aviation

When aviation was new, in the 1900s and 1910s and 1920s, the technology of flight was growing at an incredible pace. Flying was new and sexy and constantly changing.

95% of what I read about aviation/aerospace here makes me cringe. It's like hearing my parents talk about computers, but with 10x more self-assurance.

"A real act of war" - or, more likely, an act of civil aviation rule enforcement. Obstructing airspace is a pretty serious issue.

But for military and aviation use, they were golden. Every product has problems.

Can't be a photographer and aviation enthusiast, no! As Bruce says, the CYA angle is also horrific.

First, the TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of terrorist plots against aviation in the US[0]. Second, the circumstances under which 9/11 happened would be impossible to repeat.

But the occasional legacy arm-rest with an ashtray harkens back to days of yore when every Joe Cool enjoyed the wonders of aviation while kicking back with a flights as smooth as a Laramie cigarette. He probably got a full meal as part of his ticket, too, the jerk.

Also, the movie, auto, and aviation industries were all hobbled for years under patent lawsuits. It was so bad in the aviation business that development in the US pretty much ground to a standstill and the center for aviation progress switched over to Europe for a decade or two.

The aviation industry has been screaming that this is the direction that commercial flight is going to take for quite some time now. I'm saying that the article's implication that the everyman can now fly "like you're rich" is a misrepresentation of what this service is actually aiming to do.

Small inexpensive model aircraft, even when they cost thousands of dollars, are not designed to the same strict engineering standards of full-scale aircraft in general aviation. Most of these devices suffer from catastrophic single-point failures in their designs.

It's important to say that the general aviation population has gotten much smaller over the last few decades. It was a lot more popular 25 years ago when I flew much more than I do now. A number of aircraft manufacturers have stopped building small general-aviation planes for a number of reasons including liability and a reduction in public interest.

Both Saab and Dassault had presented strong bids and were considered serious contenders, particularly as both offered much higher industrial participation and technology sharing than Boeing and as such had the support of Brazil's aviation industry. That cannot be underestimated, and it's why Boeing was at a disadvantage even before the NSA story broke.

The article also mentions how this process is already causing basic aviation skills to atrophy in pilots who leave too much to the computers. I think this is a very real problem, and I think it was a major contributor to the Air France flight 447 crash. Prudent pilots do more manual flying than is strictly necessary because that's the only way to maintain proficiency. If this problem becomes severe enough, expect to see the FAA establish more granular proficiency requirements. The author talks a lot about how much the military is using UAVs, and seems to think that this is a good model for civilian applications. It isn't. The military has an entirely different set of risk considerations than civil aviation.