On Jun 13, 6:04*pm, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
So basically what you're saying is that there are some people in FAA
who want something like a PAV, but when it comes times for approval,
"Ralph" in FSDO/MIDO puts up a brick wall for whatever reason.

No, not for whatever reason. For the very simple reason that it is
not proven technology. And how would it get to be proven technology?
Well, you would need a bunch of them in the air for a long time.
Catch-22.

I think this is one of the reasons that NASA and other government
organizations *have begun to sponsor challenges like CAFE/PAV, so that
innovation can reclaim first priority.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Making a PAV is not about
breakthrough-type innovation. You can't use bleeding edge technology
in something that the consumer must use that can easily kill him.
It's never done in cars, for example. It's all about incremental
improvement.

Think about what cars were like before Henry Ford decided to
commoditize them. Well, that's what airplanes are STILL like. And
even after Henry Ford risked his own considerable personal fortune on
that technology, it still took decades to get to the point where
someone who understood nothing whatsoever about engines, mechanical
structures, the dynamics of tires, road design, or really much of
anything else could just buy a car and take off cross country - and
get there reliably and reasonably safely. BTW - despite the decades
of ever-improving technology and evolving safety regulation, driving
is STILL the most dangerous thing most americans do on a regular
basis.

Imagine what it would have been like if the federal government had
decided to regulate driving on a national level just a couple of
decades after the first cars appeared on the US roads. Imagine if
every design change needed federal approval. There never would have
been a Henry Ford. There never will be a Henry Ford of the airplane
world until you abolish the power of the FAA to regulate the
manufacture of personal aircraft.

I also think that if someone were to build a PAV that satisfied all
the criteria outlined on the CAFE site, it would be very hard for
anyone at the FAA to stop it.

Don't worry about that - with proven technology it is impossible, and
there isn't the money available to do it all at once on a maybe
anyway.

*The pressure to act objectively and
responsibly would simply be too great.

You're just not getting it - the FAA engineering people are acting
objectively and responsibly by their own lights. They are keeping
unproven technology out of the air, keeping it from killing people.
And in the short term they are right! Regulating aviation made it
safer - at first. It's just that the regulations stifled progress.

In the automotive world, by the time safety rules kicked in, it was
possible to consistently test cars and create objective tests. This
allowed the design engineer to use whatever technology he wished, as
long as the final design met the objective tests. This was not
possible when the type certification rules were implemented for
aircraft, so the rules had to be precriptive. At the time they were
written, they represented the best of the proven technology. It's
just that now they are hopelessly behind the times.

What you would really need to do is rewrite all the rules - and there
is nobody out there to do it unless you draw on the expertise of the
experimental designers - Rutan, Heinz, Nieubauer, VanGrunsven. And
how is an FAA bureaucrat to know how to tell the difference between
them and a Bede - or Moller? And if you do rewrite the rules, all you
do is freeze technology where it is in the popular experimentals now -
which would be better but still not good enough to get you that PAV.

So if you ever want to get there, the only solution is to remove the
stifling regulation - and accept the body count that will follow.

Michael