news.ycombinator.com• Aug 5, 2024• 1 min read
Launch HN: Airhart Aeronautics (YC S22) – A modern personal airplaneHey Hacker News! I’m Nikita, founder of Airhart Aeronautics (https://www.airhartaero.com/). We are building an airplane for people who don’t fly airplanes. The goal is to make flying as easy as driving a car—while maintaining a high bar for safety. Here’s a video that shows a bit of our hardware and quite a bit of our software: https://youtu.be/PGJUGUceu8AIn the US, trips that are 50-300 miles are almost all done by car because that distance is too short for commercial airlines and too far for public transportation. Thanks to the Wright Brothers we've had aerial transport for over 100 years. The US has over 19,000 airports, and large commercial airplane technology has developed to the point that the planes practically fly themselves. If we already have the infrastructure and the technology, why isn't everyone flying planes?The problem is that small airplane technology hasn’t innovated and is stuck in the past. Flying a small airplane is complicated, mentally taxing, and dangerous—about
