turbo wrote:
Jimbob wrote:
Anyone attend this on sunday? I know it's still going on. I am real
curious to see if they showed anything special.
I wasn't there, but I talked to a friend at work who was there. He said
it was
worth attending. Lots of vendor displays and the NASA(?) displays were
elaborate
and interesting. He and his instructor dropped in just to take a break,
and it
was interesting enough to keep them there all afternoon.
I worked at it for one of the contractors. There's a lot of very cool stuff
being researched that will enable us to so some very cool things in this
country and improve safety. Just got to get the funding to keep it moving.
Better use of ADS-B, energy management, highway in the sky, synthetic
vision, enhanced vision, electronic flight bags, better pilot training,
aircraft construction techniques, cheaper AWOS equipment, high volume IFR
ops into uncontrolled airports, and on and on. On all three days, the big
demo was a computer sequenced six IFR aircraft onto a GPS approach to an
uncontrolled airport in a few minutes that would under today's procedures
taken nearly an hour. The crews could all see each other on their moving
maps and received a datalinked message with their clearances. Boyer had
some good comments about how we've got to get the general public to
recognize that small planes are safe and that flying an air taxi from your
local GA airport will be a good thing. See www.sats2005.com
I'm curious to find out about the capabilities of their SATS demo
aircraft. I'm not real hyper about having the skies filled yahoos
with planes,
I don't know why people keep saying this about AGATE and now SATS. A flying
car in every driveway flown by 10 hour pilots is absolutely NOT what SATS is
about. The media twists the message about airplanes being easier to fly
into a message about how any idiot can just climb in and go.
but I would like to see the mainstreaming of some of
their safety gear.
We all would, that's why the money is being spent.
My biggest problem with SATS is they do not appear to be doing anything
abut convincing large companys that SATS is safe enough for their
workers. I work for a fortune 10 company which has a policy of no
travel on light planes. If that can be resolved then I would make use
of SATS style travel for many of my shorter trips but in my dicussions
with SATS people at Sun N Fun they said no plans were made to deal with
this issue.