alt Hacker News> I can endure buggy software but I don’t want to deal with buggy planes
A plane built for resilience against defective engine components would be very different from the airliners we fly today. I would assume more engines for redundancy, better protection against catastrophic failure, different designs to allow engines to function even if parts flew out, and so on. It’s an interesting design exercise to build from radically different expectations from the fundamental parts.
Alternatively, a far less radical redesign would be turbines running at a much more forgiving regime feeding electric motors.
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Lol.
Do you think todays aircraft are not designed with the idea that the engine can fail?
And if you have unreliable components do you think redundancy is going to save you?
And lets be real - there already exist a aerospace arena where you have a higher number of CAT-events - it's called the military. And they deal with it by having a parachute for each passenger..
No - in effect building jet-engines (that are commercially viable i.e. fuel and efficeny) is not a easy to disrupt business. And the cost of entering it would be - high. And the benefit, well less obvious.
The philosophy in aerospace is more to build a better engine rather than to have more engines, and this extends to every aspect of aircraft design. Engines are already built to contain catastrophic failure, and the planes themselves remain functional for all but the most extreme situations. We're at the point where essentially every lost aircraft is a compound failure, with significant human factors contributing to the event. It's likely that we're on the pareto front of what engineering can reasonably accomplish, and the only gains in safety either barely nudge the needle of what we would notice (better materials, say), or difficult for the market to accept (removing pilots altogether).
Aerospace RND has been looking into hybrid propulsion systems for a long time. If there's one thing they aren't shy about pushing, it's the ability to go higher, faster, more efficiently. Such systems aren't used because they aren't yet good enough.