Originally Posted by
joshperry
What I was trying to convey is that "wrecking a brand-new R44" is besides the point. It doesn't matter if you're flying a 50 year old 172 or a 6 month old R44 with fuel-injection and AC, these machines are using archaic tech invented over half a century ago, and it seems like the manufacturers and regulators have settled into enjoying it that way because of the massive amounts of cash it produces from the natural protectionism it creates for the incumbents, just like old space enjoyed. I would absolutely love to start a company in an industry where I could do R&D once and make money on it for 50 years without worrying about competition.
And that's just on the hardware side of things, before looking at how impentetrable the industry is at the flight line and how that exacerbates costs and drives operators to minimize things like maintenance to the minimum possible under the regulations. This was the experience I had.
It feels like we are risking the lives of our future pilots, our friends, and our families by settling for this status quo. In my opinion, more of the money flowing through aviation should be going towards improving it rather than going into the pockets of middle men profiting from regulatory capture and artificial scarcity.
Hi, I am the CEO of Robinson Helicopter company and am glad that the aircraft protected you in your emergency landing.
Let me personally invite you to Robinson Helicopter’s HQ in Torrance, CA so I can show you where we spend our money. We spend an incredible amount of company resources ($’s and hours) improving the product every year. We actually roll the improvements Into the basic aircraft each year in a volume and frequency that other OEM’s cannot meet. Some recent examples include the fleetwide new Horizontal Stabilizer, the standard ship 4K UHD cockpit cameras, and the impact resistant windscreens. This is just the beginning as we have more then doubled our engineering team since I joined the company last year.
I will be interested to see the results of the investigation and final report. We are very glad you and your instructor are safe.
Feel free to email me at
[email protected].
David