https://www.eaa.org/eaa/news-and-publications/eaa-news-and-a...
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.
On the balance, the FAA has saved more lives than it's cost just because big jetliners hold SO MANY PEOPLE.
But otherwise I fully agree with you.
It's deranged that students these days are taught to manually lean the mixture until the engine sputters (i.e. the engine begins to DIE), then bump it back up.
It's incredibly stupid that an aircraft flying in 2025 has multiple solid state accelerometers and gyroscopes on board as part of people's phones - but the only certified one is a vacuum-powered analog instrument from 1981.
And why the hell do we still fuel GA aircraft with a gasoline that's literally ILLEGAL to use anywhere else?
Don't even get me started on the DPE or medical systems.
These changes cannot come soon enough, because the entire GA world has slipped through the cracks as the FAA has become a disaster.
Unleaded avgas is a thing now. But it won't work with many legacy aviation engines. I hope this new rule will finally enable some engine (and thus fuel) innovation.
Many people have died from believing that their satellite weather was real-time. It’s 3-15 minutes delayed typically.
Go up on a VFR day with widely scattered wet clouds and maybe scattered showers or virga. Fly near some of the wetness and notice they are physically quite displaced from where they are on your weather display. In some cases, your weather display will show weather on the left and clear right, while your windshield will show the weather is actually on your right, having moved during that delay.
Imagine then trying to navigate that in more serious weather and you’ll hopefully get religion that the display is definitely not real-time and must not be relied upon as if it were. It’s a strategic tool, not a tactical one.
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.
It’s (mostly) not the plane, it’s the pilot.
Risk compensation is real... they put themselves into marginal situations because they're telling themselves they can always just pop the chute.
Don't get me started. It's virtually impossible to buy a car without fuel injection nowadays, but most GA airplanes still use carburetors. And these are vehicles that are constantly changing altitude, so carburetors are even more unsuited for airplanes than for cars.
Okay I lied. You can buy fuel injected engines for airplanes. They are readily available. They merely cost 2x or 3x the price of carbureted engines.
GA engines may look antiquated—with their carburetors, magnetos, and mechanical fuel pumps—but this apparent simplicity is entirely by design. These “outdated” systems are actually time-tested solutions engineered for ultimate reliability when failure means catastrophe. While car oils use metallic detergent additives, aviation oils must use ashless dispersants to prevent spark plug fouling that could cause engine failure. The oils must handle sustained high RPM operation and brutal temperature cycling while meeting strict FAA specifications that prioritize proven reliability over cutting-edge performance.
Every component, from the dual magneto ignition (no electrical system dependency) to the mechanical engine-driven fuel pump, represents decades of refinement focused on one critical goal: the engine will not quit when you need it most. It’s not that these engines are behind the times—they’re precisely engineered for their mission-critical role where proven, simple systems trump technological sophistication.
It's just that this is not a fair comparison because manufacturers of said airliners have more resources for R&D.
Many common airplanes engines have a max RPM of 2700 and are often cruised at 2300-2400.
It drives my crazy that in 2025 ADSB is still not mandatory for all aircraft. I get there's old timers flying their tail wheels from the 1950s that don't have any electrical components, but this would massively improve GA safety.
Another one is multiplex radio, again, it's 2025, the technology is there. Why are we still seeing so many blocked communications during emergencies in busy airspaces?
Completely agree with you.
Rotax engines have been extremely popular in Europe for LSA equivalents - but boy do I recall countless stories of engine failures. The most crazy one was of a flight instructor that had a total of 12 (!?) before he quit flying. A lot has to do I believe with the “creative ways the engine and its components are stuffed into different airframes”.
An interesting point here is that you can sometimes get safety improvements in an experimental aircraft that you can't get in the same airframe under Part 23 because the manufacturers don't want to go through the certification process for upgraded parts and newer technology.
I have a couple of concerns about a large expansion of personal aircraft of the type the original author is advocating.
For one, even certified GA aircraft have a fatality rate far in excess of automobiles, let alone public transport or airliners. Yes, some of that is pilot error which can be mitigated to a substantial extent by computer controls, but it’s also a result of the lack of redundancy and hard failure modes of a light aircraft compared to a car. I’d also note that the flight controls don’t do the maintenance that is required to keep a light aircraft safe. Yes, the more libertarian amongst you won’t have a problem with this, but I’d also observe that the proposal is to make these regulations applicable to four-seater aircraft, so plenty of spouses and especially kids will be affected by this risk.
Secondly, expanding a class of vehicle that chews a lot of fossil fuel is going to worsen the already serious effects of climate change; and while short-range aircraft might well electrify you’re not going to fly at 250 knots for 1000 nautical miles on batteries any time soon.
Your average single-engine piston gets ~22mpg with a single passenger. It's not terrible at all.
22 mpg is not terrible only if your frame of reference is pickup trucks, whose load-carrying capabilities can only be matched by far larger aircraft with far higher fuel usage.
Furthermore, aircraft that cruise at 250 knots are not going to get anywhere near 22mpg. A Lancair Evolution, a reasonably modern four-seater turboprop that cruises at around that speed gets something approximating 7 mpg.
Long EZ reference: https://generalaviationnews.com/2016/05/25/going-fast-on-les...
I personally don't see the point of comparing a car at 50mph with a small plane at 120mph, but if you really want to, I bet that easily doubles fuel efficiency. No one flies at Vg because that's stupid, but you COULD, and then you're basically the same fuel efficiency as a car but flying in a straight line.
Even that 22mpg is not a 1:1 comparison because of that inconvenient "as the crow flies" thing. We can build more efficient aircraft in theory, but in practice the regulation gets too expensive.
Everyone wants the use of a flying car.
Everyone in a flying car wants an airport at every street corner, just as long as they don’t have to pay for the land it occupies.
But…
Nobody wants to live next to an airport, or underneath a flight path. In the world where everyone has a flying car, everyone will live next to a next to an airport, below a flight path, or both.
In road transportation, rather than trying to link the private benefits of cars with their public costs, we “solved“ the inherent and fundamental conflict by putting the freeways in neighbourhoods that had the least political power.
If we had the ability to learn from past mistakes, we might try to internalize some of the externalities of flying cars, and get better results. One can dream.
Single engine airplanes weigh less than a small car. They are not designed to protect the occupants from side impacts, to brake the vehicle to a stop 20 times in an hour, etc.
Today, if you fly 750 miles away and get into a fender bender in your rental car, you turn it in, fill out some paperwork, and fly home in an undamaged airplane. What are you going to do when your flying car gets into a fender bender in car mode 750 miles from home?
A flying car is bound to be a terrible (and likely unsafe) car and certain to be a terrible airplane.
Most of it is, and has always been pilot error. If we only had to worry about mechanical problems the safety record would actually look quite good.
It’s harder than driving a car due to much longer decision horizons (what you do now can doom you minutes to hours from now), much more of a dynamic environment with non-obvious hazards, and just plain higher baseline skillset and awareness requirements. All of these can and should be mitigated with technology to some extent, but there will always be that one guy who will choose to dodge thunderstorms at night.
>Without the need for type certification, manufacturers can iterate on their designs more rapidly without going through the costly supplemental type certification process. They can include cheaper uncertified avionics. They can do over-the-air software updates.
Being completely out of the loop and nothing more than a moderately interested member of the public (outside USA) -- isn't lack of type certification one of the causes of recent major aviation calamities.
Looks like they're saying loads of EABs crash but well just call them LSAs because those don't crash as much, problem solved! Oh, and software is totally reliable so well have that control the aircraft. And we'll make them go faster.
A bunch of the coverage has a nice table showing the new spec. https://www.flyingmag.com/faa-finalizes-major-overhaul-of-li...
Is it good? Well, a lot of people are cheering the change. The FAA doesn’t normally make things easier for the average Joe. This will make it easier for an inexperienced (but still fairly wealthy) pilot to get their hands on a real hot rod of a plane. There’s probably some additional risk, but the FAA has clearly recognized that one of the biggest dangers too flying a high performance aircraft is having to land fast. 200 kts vs 100 kts doesn’t make a big difference in risk in straight and level flight, but landing at 80 kts vs 55 kts does make a difference.
I don’t know where I stand exactly. It’s a big jump. Surely this is going to cause some old geezer to be screaming through a congested area and not be able to keep up with the ATC traffic calls because he’s never gone this fast before, and he’ll have a midair collision. Surely this is going to cause someone to buy a “light sport” aircraft with 280 hp and a huge prop and they’re going to crash taking off. But I think that overall I’m just being overly cautious, and most Sport Pilots are too poor to afford a plane that burns 15 gallons of avgas an hour, so most of the new planes under MOSAIC won’t be that powerful. I am curious to see what kind of new aircraft become available, and what the long term safety impacts will be.
Edit: for about five minutes my post said “not approved” when I meant to type that MOSAIC is “now approved”
Then it will be the much less likely to be gamed insurance market effectively deciding who gets to fly the higher performance aircraft.
Most single-engine aircraft were already restricted to 61 knot stall speed (and I think all MOSAIC-eligible ones were).
I’m a big proponent of MOSAIC (as I was of BasicMed), even though the MOSAIC rule change won’t directly help me.
The fact that the stall speed limitation closely matches the existing limits for light singles shows where the FAA draws the safety lines. Although MOSAIC apparently allows twins, they keep the stall speed limitation at a sane number.
The only thing I don’t fully understand is them differentiating between 59 kts for a sport pilot, and 61 kts for a light sport aircraft. It feels a little arbitrary to draw those lines differently.
- 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.
FADEC means one less knob the pilot had to worry about in flight and one fewer item on the landing checklist. Probably not a massive performance difference, but I’ll call the sum of the marginal fuel efficiency and engine longevity gains along with the additional safety reduced cognitive load a compelling advantage overall.
Cheaper, modern three axis autopilots are compelling. Repeat this exercise twenty more times with areas all over an airplane and you make a huge difference. Cheap planes aren’t going to swamp the market overnight, just like most of the original LSAs were over $100k when they first came out. But a $100k LSA sure was cheaper than a new SR20 or C172. But they trickled in, and now you can buy a few year old LSA at a decent price. The new crop will start to trickle in over the years too and maybe I’ll be able to afford one when I’m at retirement age.
You’re right about the reduced training standards, but doing it with the old light sport pilot restrictions didn’t cause a massive increase in incidents, so maybe this won’t be that bad. If you fly around rural airports you’ve already been flying around sport pilots and people on BasicMed for several years, so you would have already seen the difference.
All pilots are limited to 200hp or less, and non-complex aircraft without separate instruction and endorsement. 14 CFR 61.31(e) & (f)
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
You could always get endorsements as a sport pilot, but complex and high performance didn’t make sense because there were no LSAs that qualified. But tons of people got tailwheel endorsements as sport pilots in the past. Now a bunch of sport pilots are going to get complex and high performance endorsements too.
It's really disheartening to know that I'm not allowed to fly recreationally from time to time because I take a stimulant medication to help finish university.
I don’t expect that to change, but I also wouldn’t have expected MOSAIC to be adopted either.
I think your best path is either to fly with an instructor (you don’t need a medical if the instructor is acting as pilot-in-command) or to fly Part 103 ultralights.
She talks about Pilot Mental Health Campaig https://www.pmhc.org/ and a campaign to lobby for changes.
She's also just started a new video series where she's building a wood and fabric Pietenpol Air Camper plane from 1929 plans: https://youtu.be/YThMZZ3M9uk?si=byl8E_wJF9cKY0Fj
Some "geezer" trying to land at OSH 2025 did this, just this year.
The geezer has an ATP and ATC certifications (Airline Transport Pilot)
The amount of people gatekeeping, coming up with scenarios and hating MOSAIC because of "feels" is so tiring. FAA made these changes based on DATA
But MOSAIC probably will result in more aircraft being announced that are designed to run unleaded fuel because you won’t have to use a certified engine and can use something more modern.
FAA split the concept of "sport pilot" from LSA
Now Sport Pilots can fly just about anything with VS1 of 59 knots or less (clean stall speed) (up from 45kts)
Meanwhile, new plane designs can go through a less rigorous certification as LSA if they have a VS1 of 61kts or less.
Will also need huge changes to training and certification of aircraft mechanics.
Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes.
Why? These aren’t novel power plants.
> Existing air traffic controller shortages, under-staffing, equipment deficiencies are going to have trouble coping with the increased workload posed more and faster planes
Sport pilots aren’t landing at La Guardia.
There's already a shortage of certified mechanics. Adding thousands of more pilots and presumably aircraft will make already long wait times for annuals even longer.
Hopefully those mechanics only take jobs they are proficient in, but this is going to create a bunch of new mechanics. And maybe a trickle down effect of giving those people enough experience to upgrade to a full A&P / IA license over time. But it will be the owner/operator’s job to make sure that only a proficient repairman works on their plane.
I was on board up until this phrase. I don't want my plane behaving as flakey as my Tesla, and my gauges shifting their location around every update at the whim of some junior designer.
Not saying there couldn't be a manufacturer that does OTA properly, I just haven't seen that as the trend in any other space (cars, smartphones, etc). The OTA part always seems to benefit the manufacturer, not the user. ("Watch this ad to take off....")
Wonder if there's something similar in other domains.
Personal aviation is about to get interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37988638 - Oct 2023 (137 comments)
Even at full speed in a straight line, 2000 mile trip in a C172 would take 14.5 hours, and that's without refueling. Fuel would cost you ~$920.
In a twin prop like a Piper Seneca it would take about 9 hours, and ~$1700 of fuel.
There's also the issue of weather which small aircraft are much more subject to.
You don’t fly New York to San Francisco. You fly Cupertino to Driggs with three friends. The point is connectivity between unconnected points; similar to why we drive private cars.
Also, the article’s entire point is flying is unnecessarily expensive in the birthplace of aviation.
> the category could include planes like the forthcoming Pipistrel Panthera.
The "forthcoming" (2023) Panthera has been worked on since 2011, had its first flight in 2013, and is still in development (2025).
mordechai9000•6h ago