On Jun 13, 5:47*pm, Michael wrote:
On Jun 13, 6:04*pm, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:

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 thought about this. It would seem that something truly
revolutionary would almost certainly result in some collateral damage.

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.

Incremental improvement is part of the problem. If one takes a
$200,000 aircraft and painstakingly shave 7% off the cost, it would
still cost $186,000. I think this situation occurs in almost all
engineering disciplines. Incremental is safe and manageable.
Disruptive can have huge rewards, but this risk is significant. The
US Department of Defense recognized this (or rather, a few insightful
individuals in DARPA), and created the Advanced Technology Program
(ATP):

ATP's overarching goal is "to accelerate private investment in and
development of high-risk, broad-impact technologies".

I spoke to someone at ATP a while back, and they confirmed that they
are interested in "funding projects that no one else would touch". The
gentleman said that they wanted to fund extremely high risk, extremely
high reward type research. It was clear from the conversation that
this program was created specifically to facilitate "big kills". I
think a PAV would fall into big-kill category.

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.

Yes, that's true.

Let me add to that, the effect of The Scramble:

I do work in wireless devices for digital communication and the
networking software that goes with. I can recall countless situations
where the state-of-the-art for a device or code was far from optimal.
Many people in the field know what optimal is, but..there is an
obstacle: money. People take the sub-optimal and make large amounts
of money from it. People watching people make money, and join in
(whether they were meant to be in the field or not). Also, the sub-
optimal thing works. People use it, and like it, because it is
infinitely better than what they had befo nothing. Before long, an
industry is created where there is a large number of players, all
jockeying to be on top. What gets lost in this scramble is
appreciation for innovation. Management takes over, and management
requires a reduction of risk.

Every once in a while, someone who is perhaps predisposed to innovate
that field will resurrect the power of innovation with something new,
and either get sued, bought, or, if lucky, lauded for establishing the
new standard by which future generations of incremental improvements
will be measutred.

Programs like DARPA's ATP were meant to break this cycle, by offering,
up-front, significant funding for someone willing to spent
(potentially fruitless) years of their career going for the Big Kill,
the new standard in the design of the system.

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.

Hmm....yes, that's a problem.

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.

I find it hard to believe that the steady-state model for a PAV, if it
is ever to exist, is what one sees when one looks at a Cessna, or a
slightly-modified version thereof. Also, how many people start with
clean slates? It took almost 20 years in my field for the designers
of the original Internet to realize that incremental is sometimes a
very bad idea. Now everyone is talking about redoing the entire
thing. Stanford even named their go at it "Clean Slate" (http://
cleanslate.stanford.edu/about_cleanslate.php). The waste of duct-
taping the old Internet (IPv6) has simply been massive. Hundreds of
millions of dollars from US Government alone was given for researchers
to tweak a bit here, a bit there. And what we are left with is
something strikingly atrocious from an aesthetic perspective. But the
similar arguments were made in 1990 that the best way to move forward
was not to change too much too soon. Now they are saying the exact
opposite.

I think with revolutionary ideas (that is, essentially, what PAV
represents afterall), one really has to think outside the box. The
standard should be set high, extremely high. Every criteria listed on
the PAV web site should be provided to the researcher as
requirements. Some requirements will force the designer to relinquish
the notion that tweaking is best way to succeed, like prescribing a
$50,000 limit on total cost. I think that, if this is not done, many
designers will have an extremely strong urge to go find the first
Rotax engine that is within budget, and start building from it.

The good thing about this approach is that, if the standards turn out
to be too high, then that's ok, at least it will be known that the
standard was set too high. But right now, many designers are tweaking
existing designs.

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.

Makes sense. Don't you think though that, if a PAV were made, FAA
would make accommodations for experimentation?

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.

So chicken and egg again.

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.

Yes. I was thinking of Rutan and Heinz as I wrote. [Thanks for other
names.]

I think the only way to break the impasse is to actually make
something that works. I think something like ATP program would be
best way to go. Anything short of that leaves too much opportunity
for discord.

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.

Or maybe make something? There seems to be a *huge* amount of interest
in seeing the end product, whether it is legalized or not. If someone
were to make a PAV that satified the CAFE criteria, there would be a
frenzy in the media. They already get excited by Moller's
contraption.

I plan to check over at DARPA's ATP to see what they have going for
aviation early next week.

-Le Chaud Lapin-