> Flying a small airplane is complicated, mentally taxing, and dangerous—about 28x more dangerous than driving a car.
> Our system makes it impossible to lose control of the airplane, potentially solving 80% of today’s fatal accidents in general aviation.
So this system is still at least five times as dangerous as driving a car? Is that considered safe enough for you to take liability in case of an accident, as e.g. Mercedes does with their vehicular auto-driving system?
The general opinion in professional flying is that the pilot and operator (for something like Airhart the owner would be both I guess?) decision making has an immense impact on safety. You don't typically have a two sided crash where some other party is at fault like in a car. The vast majority of general aviation accidents happen because of bad deciding making. So it's much more in your control.
While the stats may conclude "loss of control" as the cause of the accident. Often that loss of control is caused by for example the decision to fly into instrument conditions (bad weather) while the aircraft or pilot is not suitably equipped, trained and experienced for it.
> You don't typically have a two sided crash where some other party is at fault like in a car
However, increasing the number of things in the air will likely shift that, at least a little bit. Things at uncontrolled fields can get busy with just a handful of aircraft in the pattern. Add a hot-head and the safety factor drops significantly.
> So it's much more in your control.
WX is never in your control. Just like anything in life, you can make all the right decisions and still die. It's just that aviation is less forgiving than the rest of our lives so (inevitable) mistakes matter more.
Our goal is to get to the same level of safety as (if not safer than) automotive. There are some issues that we don't immediately address including engine failures, but at the same time, most of the stats are based on engines that were designed 50 years ago, while we are using a much more modern engine with better monitoring and data collection.
However, a large number of accidents are just "unknown"--we have no idea what happened. With the level of connectivity in our airplane we'll at least always have data to understand what went wrong if an accident does occur, regardless of if it's caused by our system or not. From there, we can refine to solve the issues that we currently have little insight into.
> Our system makes it impossible to lose control of the airplane
Thing in aviation is, that there are a couple of outside factors which might leed to a loss of control: bird strike and mid-air collision come to mind.
True--but those are quite rare compared to other sources of fatal accidents. And if it does happen, we have the full airplane parachute to bring the airplane safely to the ground
