping__lui 10 hours ago [-]
I hear you in general, but GA engines need to work more reliably and go through way more intense operational challenges than automotive engines. Picture this: you take off at 100°F on the ground at full throttle with only air cooling to save weight and reduce potential failure points, then climb to 10,000 feet where the outside air temperature drops to around 65°F (or even freezing conditions). The baffling is a bit worn, and the pilot maintains 70 knots in the climb, pushing cylinder head temperatures (CHT) to 420°F or higher. Then the pilot gets chatty and pulls the engine back to near-idle while CHTs are still at 350°F, before pushing the nose down to kill altitude—causing CHTs to plummet to 250°F in minutes. Through all these extreme thermal cycles and temperature swings, the engine simply cannot quit on its pilot.
GA engines may look antiquated—with their carburetors, magnetos, and mechanical fuel pumps—but this apparent simplicity is entirely by design. These “outdated” systems are actually time-tested solutions engineered for ultimate reliability when failure means catastrophe. While car oils use metallic detergent additives, aviation oils must use ashless dispersants to prevent spark plug fouling that could cause engine failure. The oils must handle sustained high RPM operation and brutal temperature cycling while meeting strict FAA specifications that prioritize proven reliability over cutting-edge performance.
Every component, from the dual magneto ignition (no electrical system dependency) to the mechanical engine-driven fuel pump, represents decades of refinement focused on one critical goal: the engine will not quit when you need it most. It’s not that these engines are behind the times—they’re precisely engineered for their mission-critical role where proven, simple systems trump technological sophistication.
dreamcompiler 7 hours ago [-]
Most of what you describe can be accomplished with diesel Jet-A engines. These used to be unthinkable for GA because they were too heavy, but clean-sheet designs are making it possible.
Much easier to fuel, no electrical system dependencies, no spark plugs to foul, liquid cooling to keep the temps more constant, and dual redundant FADECs. Plus much better range.
It is not true that reliability requires old-style engine design, it's more a question of cost. Modern jet airliners (their engines but also really everything about them) have a ton of complexity, including a myriad of electrical control systems, yet they are no less reliable.
It's just that this is not a fair comparison because manufacturers of said airliners have more resources for R&D.
CryptoBanker 9 hours ago [-]
Except now we’re back to one of the main points of the article - modern airliners cost billions of dollars to develop and certify, and GA aircraft will never get that level of investment.
bathtub365 4 hours ago [-]
The airliners are also almost exclusively flown by professional pilots.
tialaramex 4 hours ago [-]
Professional here also introducing an element that's unexpected. We expect that they'll have more training, they've often done simulator training which is more realistic, they have a lot more hours and so on.
But because it's a job they have much less Plan Continuation Bias aka "Get-there-itis". Flying New York to Dallas? I did that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. So if the weather looks bad and maybe we shouldn't, well then I guess we just don't go, I'll go tomorrow, or maybe somebody else will, it's just a job.
GA pilots are notorious for this problem, and it puts them in vulnerable situations where they're one problem away from disaster, as weather is worse than they hoped, things don't happen the way they expected, and gradually they go from "It'll probably be fine" to "I hope I live to learn from this experience".
sokoloff 9 hours ago [-]
I agree with most of what you say, but airplane piston engines are low RPM by necessity of keeping the prop tips below supersonic.
Many common airplanes engines have a max RPM of 2700 and are often cruised at 2300-2400.
looping__lui 9 hours ago [-]
GA engines use low compression ratios and high displacement to generate power at lower RPMs, reducing mechanical stress and heat buildup that would be catastrophic during sustained high-power operations like climb and cruise. The need for low propeller RPM means designs either go for a gearbox-driven high compression, low displacement approach like Rotax, or the low RPM, low compression, high displacement route like Lycoming—and given these constraints, the good old Lycoming design isn’t all that bad.
(Edited for completeness)
rainsford 3 hours ago [-]
> It's virtually impossible to buy a car without fuel injection nowadays, but most GA airplanes still use carburetors.
That's because GA airplanes in general are significantly older than most cars on the road. If you're buying a brand new car and a brand new GA airplane you're equally unlikely to encounter one without fuel injection.
Now the reason this is the case is because instead of buying brand new GA airplanes, most people are just trading around the old ones because new GA airplanes are ridiculously expensive. This is also a regulation problem, among other things, but the fuel injection thing isn't because modern GA is behind the curve. The issue is that the vast majority of GA pilots aren't flying modern GA.
dreamcompiler 1 hours ago [-]
Go to Oshkosh some year for EAA. You'll see that the vast majority of brand new "affordable" GA airplanes have carburetors. Affordable GA airplanes do exist, for some definition of affordable.
We're probably agreeing with each other but using different words.
iooi 12 hours ago [-]
> I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people.
It drives my crazy that in 2025 ADSB is still not mandatory for all aircraft. I get there's old timers flying their tail wheels from the 1950s that don't have any electrical components, but this would massively improve GA safety.
Another one is multiplex radio, again, it's 2025, the technology is there. Why are we still seeing so many blocked communications during emergencies in busy airspaces?
jdietrich 7 hours ago [-]
I get there's old timers flying their tail wheels from the 1950s that don't have any electrical components
Frustratingly, the FAA hasn't certified a straightforward solution to this problem. Here in the UK, we can use a fully standalone ADS-B transceiver that requires no permanent installation. After a rebate from the CAA, it costs about $500.
I haven't dug too much into the regulations or power requirements around running ADS-B Out purely off a battery but you can get a TSO-certified beacon https://uavionix.com/general-aviation/tailbeaconx/ and pair it with high-capacity LiFePO4 TSO battery https://earthxbatteries.com/product/etx900-tso/ for a not-unreasonable price. I don't know if that would actually be acceptable, but it's a pretty straightforward way to add that functionality to an otherwise steam-gauge-only aircraft.
tialaramex 3 hours ago [-]
> Another one is multiplex radio, again, it's 2025, the technology is there. Why are we still seeing so many blocked communications during emergencies in busy airspaces?
The difference between the radio on the WW2 era ex-pilot boat I spent time on recently and the radio in a brand new jet liner is crazy. The Global Maritime Distress Safety System - a global requirement from the 1980s - mandates a digital VHF radio service named DSC - it's not very clever by today's standards and it's hardly the easiest to drive UI - but it's night and day compared to what is provided for aeroplanes. First of all, and most crucial for its core purpose, many crucial elements of a "Mayday" call are automated so that rescuers have the most important information right away even if you're panicked and incoherent, and it won't get "blocked" by low priority callers trying to figure out which gate they're scheduled for, or whether they can get the longer runway for this approach.
It's almost aggressively bad, I guess they couldn't get an OK to use Morse code?
kqr 2 hours ago [-]
> It's almost aggressively bad, I guess they couldn't get an OK to use Morse code?
Radio navigation aids identify themselves by trnsmitting their name in morse code!
tialaramex 37 minutes ago [-]
Oh. My. God.
> The only positive method of identifying a VOR is by its Morse Code identification or by the recorded automatic voice identification which is always indicated by use of the word “VOR” following the range's name.
There's such a long way from "Move fast and break things" to "Eh, it was good enough for my grandfather" and it feels as though aeronautics is very close to the latter. This would be OK if the demands on the system were declining or even steady, but they're increasing.
looping__lui 10 hours ago [-]
FLARM as the “uncertified predecessor” in the gliding community was a game changer for safety. Game changer.
Completely agree with you.
parsimo2010 15 hours ago [-]
For those not tracking: this article is about the MOSAIC rules, which the FAA announced this week is now approved (Final Rule). In 90 days the new Sport Pilot rules will go into effect and allow Sport Pilots (a certification less stringent than Private Pilot) the ability to fly aircraft of much higher performance. Over the next year, new certification rules will go into effect allowing manufacturers to manufacture much more high performance aircraft under the Light Sport rules. There are some details, but the big picture is that the allowable performance for these “entry level” classes just got a lot higher.
Is it good? Well, a lot of people are cheering the change. The FAA doesn’t normally make things easier for the average Joe. This will make it easier for an inexperienced (but still fairly wealthy) pilot to get their hands on a real hot rod of a plane. There’s probably some additional risk, but the FAA has clearly recognized that one of the biggest dangers too flying a high performance aircraft is having to land fast. 200 kts vs 100 kts doesn’t make a big difference in risk in straight and level flight, but landing at 80 kts vs 55 kts does make a difference.
I don’t know where I stand exactly. It’s a big jump. Surely this is going to cause some old geezer to be screaming through a congested area and not be able to keep up with the ATC traffic calls because he’s never gone this fast before, and he’ll have a midair collision. Surely this is going to cause someone to buy a “light sport” aircraft with 280 hp and a huge prop and they’re going to crash taking off. But I think that overall I’m just being overly cautious, and most Sport Pilots are too poor to afford a plane that burns 15 gallons of avgas an hour, so most of the new planes under MOSAIC won’t be that powerful. I am curious to see what kind of new aircraft become available, and what the long term safety impacts will be.
Edit: for about five minutes my post said “not approved” when I meant to type that MOSAIC is “now approved”
parsimo2010 14 hours ago [-]
I’m going to add a list of things that I think are going to be cool to see:
- New engine options. Previously getting an engine certified was a big expense, so there wasn’t a lot of advancement. Now I think that higher performing Light Sport aircraft can be made with non-certified engines or components. All electronic ignitions, variable valve timing, electronic fuel injection, it’s all on the table now, and it gets to exist in a factory manufactured plane, not just experimentals.
- New avionics. The light sport category got to put some neat digital avionics in their panels because they weren’t certified. They had portable ADS-B transmitters that were legal. These options will now be open to faster planes too.
- Importing light sports from around the world. Lots of European light sport planes couldn’t be imported in the past because they weren’t certified but were too fast for American light sport rules. Now a lot of them will be able to be imported as soon as the rules allow.
- Cheaper complex trainers. Allowing variable pitch props and retractable gear in the light sport category will hopefully mean there will be a plane that comes along that allows you to build time in the complex category without spending the money that usually comes with these types of planes.
- there’s probably a bunch of other things we’ll see that I haven’t thought of, and I am curious to see whatever that is as well.
scarier 13 hours ago [-]
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.
parsimo2010 13 hours ago [-]
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.
quest88 10 hours ago [-]
Still have issues with people forgetting to enrichen on descent!
ryandrake 10 hours ago [-]
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).
TinkersW 14 hours ago [-]
Have they removed leaded fuel yet? I'd rather not have more of these things spewing that over me.
parsimo2010 14 hours ago [-]
No, leaded fuel will continue for several years as they haven’t found a drop-in replacement that will work in the entire existing fleet, and the financial burden of modifying engines is too high for them to mandate the change. Some existing planes are approved to run unleaded fuels but not all.
But MOSAIC probably will result in more aircraft being announced that are designed to run unleaded fuel because you won’t have to use a certified engine and can use something more modern.
sokoloff 14 hours ago [-]
> landing at 80 kts vs 55 kts does make a difference
Most single-engine aircraft were already restricted to 61 knot stall speed (and I think all MOSAIC-eligible ones were).
I’m a big proponent of MOSAIC (as I was of BasicMed), even though the MOSAIC rule change won’t directly help me.
parsimo2010 14 hours ago [-]
The precious light sport rules limited stall speeds to 45 kts. Jumping to 59 kts for sport pilots adds a huge amount of aircraft to the allowable list for a sport pilot.
sokoloff 14 hours ago [-]
Indeed. My point was these new LSA landing speeds are essentially the same as the landing speeds for light singles flown by private pilots. No one is landing light singles at 80 knots.
parsimo2010 14 hours ago [-]
I was picking random numbers to try and spell out that cruising speed isn’t a huge safety risk, but landing speed is. Notice that the slow speed (55 kts) I picked is legal under MOSAIC but the higher unsafe speed (80 kts) isn’t legal, and this illustrates that the FAA kept a fairly sane stall speed limit.
The fact that the stall speed limitation closely matches the existing limits for light singles shows where the FAA draws the safety lines. Although MOSAIC apparently allows twins, they keep the stall speed limitation at a sane number.
The only thing I don’t fully understand is them differentiating between 59 kts for a sport pilot, and 61 kts for a light sport aircraft. It feels a little arbitrary to draw those lines differently.
jcoby 3 hours ago [-]
> The only thing I don’t fully understand is them differentiating between 59 kts for a sport pilot, and 61 kts for a light sport aircraft. It feels a little arbitrary to draw those lines differently.
The NPRM document explains it somewhere around page 200. It’s important to note that it’s 59 knots CAS clean vs 61 knots CAS dirty.
The argument seems to be that a sport pilot is operating with less training and less oversight and so if something goes wrong and they can’t get the aircraft fully configured for landing they’ll still be able to operate and touch down at 59 vs whatever the clean stall speed would be for an aircraft with a dirty stall speed of 61 knots. That margin could be fairly large (10 knots or more) and the difference in energy between 59 and 71 knots is massive.
fnord77 14 hours ago [-]
> Surely this is going to cause some old geezer to be screaming through a congested area and not be able to keep up with the ATC traffic calls because he’s never gone this fast before,
Some "geezer" trying to land at OSH 2025 did this, just this year.
The geezer has an ATP and ATC certifications (Airline Transport Pilot)
The amount of people gatekeeping, coming up with scenarios and hating MOSAIC because of "feels" is so tiring. FAA made these changes based on DATA
cmurf 14 hours ago [-]
Sport pilots can’t operate in airspace requiring two-way radio communication, without separate instruction and endorsement. 14 CFR 61.315(c)(7)
All pilots are limited to 200hp or less, and non-complex aircraft without separate instruction and endorsement. 14 CFR 61.31(e) & (f)
One of the more arbitrary and kinda pointless rules. Someone flying a 160 knot 200 hp Piper Arrow with a controllable prop and retractable gear doesn’t need the endorsement. Someone flying a 90 knot fixed gear fixed prop biplane with a 205 hp engine does.
It’s pretty much “use more right rudder”. Although most aircraft with over 200 hp have a constant speed prop so you learn to use manifold pressure and engine speed to set power.
I went from a 145 hp plane to a 235 hp one with about 30 min of instruction during a BFR.
parsimo2010 13 hours ago [-]
Crap, forgot that sport pilots couldn’t fly within a mode C ring. Well someone will probably do it anyway.
You could always get endorsements as a sport pilot, but complex and high performance didn’t make sense because there were no LSAs that qualified. But tons of people got tailwheel endorsements as sport pilots in the past. Now a bunch of sport pilots are going to get complex and high performance endorsements too.
tc313 13 hours ago [-]
I’m a sport pilot with a controlled airspace endorsement. It took just two lessons for my instructor to give me the endorsement. I don’t know why anyone would skip it.
Teever 14 hours ago [-]
Any idea if the FAA will change the rules regarding having ADHD and a private pilots license?
It's really disheartening to know that I'm not allowed to fly recreationally from time to time because I take a stimulant medication to help finish university.
piperswe 7 minutes ago [-]
Light sport licenses don't require a medical - once I can find a light sport instructor I plan on working toward a light sport license, especially with MOSAIC passed
The FAA aeromedical philosophy is quite risk-averse for all levels requiring a medical (including BasicMed, which requires an initial medical).
I don’t expect that to change, but I also wouldn’t have expected MOSAIC to be adopted either.
I think your best path is either to fly with an instructor (you don’t need a medical if the instructor is acting as pilot-in-command) or to fly Part 103 ultralights.
tc313 13 hours ago [-]
I think it’s more likely that the FAA drops the requirement for a third-class medical certificate to get a PPL than that they significantly loosen the diagnosis restrictions. At least they have discussed dropping the requirement in the past.
tspike 8 hours ago [-]
The expansion of the sport pilot category should mean you can fly most trainer airplanes with just a driver license.
projektfu 13 hours ago [-]
It seems that they are evaluating it. Hopefully they will come up with new rules faster than they did for unleaded fuel.
MichaelZuo 15 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t this problem be obviated by simply mandating sufficiently high third party liability insurance?
Then it will be the much less likely to be gamed insurance market effectively deciding who gets to fly the higher performance aircraft.
zzless 14 hours ago [-]
I was wandering the same thing. Quite often the insurance sets a much higher standard than what is legal. I had a lot of fun flying a local police helicopter as a commercial helicopter pilot with the police pilot (who only had a private certificate at the time) simply because insurance required a commercial pilot to be present in the cockpit.
parsimo2010 14 hours ago [-]
By and large the affordability will keep a lot of people from anything too high performance and dangerous. But there will be a few dead doctors who weren’t dissuaded by high premiums and high gas bills.
willis936 14 hours ago [-]
The goal of regulation should not be "make reckless endangerment expensive enough that only the plutocrats can afford to do it".
MichaelZuo 49 minutes ago [-]
That doesn’t make sense… the vast vast majority of people could never pay the damages of a serious plane crash into another plane or building, regulations or not.
giantg2 15 hours ago [-]
"Let’s start with the obvious one. If the compliance costs of safety regulation get too high, it will shut down iteration and innovation in the industry. These innovations include safety enhancements."
An interesting point here is that you can sometimes get safety improvements in an experimental aircraft that you can't get in the same airframe under Part 23 because the manufacturers don't want to go through the certification process for upgraded parts and newer technology.
rkagerer 14 hours ago [-]
over-the-air avionics updates
I was on board up until this phrase. I don't want my plane behaving as flakey as my Tesla, and my gauges shifting their location around every update at the whim of some junior designer.
Not saying there couldn't be a manufacturer that does OTA properly, I just haven't seen that as the trend in any other space (cars, smartphones, etc). The OTA part always seems to benefit the manufacturer, not the user. ("Watch this ad to take off....")
JCBird1012 20 minutes ago [-]
Don't picture them as OTA firmware updates. Picture them as OTA navigation data updates (i.e. maps, charts, waypoints, airport info, etc...) - that's much easier to pull off.
The process right now is pulling out an SD card from your Garmin/Avidyne/BendixKing whatever every 28-days or so (that's how often the FAA updates the navigation database backing these avionics), popping it into your PC, using software/webistes that could be... much better designed (to put it lightly) and then going back again. It's not exactly the hardest thing in the world, but it's not exactly a walk in the park either (especially for less-technically inclined pilots, who just let it lapse, and click out of the big expiration warnings every time they start up their planes).
piperswe 6 minutes ago [-]
OTA map updates on my other Garmin devices have always been unobtrusive, I expect their avionics updates to be similar.
daft_pink 12 hours ago [-]
The reality is that personal aviation doesn’t make sense because the range of an cheap aircraft just isn’t very high so you’re not gonna fly from New York to California on an aircraft under $1 million dollars brand new and you’re certainly not gonna fly internationally. How can you spend so much money and so much time getting your pilots license for a plane that only will get you 500 or 600 miles effectively. Most people who can afford a six figure aircraft wanna fly much longer distances than they are able to fly.
hollerith 12 hours ago [-]
The main way that personal aviation contributes to the economy is by giving inexperienced pilots the experience they need to qualify to work for the airlines.
ufmace 12 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't they just land, refuel, and take off again a few times if they wanted to fly cross-country, similar to what they'd do in a car?
andoando 10 hours ago [-]
You can but its very slow and very expensive.
Even at full speed in a straight line, 2000 mile trip in a C172 would take 14.5 hours, and that's without refueling. Fuel would cost you ~$920.
In a twin prop like a Piper Seneca it would take about 9 hours, and ~$1700 of fuel.
There's also the issue of weather which small aircraft are much more subject to.
dontTREATonme 10 hours ago [-]
Wow, private flying really is for the rich. $1700 to fly cross country and it’s still 3 hours longer than flying commercial.
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago [-]
> private flying really is for the rich. $1700 to fly cross country and it’s still 3 hours longer than flying commercial
You don’t fly New York to San Francisco. You fly Cupertino to Driggs with three friends. The point is connectivity between unconnected points; similar to why we drive private cars.
Also, the article’s entire point is flying is unnecessarily expensive in the birthplace of aviation.
bloggie 2 hours ago [-]
It will take much longer than that, you have to prep the airplane, do planning, refuel and inspect, pee, eat, and everything depends on the weather, is it too hot, too windy, poor visibility, what is the expected weather enroute and at the destination 4 hours from now, are there route restrictions. Still worth it usually.
10 hours ago [-]
fnord77 12 hours ago [-]
Read the article. The reality is the FAA choked innovation in this industry.
daft_pink 11 hours ago [-]
I read it. I think we need planes with more range in the United States before personal aviation could become popular. I think that's the limiting factor not the 20 hour flying requirement vs the 40 hour flying requirement, Light Sport Aircraft.
wingspar 16 hours ago [-]
MOSAIC is Done!
>> Ninety days from now, about three-quarters of the general aviation fleet will be accessible to sport pilots and those exercising sport pilot privileges. One year from now, new and modern aircraft will begin entering the fleet with minimal certification costs.
> the category could include planes like the forthcoming Pipistrel Panthera.
The "forthcoming" (2023) Panthera has been worked on since 2011, had its first flight in 2013, and is still in development (2025).
mordechai9000 16 hours ago [-]
Small personal aircraft are great, but subject to weather and visibility. Although some of that could probably be mitigated through automation technology. I doubt we'll see Jetsons style cars replacing the American auto anytime soon, but more competition in the world of light sport aircraft would be nice.
I have a couple of concerns about a large expansion of personal aircraft of the type the original author is advocating.
For one, even certified GA aircraft have a fatality rate far in excess of automobiles, let alone public transport or airliners. Yes, some of that is pilot error which can be mitigated to a substantial extent by computer controls, but it’s also a result of the lack of redundancy and hard failure modes of a light aircraft compared to a car. I’d also note that the flight controls don’t do the maintenance that is required to keep a light aircraft safe. Yes, the more libertarian amongst you won’t have a problem with this, but I’d also observe that the proposal is to make these regulations applicable to four-seater aircraft, so plenty of spouses and especially kids will be affected by this risk.
Secondly, expanding a class of vehicle that chews a lot of fossil fuel is going to worsen the already serious effects of climate change; and while short-range aircraft might well electrify you’re not going to fly at 250 knots for 1000 nautical miles on batteries any time soon.
appreciatorBus 15 hours ago [-]
This is going to be the same tragedy of the commons that played out for road transport, repeated in the sky.
Everyone wants the use of a flying car.
Everyone in a flying car wants an airport at every street corner, just as long as they don’t have to pay for the land it occupies.
But…
Nobody wants to live next to an airport, or underneath a flight path. In the world where everyone has a flying car, everyone will live next to a next to an airport, below a flight path, or both.
In road transportation, rather than trying to link the private benefits of cars with their public costs, we “solved“ the inherent and fundamental conflict by putting the freeways in neighbourhoods that had the least political power.
If we had the ability to learn from past mistakes, we might try to internalize some of the externalities of flying cars, and get better results. One can dream.
sokoloff 14 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of people think they want a flying car. I posit that flying cars are a pretty terrible idea.
Single engine airplanes weigh less than a small car. They are not designed to protect the occupants from side impacts, to brake the vehicle to a stop 20 times in an hour, etc.
Today, if you fly 750 miles away and get into a fender bender in your rental car, you turn it in, fill out some paperwork, and fly home in an undamaged airplane. What are you going to do when your flying car gets into a fender bender in car mode 750 miles from home?
A flying car is bound to be a terrible (and likely unsafe) car and certain to be a terrible airplane.
SR2Z 15 hours ago [-]
> Secondly, expanding a class of vehicle that chews a lot of fossil fuel is going to worsen the already serious effects of climate change; and while short-range aircraft might well electrify you’re not going to fly at 250 knots for 1000 nautical miles on batteries any time soon.
Your average single-engine piston gets ~22mpg with a single passenger. It's not terrible at all.
rgmerk 14 hours ago [-]
Ignoring EVs for a moment, a Toyota Camry hybrid, which can carry five people in more comfort and carrying more luggage than a light aircraft, gets 50mpg on the highway.
22 mpg is not terrible only if your frame of reference is pickup trucks, whose load-carrying capabilities can only be matched by far larger aircraft with far higher fuel usage.
Furthermore, aircraft that cruise at 250 knots are not going to get anywhere near 22mpg. A Lancair Evolution, a reasonably modern four-seater turboprop that cruises at around that speed gets something approximating 7 mpg.
SR2Z 14 hours ago [-]
A Toyota Camry hybrid does not move 110mph at 22mpg with a 700mi range. Once you start moving fast the fact that it's a hybrid is irrelevant since the engine must provide 100% of the power.
I personally don't see the point of comparing a car at 50mph with a small plane at 120mph, but if you really want to, I bet that easily doubles fuel efficiency. No one flies at Vg because that's stupid, but you COULD, and then you're basically the same fuel efficiency as a car but flying in a straight line.
Even that 22mpg is not a 1:1 comparison because of that inconvenient "as the crow flies" thing. We can build more efficient aircraft in theory, but in practice the regulation gets too expensive.
sokoloff 14 hours ago [-]
Turboprop airplanes will be less efficient than pistons in general (though few pistons can hit 250 knots). A Lancair IV-P is a better comparison aircraft, hitting 335 mph at 75% power, 17.5gph, for a net of 19mpg at considerably over 250 knots.
zzless 14 hours ago [-]
On the other hand here is a Long-EZ that gets 40 mpg flying at over 250 mph (so not quite 250 knots but still). The actual savings will be higher since one can fly in a straight line most of the time. It also avoids congestion and ... is simply more fun than driving. Also an auto-pilot in aircraft has been a real thing for quite some time while same in a car ... is still quite pathetic. I have eaten plenty of lunches comfortably while flying a plane while I would not be comfortable doing it while driving.
That’s impressive but it hardly sounds like a comfortable experience for passengers, and while I get the whole argument that overregulation has made light aircraft less safe, i wouldn’t get in that plane thanks.
lovecg 15 hours ago [-]
> Yes, some of that is pilot error which can be mitigated to a substantial extent by computer controls, but it’s also a result of the lack of redundancy and hard failure modes of a light aircraft compared to a car.
Most of it is, and has always been pilot error. If we only had to worry about mechanical problems the safety record would actually look quite good.
It’s harder than driving a car due to much longer decision horizons (what you do now can doom you minutes to hours from now), much more of a dynamic environment with non-obvious hazards, and just plain higher baseline skillset and awareness requirements. All of these can and should be mitigated with technology to some extent, but there will always be that one guy who will choose to dodge thunderstorms at night.
jeffbee 14 hours ago [-]
There doesn't seem to be any danger of a large expansion of GA. All the aggregate statistics point to terminal decline.
hoekit 13 hours ago [-]
This idea of a continuum as a tool to allow experimentation and gradual evolution of a critical infrastructure is an interesting one.
Wonder if there's something similar in other domains.
dostick 14 hours ago [-]
Is this like Ultralight license? Making it more accessible only created more new deaths.
bluGill 14 hours ago [-]
This is a step higher. Ultralight requires no training at all, this license has same training requirements but not as much.
tc313 13 hours ago [-]
Yep. The flight training is the same as for a PPL, except there’s no VOR navigation, less instrument time, no night flights, and no (intentional) spin training.
andoando 10 hours ago [-]
At least in US, PPL does not require spin training
brikym 12 hours ago [-]
It'd be good if small time pilots could fly quieter aircraft. There is an A380 that regularly takes off near me and it's quieter than most small planes. The engines on smaller planes drone loudly and it goes on and on as the planes are slow. Just another externalized cost of aviation.
nosefrog 12 hours ago [-]
On the flip side, my baby likes the small loud airplanes. He points at them and says "oooh!"
fnord77 14 hours ago [-]
This article is outdated.
FAA split the concept of "sport pilot" from LSA
Now Sport Pilots can fly just about anything with VS1 of 59 knots or less (clean stall speed) (up from 45kts)
Meanwhile, new plane designs can go through a less rigorous certification as LSA if they have a VS1 of 61kts or less.
smeeger 12 hours ago [-]
flying is dumb. in a small aircraft your fuel efficiency can be vaporized by a simple head wind. owning an operating any kind of aircraft is insanely expensive. for years i looked into finding some way of justifying the expense of a private aircraft. the only way it can be worth it is if you need to hop between distant cities as a part of your business. flying cars will never happen
16 hours ago [-]
GianFabien 14 hours ago [-]
The big question: How is pilot training and certification going to ensure that accident rates are further reduced?
Will also need huge changes to training and certification of aircraft mechanics.
Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes.
parsimo2010 13 hours ago [-]
On the maintenance side, MOSAIC rules are actually allowing people with a repairman certificate to do a condition inspection on an experimental or light sport aircraft. So there will be a bunch more mechanics available with a shorter training course.
Hopefully those mechanics only take jobs they are proficient in, but this is going to create a bunch of new mechanics. And maybe a trickle down effect of giving those people enough experience to upgrade to a full A&P / IA license over time. But it will be the owner/operator’s job to make sure that only a proficient repairman works on their plane.
JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago [-]
> Will also need huge changes to training and certification of aircraft mechanics
Why? These aren’t novel power plants.
> Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes
Sport pilots aren’t landing at La Guardia.
sparrish 13 hours ago [-]
> Will also need huge changes to training and certification of aircraft mechanics
There's already a shortage of certified mechanics. Adding thousands of more pilots and presumably aircraft will make already long wait times for annuals even longer.
13 hours ago [-]
pbhjpbhj 15 hours ago [-]
Did someone wanting to sell flying cars bribe Trump, or is this from before the current administration? Didn't they cut loads of FAA inspectors and such?
>Without the need for type certification, manufacturers can iterate on their designs more rapidly without going through the costly supplemental type certification process. They can include cheaper uncertified avionics. They can do over-the-air software updates.
Being completely out of the loop and nothing more than a moderately interested member of the public (outside USA) -- isn't lack of type certification one of the causes of recent major aviation calamities.
Looks like they're saying loads of EABs crash but well just call them LSAs because those don't crash as much, problem solved! Oh, and software is totally reliable so well have that control the aircraft. And we'll make them go faster.
For example it has a ballistic parachute that will bring the entire aircraft to the ground. Unlike the Lycomings and Continentals the engine wasn’t designed in the 1950s. It’s equipped with real time satellite weather, GPS autopilot, Avionics that would cost you $15-20k to put in a Cessna due to all the red tape.
I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people. If pilots had low cost access to things like glass cockpits, satellite weather, inexpensive autopilot, and a healthy ecosystem of cheap, modern aircraft with modern engines (Basic things like fuel injection) a lot of pilots might still be alive right now.
On the balance, the FAA has saved more lives than it's cost just because big jetliners hold SO MANY PEOPLE.
But otherwise I fully agree with you.
It's deranged that students these days are taught to manually lean the mixture until the engine sputters (i.e. the engine begins to DIE), then bump it back up.
It's incredibly stupid that an aircraft flying in 2025 has multiple solid state accelerometers and gyroscopes on board as part of people's phones - but the only certified one is a vacuum-powered analog instrument from 1981.
And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?
Don't even get me started on the DPE or medical systems.
These changes cannot come soon enough, because the entire GA world has slipped through the cracks as the FAA has become a disaster.
Why? That is essentially an engine check. I think you want pilots to understand their machines and to do that you need to operate the engines.
Unleaded avgas is a thing now. But it won't work with many legacy aviation engines. I hope this new rule will finally enable some engine (and thus fuel) innovation.
Many people have died from believing that their satellite weather was real-time. It’s 3-15 minutes delayed typically.
Go up on a VFR day with widely scattered wet clouds and maybe scattered showers or virga. Fly near some of the wetness and notice they are physically quite displaced from where they are on your weather display. In some cases, your weather display will show weather on the left and clear right, while your windshield will show the weather is actually on your right, having moved during that delay.
Imagine then trying to navigate that in more serious weather and you’ll hopefully get religion that the display is definitely not real-time and must not be relied upon as if it were. It’s a strategic tool, not a tactical one.
Very few pilots manage to earn a lifetime ban.
You're talking about what's known as an electronic flight bag, which is using a tablet as a replacement for paper maps and charts. This is legal and has been for some time.
What I and Animats are talking about is running an app on a ipad as a "replacement" for equipment or training that is required for safe, legal, operation. NOT legal.
Rotax 912? :D
I've spent a lot of time getting familiar with that engine over the last two years as part of a large UAS programme. Every time I have to do integration work with it (electrical or CAN) I end up having an even-deeper appreciation of how thoughtful the engineering behind it is.
Edit: also, since people below brought up 100LL... I also deeply appreciate that it runs fine on plain ol' premium mogas. Both because I'd rather not expose my self to tetraethyl lead all the time and because it's really convenient to be able to just load up a few jerry cans on my way out to the field while getting fuel for my truck.
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.
It’s (mostly) not the plane, it’s the pilot.
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.
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.
Risk compensation is real... they put themselves into marginal situations because they're telling themselves they can always just pop the chute.
Rotax engines have been extremely popular in Europe for LSA equivalents - but boy do I recall countless stories of engine failures. The most crazy one was of a flight instructor that had a total of 12 (!?) before he quit flying. A lot has to do I believe with the “creative ways the engine and its components are stuffed into different airframes”.
Rotax engines were not worse than Lycoming or Continental ones, 1 in 36 vs. 1 in 35. Japiru engines were the bad outlier.
"Engine failures and malfunctions in light aeroplanes 2009 - 2014"
https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/2013/ar-2013-107_resear...
The relevant excerpt, paragraph breaks added:
"Over the 6-year study period between 2009 and 2014, 322 engine failures or malfunctions involving light aircraft were reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and/or Recreational Aviation Australia (RA-Aus). These reports involved single-engine piston aeroplanes up to 800 kg maximum take-off weight.
Aircraft powered by Jabiru engines were involved in the most engine failures or malfunctions with 130 reported over the 6 years. This represents about one in ten aircraft powered by Jabiru engines in the study set having reported an engine failure or malfunction.
Reports from Rotax powered aircraft were the next most common with 87 (one in 36), followed by aircraft with Lycoming (58 – one in 35) and Continental (28 – one in 35) engines.
When factoring in the hours flown for each of these engine manufacturers, aircraft with Jabiru engines had more than double the rate of engine failure or malfunction than any other of the manufacturers in the study set with 3.21 failures per 10,000 hours flown."
(When you read on, it appears the Jabiru engine was improved and now has less failures)
Last year, the LSA association in Germany started a large survey across its members because of the high number of failures with Rotax engines: https://www.daec.de/news/news-detail/service-bulletin-zu-sto...
Now, I definitely do not say that these are bad engines, but there is a lot of chatter in Europe how these engines are plugged into a wide range of airframes and there are more complex system interactions than meets the eye which can cause some problems. Or put differently: C172 and Pa28 are probably among the most common airframes to stuff the Lycomings and Continentals into. I suspect we kind of figured out how to make these work reliably.
Rotax works in MANY many different combinations and many different airframes - so there is that.
> there are more complex system interactions than meets the eye which can cause some problems
I will grant this for sure. Kind of like modern cars though, it's a double-edged sword. On the UAS programme I'm working on it has been absolutely invaluable to be able to just plug into the 912 ECU's CAN bus and gather a ton of engine telemetry (and send it down to the ground for monitoring at the GCS).
Thank you for posting the links and starting the discussion about 912 reliability. I'm going to have to dig into it a little and see if there's any takeaways I need to bring back to my team.
With zero evidence to support this other than my own experience with N=4 of these, I have a suspicion that part of the problem could be that they're not getting sufficient maintenance and inspection because of how simple they are from an O&M perspective and how robust they are in nominal and off-nominal conditions. When I was first working with it and flipping through the operators manual I was kind of shocked to discover that the only real pre-flight actions are: check coolant level, rotate the prop and make sure the oil reservoir burps. There's a startup and warm-up procedure that we follow to the letter but short-term you almost certainly won't notice if you skip it. Before we had our robust telemetry system and checklists in place, we accidentally flew it with only one ECU lane turned on once and didn't notice until we were on the ground. Engine was already off after landing when someone came on the radio and asked "hey guys... in-flight we're supposed to have both lanes A and B on right?" "Yeah..." "The Lane B switch was off when I approached the aircraft...".
To summarize what I'm getting at: this engine, in my experience so far, has a ton of really robust redundancy features and those redundancy features work so well that you may not notice that you've got issues until you've run out of redundancy. I can only think of two situations where we've had issues bad enough that it caused it to "run rough" and trigger a deeper investigation:
- Because our aircraft is unmanned we have electromechanical relays in series with the Lane A/B switches that we can control from the ground both for engine-start safety (the engine can't be started unless both the crew chief and remote pilot have turned on Lanes A and B) and to be able to kill the engine remotely after landing or in an emergency. We had an electrical issue that was causing the relays to chatter, resulting in Lanes A and B getting sporadic power.
- Somehow in one revision of the ever-evolving full-system checklist the "check water separator" item got dropped and no one noticed. It flew probably 10+ flights on that checklist before we had a really rough start, in an environment that was highly conducive to water accumulation in the fuel (large daily OAT and RH swings). We were horrified at how much water came out when I realized that no one had been checking... and yet there had been zero negative effects until there was a big negative effect.
Don't get me started. It's virtually impossible to buy a car without fuel injection nowadays, but most GA airplanes still use carburetors. And these are vehicles that are constantly changing altitude, so carburetors are even more unsuited for airplanes than for cars.
Okay I lied. You can buy fuel injected engines for airplanes. They are readily available. They merely cost 2x or 3x the price of carbureted engines.
GA engines may look antiquated—with their carburetors, magnetos, and mechanical fuel pumps—but this apparent simplicity is entirely by design. These “outdated” systems are actually time-tested solutions engineered for ultimate reliability when failure means catastrophe. While car oils use metallic detergent additives, aviation oils must use ashless dispersants to prevent spark plug fouling that could cause engine failure. The oils must handle sustained high RPM operation and brutal temperature cycling while meeting strict FAA specifications that prioritize proven reliability over cutting-edge performance.
Every component, from the dual magneto ignition (no electrical system dependency) to the mechanical engine-driven fuel pump, represents decades of refinement focused on one critical goal: the engine will not quit when you need it most. It’s not that these engines are behind the times—they’re precisely engineered for their mission-critical role where proven, simple systems trump technological sophistication.
Much easier to fuel, no electrical system dependencies, no spark plugs to foul, liquid cooling to keep the temps more constant, and dual redundant FADECs. Plus much better range.
But they're still expensive.
https://www.flyingmag.com/inside-aviation-diesel-revolution/
It's just that this is not a fair comparison because manufacturers of said airliners have more resources for R&D.
But because it's a job they have much less Plan Continuation Bias aka "Get-there-itis". Flying New York to Dallas? I did that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. So if the weather looks bad and maybe we shouldn't, well then I guess we just don't go, I'll go tomorrow, or maybe somebody else will, it's just a job.
GA pilots are notorious for this problem, and it puts them in vulnerable situations where they're one problem away from disaster, as weather is worse than they hoped, things don't happen the way they expected, and gradually they go from "It'll probably be fine" to "I hope I live to learn from this experience".
Many common airplanes engines have a max RPM of 2700 and are often cruised at 2300-2400.
(Edited for completeness)
That's because GA airplanes in general are significantly older than most cars on the road. If you're buying a brand new car and a brand new GA airplane you're equally unlikely to encounter one without fuel injection.
Now the reason this is the case is because instead of buying brand new GA airplanes, most people are just trading around the old ones because new GA airplanes are ridiculously expensive. This is also a regulation problem, among other things, but the fuel injection thing isn't because modern GA is behind the curve. The issue is that the vast majority of GA pilots aren't flying modern GA.
We're probably agreeing with each other but using different words.
It drives my crazy that in 2025 ADSB is still not mandatory for all aircraft. I get there's old timers flying their tail wheels from the 1950s that don't have any electrical components, but this would massively improve GA safety.
Another one is multiplex radio, again, it's 2025, the technology is there. Why are we still seeing so many blocked communications during emergencies in busy airspaces?
Frustratingly, the FAA hasn't certified a straightforward solution to this problem. Here in the UK, we can use a fully standalone ADS-B transceiver that requires no permanent installation. After a rebate from the CAA, it costs about $500.
https://uavionix.com/general-aviation/skyecho/
The difference between the radio on the WW2 era ex-pilot boat I spent time on recently and the radio in a brand new jet liner is crazy. The Global Maritime Distress Safety System - a global requirement from the 1980s - mandates a digital VHF radio service named DSC - it's not very clever by today's standards and it's hardly the easiest to drive UI - but it's night and day compared to what is provided for aeroplanes. First of all, and most crucial for its core purpose, many crucial elements of a "Mayday" call are automated so that rescuers have the most important information right away even if you're panicked and incoherent, and it won't get "blocked" by low priority callers trying to figure out which gate they're scheduled for, or whether they can get the longer runway for this approach.
It's almost aggressively bad, I guess they couldn't get an OK to use Morse code?
Radio navigation aids identify themselves by trnsmitting their name in morse code!
> The only positive method of identifying a VOR is by its Morse Code identification or by the recorded automatic voice identification which is always indicated by use of the word “VOR” following the range's name.
There's such a long way from "Move fast and break things" to "Eh, it was good enough for my grandfather" and it feels as though aeronautics is very close to the latter. This would be OK if the demands on the system were declining or even steady, but they're increasing.
Completely agree with you.
Is it good? Well, a lot of people are cheering the change. The FAA doesn’t normally make things easier for the average Joe. This will make it easier for an inexperienced (but still fairly wealthy) pilot to get their hands on a real hot rod of a plane. There’s probably some additional risk, but the FAA has clearly recognized that one of the biggest dangers too flying a high performance aircraft is having to land fast. 200 kts vs 100 kts doesn’t make a big difference in risk in straight and level flight, but landing at 80 kts vs 55 kts does make a difference.
I don’t know where I stand exactly. It’s a big jump. Surely this is going to cause some old geezer to be screaming through a congested area and not be able to keep up with the ATC traffic calls because he’s never gone this fast before, and he’ll have a midair collision. Surely this is going to cause someone to buy a “light sport” aircraft with 280 hp and a huge prop and they’re going to crash taking off. But I think that overall I’m just being overly cautious, and most Sport Pilots are too poor to afford a plane that burns 15 gallons of avgas an hour, so most of the new planes under MOSAIC won’t be that powerful. I am curious to see what kind of new aircraft become available, and what the long term safety impacts will be.
Edit: for about five minutes my post said “not approved” when I meant to type that MOSAIC is “now approved”
- New engine options. Previously getting an engine certified was a big expense, so there wasn’t a lot of advancement. Now I think that higher performing Light Sport aircraft can be made with non-certified engines or components. All electronic ignitions, variable valve timing, electronic fuel injection, it’s all on the table now, and it gets to exist in a factory manufactured plane, not just experimentals.
- New avionics. The light sport category got to put some neat digital avionics in their panels because they weren’t certified. They had portable ADS-B transmitters that were legal. These options will now be open to faster planes too.
- Importing light sports from around the world. Lots of European light sport planes couldn’t be imported in the past because they weren’t certified but were too fast for American light sport rules. Now a lot of them will be able to be imported as soon as the rules allow.
- Cheaper complex trainers. Allowing variable pitch props and retractable gear in the light sport category will hopefully mean there will be a plane that comes along that allows you to build time in the complex category without spending the money that usually comes with these types of planes.
- there’s probably a bunch of other things we’ll see that I haven’t thought of, and I am curious to see whatever that is as well.
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.
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.
But MOSAIC probably will result in more aircraft being announced that are designed to run unleaded fuel because you won’t have to use a certified engine and can use something more modern.
Most single-engine aircraft were already restricted to 61 knot stall speed (and I think all MOSAIC-eligible ones were).
I’m a big proponent of MOSAIC (as I was of BasicMed), even though the MOSAIC rule change won’t directly help me.
The fact that the stall speed limitation closely matches the existing limits for light singles shows where the FAA draws the safety lines. Although MOSAIC apparently allows twins, they keep the stall speed limitation at a sane number.
The only thing I don’t fully understand is them differentiating between 59 kts for a sport pilot, and 61 kts for a light sport aircraft. It feels a little arbitrary to draw those lines differently.
The NPRM document explains it somewhere around page 200. It’s important to note that it’s 59 knots CAS clean vs 61 knots CAS dirty.
The argument seems to be that a sport pilot is operating with less training and less oversight and so if something goes wrong and they can’t get the aircraft fully configured for landing they’ll still be able to operate and touch down at 59 vs whatever the clean stall speed would be for an aircraft with a dirty stall speed of 61 knots. That margin could be fairly large (10 knots or more) and the difference in energy between 59 and 71 knots is massive.
Some "geezer" trying to land at OSH 2025 did this, just this year.
The geezer has an ATP and ATC certifications (Airline Transport Pilot)
The amount of people gatekeeping, coming up with scenarios and hating MOSAIC because of "feels" is so tiring. FAA made these changes based on DATA
All pilots are limited to 200hp or less, and non-complex aircraft without separate instruction and endorsement. 14 CFR 61.31(e) & (f)
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
One of the more arbitrary and kinda pointless rules. Someone flying a 160 knot 200 hp Piper Arrow with a controllable prop and retractable gear doesn’t need the endorsement. Someone flying a 90 knot fixed gear fixed prop biplane with a 205 hp engine does.
It’s pretty much “use more right rudder”. Although most aircraft with over 200 hp have a constant speed prop so you learn to use manifold pressure and engine speed to set power.
I went from a 145 hp plane to a 235 hp one with about 30 min of instruction during a BFR.
You could always get endorsements as a sport pilot, but complex and high performance didn’t make sense because there were no LSAs that qualified. But tons of people got tailwheel endorsements as sport pilots in the past. Now a bunch of sport pilots are going to get complex and high performance endorsements too.
It's really disheartening to know that I'm not allowed to fly recreationally from time to time because I take a stimulant medication to help finish university.
She talks about Pilot Mental Health Campaig https://www.pmhc.org/ and a campaign to lobby for changes.
She's also just started a new video series where she's building a wood and fabric Pietenpol Air Camper plane from 1929 plans: https://youtu.be/YThMZZ3M9uk?si=byl8E_wJF9cKY0Fj
I don’t expect that to change, but I also wouldn’t have expected MOSAIC to be adopted either.
I think your best path is either to fly with an instructor (you don’t need a medical if the instructor is acting as pilot-in-command) or to fly Part 103 ultralights.
Then it will be the much less likely to be gamed insurance market effectively deciding who gets to fly the higher performance aircraft.
An interesting point here is that you can sometimes get safety improvements in an experimental aircraft that you can't get in the same airframe under Part 23 because the manufacturers don't want to go through the certification process for upgraded parts and newer technology.
I was on board up until this phrase. I don't want my plane behaving as flakey as my Tesla, and my gauges shifting their location around every update at the whim of some junior designer.
Not saying there couldn't be a manufacturer that does OTA properly, I just haven't seen that as the trend in any other space (cars, smartphones, etc). The OTA part always seems to benefit the manufacturer, not the user. ("Watch this ad to take off....")
The process right now is pulling out an SD card from your Garmin/Avidyne/BendixKing whatever every 28-days or so (that's how often the FAA updates the navigation database backing these avionics), popping it into your PC, using software/webistes that could be... much better designed (to put it lightly) and then going back again. It's not exactly the hardest thing in the world, but it's not exactly a walk in the park either (especially for less-technically inclined pilots, who just let it lapse, and click out of the big expiration warnings every time they start up their planes).
Even at full speed in a straight line, 2000 mile trip in a C172 would take 14.5 hours, and that's without refueling. Fuel would cost you ~$920.
In a twin prop like a Piper Seneca it would take about 9 hours, and ~$1700 of fuel.
There's also the issue of weather which small aircraft are much more subject to.
You don’t fly New York to San Francisco. You fly Cupertino to Driggs with three friends. The point is connectivity between unconnected points; similar to why we drive private cars.
Also, the article’s entire point is flying is unnecessarily expensive in the birthplace of aviation.
https://www.eaa.org/eaa/news-and-publications/eaa-news-and-a...
> the category could include planes like the forthcoming Pipistrel Panthera.
The "forthcoming" (2023) Panthera has been worked on since 2011, had its first flight in 2013, and is still in development (2025).
Personal aviation is about to get interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37988638 - Oct 2023 (137 comments)
A bunch of the coverage has a nice table showing the new spec. https://www.flyingmag.com/faa-finalizes-major-overhaul-of-li...
I have a couple of concerns about a large expansion of personal aircraft of the type the original author is advocating.
For one, even certified GA aircraft have a fatality rate far in excess of automobiles, let alone public transport or airliners. Yes, some of that is pilot error which can be mitigated to a substantial extent by computer controls, but it’s also a result of the lack of redundancy and hard failure modes of a light aircraft compared to a car. I’d also note that the flight controls don’t do the maintenance that is required to keep a light aircraft safe. Yes, the more libertarian amongst you won’t have a problem with this, but I’d also observe that the proposal is to make these regulations applicable to four-seater aircraft, so plenty of spouses and especially kids will be affected by this risk.
Secondly, expanding a class of vehicle that chews a lot of fossil fuel is going to worsen the already serious effects of climate change; and while short-range aircraft might well electrify you’re not going to fly at 250 knots for 1000 nautical miles on batteries any time soon.
Everyone wants the use of a flying car.
Everyone in a flying car wants an airport at every street corner, just as long as they don’t have to pay for the land it occupies.
But…
Nobody wants to live next to an airport, or underneath a flight path. In the world where everyone has a flying car, everyone will live next to a next to an airport, below a flight path, or both.
In road transportation, rather than trying to link the private benefits of cars with their public costs, we “solved“ the inherent and fundamental conflict by putting the freeways in neighbourhoods that had the least political power.
If we had the ability to learn from past mistakes, we might try to internalize some of the externalities of flying cars, and get better results. One can dream.
Single engine airplanes weigh less than a small car. They are not designed to protect the occupants from side impacts, to brake the vehicle to a stop 20 times in an hour, etc.
Today, if you fly 750 miles away and get into a fender bender in your rental car, you turn it in, fill out some paperwork, and fly home in an undamaged airplane. What are you going to do when your flying car gets into a fender bender in car mode 750 miles from home?
A flying car is bound to be a terrible (and likely unsafe) car and certain to be a terrible airplane.
Your average single-engine piston gets ~22mpg with a single passenger. It's not terrible at all.
22 mpg is not terrible only if your frame of reference is pickup trucks, whose load-carrying capabilities can only be matched by far larger aircraft with far higher fuel usage.
Furthermore, aircraft that cruise at 250 knots are not going to get anywhere near 22mpg. A Lancair Evolution, a reasonably modern four-seater turboprop that cruises at around that speed gets something approximating 7 mpg.
I personally don't see the point of comparing a car at 50mph with a small plane at 120mph, but if you really want to, I bet that easily doubles fuel efficiency. No one flies at Vg because that's stupid, but you COULD, and then you're basically the same fuel efficiency as a car but flying in a straight line.
Even that 22mpg is not a 1:1 comparison because of that inconvenient "as the crow flies" thing. We can build more efficient aircraft in theory, but in practice the regulation gets too expensive.
Long EZ reference: https://generalaviationnews.com/2016/05/25/going-fast-on-les...
Most of it is, and has always been pilot error. If we only had to worry about mechanical problems the safety record would actually look quite good.
It’s harder than driving a car due to much longer decision horizons (what you do now can doom you minutes to hours from now), much more of a dynamic environment with non-obvious hazards, and just plain higher baseline skillset and awareness requirements. All of these can and should be mitigated with technology to some extent, but there will always be that one guy who will choose to dodge thunderstorms at night.
Wonder if there's something similar in other domains.
FAA split the concept of "sport pilot" from LSA
Now Sport Pilots can fly just about anything with VS1 of 59 knots or less (clean stall speed) (up from 45kts)
Meanwhile, new plane designs can go through a less rigorous certification as LSA if they have a VS1 of 61kts or less.
Will also need huge changes to training and certification of aircraft mechanics.
Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes.
Hopefully those mechanics only take jobs they are proficient in, but this is going to create a bunch of new mechanics. And maybe a trickle down effect of giving those people enough experience to upgrade to a full A&P / IA license over time. But it will be the owner/operator’s job to make sure that only a proficient repairman works on their plane.
Why? These aren’t novel power plants.
> Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes
Sport pilots aren’t landing at La Guardia.
There's already a shortage of certified mechanics. Adding thousands of more pilots and presumably aircraft will make already long wait times for annuals even longer.
>Without the need for type certification, manufacturers can iterate on their designs more rapidly without going through the costly supplemental type certification process. They can include cheaper uncertified avionics. They can do over-the-air software updates.
Being completely out of the loop and nothing more than a moderately interested member of the public (outside USA) -- isn't lack of type certification one of the causes of recent major aviation calamities.
Looks like they're saying loads of EABs crash but well just call them LSAs because those don't crash as much, problem solved! Oh, and software is totally reliable so well have that control the aircraft. And we'll make them go faster.