This is wonderful.

So simple, what a great idea! As a feature suggestion, it should automatically arm when the wheels leave the ground and engage if the rpm drops below a threshold. I work near an airport and a small plane crashed about 100 yards from my desk. It all happened VERY quickly, none survived.

Auto engage would be a nice and potentially life-saving feature no doubt, but always watch what you wish for if the thing auto engages at zero RPM by mistake when someone is walking nearby

That's what I was thinking too, which is why the wheels have to be off the ground ;) Like a pressure sensor on all three (or more) landing gear. Possibly after the engine has been running for 1 minute or something along those lines.

Mechanics may not like all that high voltage floating around either, or the lithium battery fires/explosions

For every part and bit of automation you add that creates one more thing that could go wrong. What happens when that automatic cutoff sensor gets stuck and you need the power? What happens when it get stuck in "on" position while the engine is running and you don't realize it so it drains the battery power so that when you do need the power it inn't there? I think that it's perfectly fine for this kind of emergency equipment to be manually operated. Yes, I am an engineer.

Does manually operated air bags for your cars sound like a good idea? That's why all of these things have to be vetted through the FAA.

Good point, but airbags by their nature have to work in an instant and it either works or it doesn't. An engine failure in an airplane isn't something that you need to take care of in a couple of milliseconds. It's a slow motion disaster and there's plenty of time to respond to it. On the other hand, there are plenty of things that could make it fail as you add on endless safeguards and automation all of which could also fail.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of this. Yes, every additional component is something that can go wrong. But the way this works means that even if this totally fails in a critical situation the only result is the same as if this wasn't even installed. It's not supposed to just turbo-charge your engine, it's there for critical response only and is transparent to the user at all other times. The flaws you point to are obviously something they'll be designing to avoid and constantly under improvement. There is some potential for a failure in there, but it's a much lower chance than a pilot knocking the wrong switch and draining the battery himself. I'll take machine error over human error any day.

We all see the start of the reign of electric planes.

I really doubt this. There's nothing about airplanes that make any sense except in this narrow niche which is not really even a way of flying airplanes, it's more of a "parachute replacement" than a replacement for any ordinary airplane technology.

If I remember well Elon Musk talked about this at a moment on his MIT conference last year. https://www.youtube.com/wat...

I'm sure this article would have been just as interesting without the sensationalist part about how "dangerous" flying light aircraft is. While certainly more risky than sitting in your living room, about as many people die in General Aviation (GA) aircraft as die in boating or train accidents. In round figures that's less than 1,000 people total per year for GA in the entire country. While of course this is still too many, I don't recall too many articles equating boating to a high risk activity. Contrast GA to America's favorite mode of transportation, cars, where some 30,000+ die a year.

Back to the subject at hand though, while hybrid drives in aircraft may be useful, saving lives is not likely to be a major rationale for their use. The vast majority of all small aircraft accidents are pilot induced in one way or another. Less than 20% of GA aircraft accidents are caused by mechanical issues in total and fewer still are caused by engine failures; certified aircraft engines are extremely reliable and must be inspected on a yearly basis. Carrying around hundreds of pounds of hybrid drive hardware and batteries just to mitigate the risk of a relatively rare engine failure is not a good trade. Like cars, hybrid drives in aircraft will be used to gain efficiency or for a burst of performance on take-off. Aviation is notoriously conservative and government certification requirements require large amounts of money and time to complete. Unfortunately, outside of the home-built / Experimental market, we won't be seeing this technology used for some time.

By the way, Rotax engines don't burn jet fuel, they burn auto-gas, are used almost exclusively on experimental or light sport aircraft and are quite reliable as well. Ask a pilot the next time you are writing about aviation, you'd get an accurate article and it would still be interesting :)

Factoring in that the US is not the entire world, then your GA death toll will increase exponentially.

A number of GA pilots do not go through intense emergency procedure like ATP rated pilots do. So in an emergency situation, quite a lot are not equipped mentally to make the right decision at the right time, hence the reason why pilot error related crashes are prevalent in GA. So bringing up boat accidents and car accidents doesn't really make much sense in your response. Efficiency is definitely a benefactor of this technology, however safety and redundancy is just as important if not more.

Take Cirrus for example, while it's not an industry standard, the fact that it has been used to save lives, pilot error or not, was worth the time and effort they put into developing and certifying the air-frame parachute system. So to say that this is not cost effective enough for manufacturers to consider this as a safety system, is saying that the industry does not rate safety as it's top priority, because accidents are almost always caused by the people that fly the airplane.

> I don't recall too many articles equating boating to a high risk activity

Because all the would-be authors died in lethal boating accidents!

This is one of things you hear about for the first time and keep thinking.... how was this not already a thing?

"Real jet fuel engines will always be around for the serious and dedicated missions" umm...no.

i saw that video of the parachute system to save the plane from crashing and it was awesome.

"engine stalls". "914 jet fuel engine" Who wrote this?

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