Disrupting small vehicle air travel; making it safer, easier, and more approachable

Savionics will affect an order-of-magnitude improvement in small aircraft safety. A first principal human re-factoring of the flight experience, positively disrupting general aviation and agnostic of aircraft design. Secondary goals include dramatically lowering the bar for learning and operating small aircraft, including large, mission-oriented UAVs.

Yesterday and Today

Aviation has a varied safety history. Through rigorous controls, learning, and testing large aircraft have become very very safe. Too few of these hard lessons learned have trickled down to small aircraft. Furthermore, a malaise, “good enough” attitude is the norm. But if you dig deeper are 1000x more accidents per hour “good”? Factors like training, cost, and complexity have been to blame. Yet it’s these light aircraft where all pilots are made and still the safety of any light aircraft is pitiful.

Here is the summary of the 27th 2017-2018 Nall Report;

Other or unknown 10.4% – 101 Total – So, if we’re honest there’s not much anyone can do about these, at some level, aviation has risks, we should acknowledge we can’t resolve all problems, but maybe some of these “unknown” accidents might not have happened if the airplane hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mechanical 15.7% – 152 Total – Many mechanical accidents are avoidable with purposely built and tested 100% redundancy at all levels.

Pilot-related 73.8% – 714 Total – This is entirely unacceptable and avoidable. If you take away nothing from the Nall report, every pilot should recognize they’re the weakest and most important link in aviation safety. This project attempts to fix that.

The Nall report has been trending safer for decades… many in the industry site Electronic cockpits and ballistic parachutes, while I agree they are good, I do not think they are enough. There’s no excuse for fuel starvation or CFIT 100+ years after kitty hawk.

First Principal

To push through incremental and become disruptive, we have to disassemble the core aviation “Whys”. Why are people flying, why are people learning to fly.

From these tenants, we rebuild, ground up, from new assumptions and new decisions without old paradigms and solutions.

Priorities

These priorities attempt to directly address that general aviation is not at all generally accessible;

Safety – This project is founded on the principle that an order of magnitude improvement in overall light aircraft aviation safety is achievable. That’s 97 accidents where we have 967 today. But to do that it requires a “first principle” approach. Strip down the aircraft, what it does how it functions, and what the pilot’s role is in and out of the cockpit.

Easy – It’s a daunting skill set to fly a plane safely in all conditions at all times. This project proposes an “active-active” stability enhancement and envelope-protection flight control system. This system relaxes and virtually disappears in “safe” flight regimes and seamlessly becomes more aggressive in high-risk environments. The flight system will also feature “designed-in” skills-building flight exercises to “flatten” the learning curve and enhance “hands-on” in-flight learning and enabling pilots to gain skills most effectively at their own pace in an objective, safe environment.

Approachable– Pilots that don’t fly often aren’t flying at their potential. Many of the other goals of this project have secondary impacts on the bottom line… An easier-to-fly, safer aircraft has lower insurance. The direct operating cost of electric aircraft is in single dollars per hour vs. hundred(s) for gasoline. New interesting use cases have viability if it was $10/hr or $100 a day to rent an aircraft. Imagine driving up to any airport in any city and just renting out any available airplane on the ramp because the entire system vouches for and supports your safe operation. World-wide rental!

What’s next

We seek funding and opportunities to research, build and bring to market compelling solutions that can affect a new future for all aspects of aviation.