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filleduchaosyesterday at 10:22 PM1 replyview on HN

"One hour is plenty of time for flight school" is not doing you any favours in coming across as knowing what you're talking about lol. Good freaking luck completing cross-country flights for an instrument rating with that endurance, never mind your certainty that there are "better options" as if the laws of physics have changed dramatically between 2020 and today.

And I mentioned workhorse aircraft for a reason, considering that the Velis Electro has a payload of...172 kilograms. Turboprops (gas turbines in general) are far more expensive and far less fuel efficient at low altitudes than their piston engine counterparts, which is precisely why piston engines still exist.

The fact that alternative fuels now exist for piston engines does not make the blatantly wrong nonsense you've been throwing out any more correct, such as your suggestion that you can "just run" piston engines on Jet-A. That is something that anyone who actually knows anything about internal combustion engines can tell you for free causes regular piston engines to detonate/knock. Your assertion that piston-engine aircraft have virtually no vital role was similarly ignorant.

And that's besides the fact that black-and-white "if you don't agree with whatever half-assed or plainly incorrect crap I say in support of The Cause™ you're an apologist" nonsense lost its efficacy years ago; you might want to find a better soapboxing tactic for 2026.


Replies

moffkalasttoday at 10:17 AM

It really doesn't matter if I don't know the paragraph eight of rule one hundred and thirty four, I know that if you can't do something without poisoning people you should not get to do it. That's as much as there is to it, and it's an argument you can't ever win without proving lead is harmless or something.

You can't just run piston engines on jet-a but you can run them on regular high octane from any regular gas station or any of the actual alternatives, my point was you can swap them for small turboprop powerplants and run the plane on jet-a. Afaik reducing knocking is not really the point of avgas either, which I'm sure you know, but vapor lock at high altitudes, which you can easily avoid by... not flying high, which by your own point is the main use case for piston aircraft. I guess we'll just spray lead over everyone instead, cause it's "safer".