Future of Electronics In Aviation

On Jun 20, 12:15 pm, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:

There are 100's, if not 1000's of features, that a general-purpose
computer + inexpensive, commoditized accessories, can add to flying.

I want to know which aircraft components can be
"commoditized," and what that means. Does it mean that ordinary
industrial or automotive bits are used in building the airplane? Where
can I get such commoditized cheap parts for my airplane? It needs new
wheels and brakes, which can't be replaced by car brakes because
they're all too big and heavy, it needs a new engine but that engine
has to weigh 178 pounds or less, it needs new radios that can tune in
aircraft fequencies. Can I buy those at JC Penney or Canadian Tire?

What is notable is that the cost of the $1000 PC does not increase.
Only the software and accessories change.

Of course, since billions of them are out there and many,
many millions more are sold every year. Not like airplanes at all.

We have some 172s and a 182 and a couple of Citabrias. These
airplanes all came with electromechanical voltage regulators, where a
small electromagnet pulls open the field current contacts to limit
alternator output. The 172s and 182 are all 1970s models and ran for
years and years and thousands of hours on those primitive make-and-
break buzzer-type regulators, and when they did quit we'd buy new
ones.
Now, the manufacturer makes regulators that look the same
and have the same part number, but the make-break contact setup has
been replaced with an electronic control circuit. No moving parts. And
those regulators last as little as a week and no more than a year or
two and cost every bit as much as the old style. What did we gain
there?
We fly in Canada where it can get really, really cold. The
epoxy cases on computer chips or transistor cases contract and crack
at -40 and moisture from the air gets in there and shorts them and
they're dead. Finished. This can happen when the unit is parked
outside, as they often are. Next time the pilot goes to use his
airplane the radio doesn't want to work right because the synthesized
tuner, which replaced a bank of switched crystals, is wandering all
over the place because its frequency counter chip is pooched. What did
we gain there? That radio weighs as much as the old crystal unit did
and lasted one fifth as long as the old one. What else would we use to
encapsulate a chip that wouldn't shrink and crack at -40? The LCD
displays on these things quit at -25 degrees. The liquid crystal
freezes. Useless. Narco uses a special gas discharge display in many
of their avionics, and that stupid thing burns out regularly. $350 for
each side of a NavComm. The old mechanically tuned radios keep on
going. What did we gain there?
I'm not against electronics. I've worked on electronic
devices since I was 14 years old, which was 41 years ago. It's just
that the "advances" we've been sold aren't ready yet and cost MORE
than the older ones did and are LESS reliable. We really haven't moved
ahead much at all and I would not trust my primary flight controls to
a single set of FBW controls. Airliners use three systems, just like
heavy trucks have three separate braking systems (but only one drum/
shoe per wheel) and such redundancy adds a lot of cost and weight.
Those 1/8" cables and their pulleys are going to be around for a long
time yet, believe me, and it's not because we don't want electronics,
it's because we can't trust them that much. My Power Mechanics teacher
in high school told us kids that 90% of all car problems would be
electrical, and in those many years since he's been proven right over
and over again.
The FAA is not against innovation and improvement. In the
early '70s a guy named Ken Rand took a set of Taylor Monoplane
blueprints (I once had one of those airplanes) and made some changes
and came up with the KR-1. It was the same size but much lighter and
slicker and went 50% faster, all using styrofoam and polyester fabric
and epoxy resins, and the idea caught on and Burt Rutan refined it and
built some astounding airplanes, paving the way for a host of new
designs. Lots of folks thought is was crap, and the composite airplane
still has lots of shortcomings (hard to repair, temperature extremes
are hard on it, resins are toxic, and lightning passing through it
tends to blow it to tiny bits) but we now have certified airplanes
like the Cirrus and composite propellers and composite tails on
airliners along with composite flaps and so forth, and the new 787 is
almost all composite. The FAA is happy with it and the 787, due to its
enormous strength, will have much better differential pressure for
higher cruise altitudes with lower cabin altitudes, so that its worst
fuel mileage will be better than the A380's best.
Stop dreaming about alternate propulsion methods and fancy
FBW systems and go invent and build them and if they make sense
they'll sell and you'll become rich and famous. Aviation is as market-
driven as anything else, and we're not resistant to innovation that
saves us money or makes us safer. But we WON'T buy something that
doesn't work as well as what we have now. Period.

Dan

In article ,
Gig 601Xl Builder wrote:

Le Chaud Lapin wrote:

I must ask then, if one were to look at a typical GA aircraft, in the
year 2100, in your opinion, will it be as devoid of electro-mechanical
controls as it is today?

What will it look like?

-Le Chaud Lapin-

In less than 100 years we went from the first plane the Wrights built to
the Space Shuttle, the F22 and more importantly for this conversation
the Cirrus SR-22. For over half of that century we've told out kids
through magazines like "Popular Science" that flying cars are about 10
years away. I personally think you have bought into the "Popular
Science" mindset and if you aren't a 15 year old kid (which I'm not
really sure that you aren't) you will probably grow out of it.

Will there be electro-mechanical controls in future GA aircraft? Of
course there will be. The 601XL I'm building has electro-mechanical in
it running the elevator and aileron trim. Will the entire wire or
push-rod system be replaced? If the parts get to the point where they
are of equal or less weight AND the system is as reliable AND cost is
equal or less than what is used now the answer is yes.

If the Wright brothers were to come back to life today they could look
at the SR-22 or the other aircraft I mentioned and understand why they
fly how they do. They could probably fly the Cirrus with no more check
out than is required of the average guy who is transitioning from a 172.

There is a reason for this. Airplanes work the way they do because they
are flying in the same environment they were in 1903. They have to
overcome the same gravity and they need to be as light as possible for a
given job.

You have all these grand ideas that replacing everything with
electronics will make aircraft easier to fly and cheaper. Yet you have
never really told us your idea. You just keep saying things like, "Well,
my design will get around that problem."

I know you think that there is all this open source software and
electronic hardware that is available and cheap. And you have been
raised to think that there is not problem that a few silicon chips can't
fix. BUT I can pretty much assure you that there are a lot of people a
lot smarter than you in the world and some of them work for companies
called Lockheed and Boeing and even Cessna and Cirrus.

Tell me this. If it could be done cheaper why aren't any of these
companies doing it? It isn't like they are making all the money they
want and I'm sure any of them would be more than happy to increase the
size of the market for aircraft by 1000 fold.

I want the flying car I've been promised by "Popular Science" and so do
a lot of other people and Boeing and Cessna and Cirrus and the other
know it. They just don't know how to make it because with technology
available today it can't be made.

I'm still waiting for the rocket backpacks they promised...

On Jun 20, 1:47*pm, Gig 601Xl Builder
wrote:
Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
I know you think that there is all this open source software and
electronic hardware that is available and cheap. And you have been
raised to think that there is not problem that a few silicon chips can't
fix. *BUT I can pretty much assure you that there are a lot of people a
lot smarter than you in the world and some of them work for companies
called Lockheed and Boeing and even Cessna and Cirrus.

Tell me this. If it could be done cheaper why aren't any of these
companies doing it? It isn't like they are making all the money they
want and I'm sure any of them would be more than happy to increase the
size of the market for aircraft by 1000 fold.

I am glad we agree about the desirability of a PAV. As for why it has
not been done yet, I think the answer has more to do with managerial
dynamics than technology. Ten years from now, someone will invent a
system, software or otherwise, that will be herald as a
"breakthrough". The fundamental components that are required to build
that system most likely exist today, in 2008, especially in the case
of software. What changes in 10 years that makes the breakthrough
able to occur later than sooner?

I want the flying car I've been promised by "Popular Science" and so do
a lot of other people and Boeing and Cessna and Cirrus and the other
know it. They just don't know how to make it because with technology
available today it can't be made.

I disagree with this. There is a difference between cannot and has
not.

If the truth were always "cannot", there would never be any
breakthroughs.

If you say that there will be breakthroughs, but it will be done by
Boeing, Cessna, or Cirrus, then NASA should take the CAFE/PAV award
and give it to engineers inside those companies directly.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

wrote:
I'm a bit on edge at the moment as I am deeply involved in testing a
system due to go live in a couple of days which if it goes tits up
will embarass a lot of people and cost me a lot of money and if it
works means a huge amount of follow on work.

Sounds like fun. ;-) Seriously though, I wish you good success.

On Jun 20, 2:17*pm, wrote:
* * * * *We have some 172s and a 182 and a couple of Citabrias. These
airplanes all came with electromechanical voltage regulators, where a
small electromagnet pulls open the field current contacts to limit
alternator output. The 172s and 182 are all 1970s models and ran for
years and years and thousands of hours on those primitive make-and-
break buzzer-type regulators, and when they did quit we'd buy new
ones.
* * * * * *Now, the manufacturer makes regulators that look the same
and have the same part number, but the make-break contact setup has
been replaced with an electronic control circuit. No moving parts. And
those regulators last as little as a week and no more than a year or
two and cost every bit as much as the old style. What did we gain
there?

A poorly designed switching regulator, a component so common in
electrical design that it is often given as a project to
undergraduates in electrical engineering [http://www.rason.org/
Projects/swregdes/swregdes.htm]. You could go over to
sci.electronics.design and ask the other EE's what they think about
botching a switching regulator and see what they say.

* * * * * *We fly in Canada where it can get really, really cold. The
epoxy cases on computer chips or transistor cases contract and crack
at -40 and moisture from the air gets in there and shorts them and
they're dead. Finished. This can happen when the unit is parked
outside, as they often are. Next time the pilot goes to use his
airplane the radio doesn't want to work right because the synthesized
tuner, which replaced a bank of switched crystals, is wandering all
over the place because its frequency counter chip is pooched. What did
we gain there? That radio weighs as much as the old crystal unit did
and lasted one fifth as long as the old one. What else would we use to
encapsulate a chip that wouldn't shrink and crack at -40? The LCD
displays on these things quit at -25 degrees. The liquid crystal
freezes. Useless. Narco uses a special gas discharge display in many
of their avionics, and that stupid thing burns out regularly. $350 for
each side of a NavComm. The old mechanically tuned radios keep on
going. What did we gain there?

Bad designs. I have a spare deactivated cell phone that I keep in my
Jeep for 911 emergencies. It sat in my Jeep for years. Every time I
have connected it to power outlet, it works, without a problem. True,
-25 is extreme, but not so extreme that reliable components could not
be made for those temperature. The point here is that it is not the
devices fault. If it breaks, it is because it was not engineered
properly for that environment.

* * * * * I'm not against electronics. I've worked on electronic
devices since I was 14 years old, which was 41 years ago. It's just
that the "advances" we've been sold aren't ready yet and cost MORE
than the older ones did and are LESS reliable.

I think this happens in aviation (and automotive industry in general).
This is what I meant about inter-discipline engineering. The Dean at
my university had launched a program that essentially asked, for
example, the mechanical engineering department to allow the electrical
engineers more freedom in designing those aspects of ME devices that
required electronics, and vice versa, the idea being that, if the EE's
are allowed to do the EE part, and the ME's are allowed to do the ME
part, the the overall system will be cheaper, more reliable, etc,
because each department would be exercising their natural
competencies. There were multiple programs like this at my
university, so many that one would have to conclude that this type of
development was not occurring.

We really haven't moved
ahead much at all and I would not trust my primary flight controls to
a single set of FBW controls. Airliners use three systems, just like
heavy trucks have three separate braking systems (but only one drum/
shoe per wheel) and such redundancy adds a lot of cost and weight.
Those 1/8" cables and their pulleys are going to be around for a long
time yet, believe me, and it's not because we don't want electronics,
it's because we can't trust them that much. My Power Mechanics teacher
in high school told us kids that 90% of all car problems would be
electrical, and in those many years since he's been proven right over
and over again.

Well, as you mentioned, change is going to happen some day.

What will change to allow these things to happen? It most likely will
not be new materials. Faults in electronics are generally due bad
design of the system, not the components themselves. What will have
changed when the day comes where you can trust the system?

[snipped]

* * * * * *Stop dreaming about alternate propulsion methods and fancy
FBW systems and go invent and build them and if they make sense
they'll sell and you'll become rich and famous. Aviation is as market-
driven as anything else, and we're not resistant to innovation that
saves us money or makes us safer. But we WON'T buy something that
doesn't work as well as what we have now. Period.

Well, something that makes sense would be something that is lighter,
cheaper, easier to fix, etc than what we have, which would mean it
would be imprudent, to say, spend $50,000 on a base plane, and add a
$5000 of extra equipment to it. That would not make sense.

In any case, my focus is only in the propulsion system. If that
failed, there would be no point for me, personally, to continue, as it
is very difficult, if not impossible, to improve upon the tractor
model to satisfy requirements outlined by CAFE/PAV.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Recently, Le Chaud Lapin posted:
[...]

In any case, because the material cost of software is $0, the cost of
verification would have to be very high indeed before a point would
reached, beyond which, it did not make sense to make the software
because the market could not support it.

I tried to resist jumping in, but having read through many of the posts
only to see you wind up where you began is incredible. if one more voice
saying that you are grossly missing the fundamental costs involved in
software development helps to move you from this position, then perhaps it
won't be wasted effort.

GA is a small market. Too small to warrant specialized development of much
of anything, which is why most of the components are either used or
spin-offs from other areas of aviation. Comparing it to the _general_
automotive market is completely off-base, as even a single model of a
single brand in a single year will have more units in the market than all
of GA.

So, to think that a body of expert programmers will somehow collaborate on
systems that, at best will be less reliable than the pulley and wire that
they replace is an unrealistic fantasy.

BTW - if you think that "the material costs of software is $0", let me
know where you're getting your language compilers and hardware to create
and test your code. And, don't tell me about "Open Source" options,
either, unless you want to increase your development costs by a factor of
100 or so.

Neil

On Jun 20, 4:27*pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
GA is a small market. Too small to warrant specialized development of much
of anything, which is why most of the components are either used or
spin-offs from other areas of aviation. Comparing it to the _general_
automotive market is completely off-base, as even a single model of a
single brand in a single year will have more units in the market than all
of GA.

It's a Catch-22. The FAA, NASA, DARPA, CAFE, and other organizations
are trying to make it not a small market, so the assumption is that,
if a PAV were created, it would be created for a mass market.

So, to think that a body of expert programmers will somehow collaborate on
systems that, at best will be less reliable than the pulley and wire that
they replace is an unrealistic fantasy.

A bit of a stretch.

BTW - if you think that "the material costs of software is $0", let me
know where you're getting your language compilers and hardware to create
and test your code. And, don't tell me about "Open Source" options,
either, unless you want to increase your development costs by a factor of
100 or so.

Accountants define material cost to be the cost of the components from
which the system is synthesized, not from the tools used to design or
create the system.

For example, the material cost of an iPod would include its hard disk,
RAM, ROM, resistors, capacitors, dials, faceplace, battery holder,
wires, mounts, shock absorbers, etc. It would not include
dehumidifier, blower, oscilloscope, spectral analyzer, or other factor
equipment used to manufacture the product.

The material cost of software, if sold in a store, would include the
cost of manual, the disks, and the packaging.

Compilers and hardware do not factor into the material cost of
software any more than an oscilloscope factors into the material cost
of an iPod.

To determine what components are considered "material", move the
product over a large distance. Whatever components move with the
products, those components are considered material. Those that stay
behind are something else.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

On Jun 20, 3:32*pm, John Smith wrote:
Le Chaud Lapin wrote:

I do not know what your profile is with regard to engineering and years
of experience, but you really should do some independent research on the
topics you have proposed and learn what has actually already been done.

Following that, come back here and propose something new that will solve
the problems that were found to be obstacles to the ideas you propose.

Burt Rutan used an early Apple Powerbook in the early/mid-1990's to
control the engine of his homebuilt Catbird research aircraft.

Very nice!

-Le Chaud Lapin-

In rec.aviation.piloting Jim Logajan wrote:
wrote:
I'm a bit on edge at the moment as I am deeply involved in testing a
system due to go live in a couple of days which if it goes tits up
will embarass a lot of people and cost me a lot of money and if it
works means a huge amount of follow on work.

Sounds like fun. ;-) Seriously though, I wish you good success.

Thanks.

A bunch of major tests just finished with zero problems.

Things are looking good...

--
Jim Pennino

Remove .spam.sux to reply.

In rec.aviation.student Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
On Jun 20, 4:27?pm, "Neil Gould" wrote:
GA is a small market. Too small to warrant specialized development of much
of anything, which is why most of the components are either used or
spin-offs from other areas of aviation. Comparing it to the _general_
automotive market is completely off-base, as even a single model of a
single brand in a single year will have more units in the market than all
of GA.

It's a Catch-22. The FAA, NASA, DARPA, CAFE, and other organizations
are trying to make it not a small market, so the assumption is that,
if a PAV were created, it would be created for a mass market.

So, to think that a body of expert programmers will somehow collaborate on
systems that, at best will be less reliable than the pulley and wire that
they replace is an unrealistic fantasy.

A bit of a stretch.

BTW - if you think that "the material costs of software is $0", let me
know where you're getting your language compilers and hardware to create
and test your code. And, don't tell me about "Open Source" options,
either, unless you want to increase your development costs by a factor of
100 or so.

Accountants define material cost to be the cost of the components from
which the system is synthesized, not from the tools used to design or
create the system.

For example, the material cost of an iPod would include its hard disk,
RAM, ROM, resistors, capacitors, dials, faceplace, battery holder,
wires, mounts, shock absorbers, etc. It would not include
dehumidifier, blower, oscilloscope, spectral analyzer, or other factor
equipment used to manufacture the product.

The material cost of software, if sold in a store, would include the
cost of manual, the disks, and the packaging.

Compilers and hardware do not factor into the material cost of
software any more than an oscilloscope factors into the material cost
of an iPod.

To determine what components are considered "material", move the
product over a large distance. Whatever components move with the
products, those components are considered material. Those that stay
behind are something else.

Therefore you saying "the material costs of software is $0" is about as
usefull and insightfull as saying "watermelon has no bones".


--
Jim Pennino

Remove .spam.sux to reply.