Readit NewsI completely understand your analogy and you are right. However just to nitpick, it is actually super important to have a weight on the airplane at the right place. You have to make sure that your aeroplane does not become tail heavy or it is not recoverable from a stall. Also a heavier aeroplane, within its gross weight, is actually safer as the safe manoeuverable speed increases with weight.
At the very least it’s an interesting experiment—still unclear if or how well this sort of thing will succeed.
- New engine options. Previously getting an engine certified was a big expense, so there wasn’t a lot of advancement. Now I think that higher performing Light Sport aircraft can be made with non-certified engines or components. All electronic ignitions, variable valve timing, electronic fuel injection, it’s all on the table now, and it gets to exist in a factory manufactured plane, not just experimentals.
- New avionics. The light sport category got to put some neat digital avionics in their panels because they weren’t certified. They had portable ADS-B transmitters that were legal. These options will now be open to faster planes too.
- Importing light sports from around the world. Lots of European light sport planes couldn’t be imported in the past because they weren’t certified but were too fast for American light sport rules. Now a lot of them will be able to be imported as soon as the rules allow.
- Cheaper complex trainers. Allowing variable pitch props and retractable gear in the light sport category will hopefully mean there will be a plane that comes along that allows you to build time in the complex category without spending the money that usually comes with these types of planes.
- there’s probably a bunch of other things we’ll see that I haven’t thought of, and I am curious to see whatever that is as well.
My cold take is that the only significant, short-term effect will be slightly lowered training standards for low-to-moderate-performance aircraft. It's unclear that this will have any practical effects, since personal airplanes will remain prohibitively expensive to own and operate for the vast majority of us.
For example it has a ballistic parachute that will bring the entire aircraft to the ground. Unlike the Lycomings and Continentals the engine wasn’t designed in the 1950s. It’s equipped with real time satellite weather, GPS autopilot, Avionics that would cost you $15-20k to put in a Cessna due to all the red tape.
I will get a lot of heat for this but I think the FAA has killed a lot of people. If pilots had low cost access to things like glass cockpits, satellite weather, inexpensive autopilot, and a healthy ecosystem of cheap, modern aircraft with modern engines (Basic things like fuel injection) a lot of pilots might still be alive right now.
I share your frustration with the technological stagnation of general aviation, but this is completely damning. Cirrus added all of the features you mention, at great expense and in a fully certified aircraft, and took decades to show any kind of clear safety advantage over clapped-out Cessnas (as I understand it, the vast majority of improvement came from intensive training in when to deploy the parachute, which was wildly less intuitive than anyone originally realized and likely remains so for pilots without specialized training). Digital instruments, weather displays, and automation have significant benefits for many use cases, but it's unclear that they're inherently safer than legacy systems for amateur aviators.
Why not just control access to the room behind a metal detector? It would be really simple, but effective. I don't think any MRI should be allowed to operate without this basic level of protection.
Literally no one disagrees with you on this, and most (if not all) hospital administrators will say they already do it the way you suggest. I'm pointing out that the actual implementations I'm aware of are often ineffective because they use administrative rather than engineering controls, and this is a critical distinction people need to be more aware of when interacting with dangerous systems. Managers, at least in my experience, tend to wildly overestimate compliance rates with administrative controls, even ignoring any possibility of deliberate noncompliance.
I guess maybe the MRI machine might interfere with metal detecting?