<story><title>Boeing&apos;s folding wingtips get the FAA green light</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/18/boeing-folding-wingtips-faa-777X/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m glad the FAA does what they do. While it is easy to hand wave away their concerns, it is better to over-spec it now and to test the design than to just let manufacturers put &amp;quot;alpha&amp;quot; products into commercial usage and only fix them after a body-count.&lt;p&gt;If driving&amp;#x2F;vehicles&amp;#x2F;roads were held to the same or a similar standards to aircraft there might be fewer accidents and deaths today.&lt;p&gt;Ironically self-driving is held to a much higher standard than regular driving; which is appreciated but further makes one question why regular &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; vehicles are so under-regulated (the analogy that springs to my mind is when HTTPS with a self-signed certificate used to be treated much worse than regular HTTP, it took years to treat HTTP as the insecure connection it is, manual vehicles are the same way, something that has been around so long we ignore its safety issues).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sunflowerfly</author><text>Bringing the same rules to light aircraft as airliners has actually made them less safe. Bringing a new four place plane to market has been cost prohibitive. The majority of new planes built today were designed in the 50’s on slide rules. Imagine if we were all still driving 50’s era automobiles. Luckily, the FAA loosened these rules this week.</text></comment>
<story><title>Boeing&apos;s folding wingtips get the FAA green light</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/18/boeing-folding-wingtips-faa-777X/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m glad the FAA does what they do. While it is easy to hand wave away their concerns, it is better to over-spec it now and to test the design than to just let manufacturers put &amp;quot;alpha&amp;quot; products into commercial usage and only fix them after a body-count.&lt;p&gt;If driving&amp;#x2F;vehicles&amp;#x2F;roads were held to the same or a similar standards to aircraft there might be fewer accidents and deaths today.&lt;p&gt;Ironically self-driving is held to a much higher standard than regular driving; which is appreciated but further makes one question why regular &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; vehicles are so under-regulated (the analogy that springs to my mind is when HTTPS with a self-signed certificate used to be treated much worse than regular HTTP, it took years to treat HTTP as the insecure connection it is, manual vehicles are the same way, something that has been around so long we ignore its safety issues).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>walrus01</author><text>Not related to autonomous vehicles, but related to the risk of death for light aircraft flight vs. NASA spacecraft human-rating...&lt;p&gt;The FAA seems to be relatively OK with the current annual fatality rate for light-sport aircraft, homebuilt experimental licensed aircraft, and light aircraft in the size range of the Cessna 172. For pilots with less than 1000 hours, flying a light single engine aircraft is a relatively dangerous activity on a per-hour basis.&lt;p&gt;If human spaceflight had the same number of annual fatalities as the current number deaths in the US 48 states while flying homebuilt&amp;#x2F;kit&amp;#x2F;light sport aircraft, both NASA and the news media would be freaking out.&lt;p&gt;NASA is requiring spacex to put the Falcon9 and Dragon2 through a very expensive and rigorous period of qualification before it can carry humans on commercial launch contracts. The likelihood that there will be a totally catastrophic disaster that the launch escape system can&amp;#x27;t recover from is low, but the standard of safety (in terms of flight-hours per human per year) seems to be much, much higher than the FAA&amp;#x27;s.</text></comment>