It’s shocking how much this gets thrown around, yet there are countless people who are alive only because someone from the government showed up to help. A democratic government is no more or less corrupt then the people they serve.
While I appreciate the subject matter, I think ignoring the prior art of checklist design and human factors engineering is a big oversight. I don’t know enough about either field to know what tools they are using in the process of designing instruction manuals, time critical check lists, or diagnostic and troubleshooting guides, but I imagine that would be a very good place to start. I will say though that bringing analog checklists into a multimedia world is an intriguing direction, since being able to access an expanded checklist that enables you to see details, infographics, etc when you want to dive into a specific step while also allowing you to track your current place in a process would be pretty cool.
Interestingly, the US Coast Guards only “no fail” mission is providing rotary wing air intercept capability to the air defense network. In the National Capital Region they have helicopters that get scrambled as part of the air defense response to go intercept air targets that a slow and low. Basically anything that it would be hard for a fighter jet to pull up along side and match airspeed with. The Coast Guard helos don’t have any air to air weapons capability, their main purpose is to prevent false positives. They can get real close and relay information to the air defense folks who have access to weapons systems, and also a helicopter suddenly appearing next to you with a signboard saying that you need to turn immediately is a pretty good indicator to a weekend warrior that they are not supposed to be flying there.
Why do you say it isnt a navy crew, and those arent navy uniforms? Not in the USN so not able to tell quickly, but it seems that they are in a mix of the USN NWA Type IIIs, Navy Whites, and then working overalls. They almost all seem to have some sort of rank insignia, though the only ones I can make out are the LT, the CDR or possibly CAPT, and then maybe a cadet to his left?
At the end of the day, the only things that matter are those that you let influence your operational tempo. Unfortunately, a wartime organization that is able to accept a certain level of fatalities in a combat situation has trouble adapting the mentality of "the mission must get done" to a non-wartime footing. Because of the lower stakes for surface vessels, there is a higher chance that the time allocated to maintenance (whether thats fixing running rust, overhauling a piece of equipment, or ensuring crew are trained) is whatever is left in the schedule after their operational needs have been met. Unless a skipper is willing to bet their career on saying "I wont sail until these repairs are done, operational schedule be damned", its not going to change. At the end of the day, someone needs to be willing to say no, and deleverage the commitments. All the services are seeing the "do less with more attitude" creep into senior leadership's thinking, and its causing both human and material assets to be depleted. Its no wonder theres a human resources shortfall - the value proposition is just not what it used to be, and the level of burnout of sailors has only increased.
Making things legible to the state is one of the ever going projects of any state. So while I think it’s important to make sure that refusal to participate in one of these projects doesn’t preclude you from still receiving the services of the state, it’s also isn’t surprising that the state wants to make its constituents more legible to itself. The balance falls in figuring out how to firewall these different functions to prevent certain kinds of identity from making it so you can’t receive the services that are the whole reason why you have a state.
Your comment about automating autorotations got me interested, and it appears that one UAV company has done a tech demo for it, at least from my cursory search. From what I can tell though the design space would be extraordinarily difficult to fully automate. Management of rotor RPM requires finesse, functioning flight controls and also quick decision making about where and how you are going to land. Usually the automatic flight control system would require either enough battery power to power your servo actuators after an engine failure or a system designed to run in AC power which is generated by your rotor system (which of course means it’s depleting rotor RPM at a time when rotor RPM is what is most important to manage). I think you’d have to design a lot of the aircraft systems with automation in mind, so it really would have to be a new aircraft in many regards, and you’d be unlikely to be able to retrofit an older airframe to do it. I think there’s just too many trade offs to make the system worthwhile in the low margin business of crop spraying, tour rides, or electronic news gathering. Medevac, oil rig transportation or military applications could make use of an automatic autorotation system, but those aircraft also tend to be medium to heavy twin engine aircraft which negates a lot of the need to focus as much on autos when you are designing the overall system.
I’m having trouble digging into their tech stack and can mostly just find advertising copy, but from what I can tell they must be integrating software (run on an iPad) into the flight controls. Which makes this a fancy skin on an automatic flight control system, something that most larger helicopters have to varying degrees. I’m not really sure what the actual product that Skyryse has developed. If they are including the requisite servos to manipulate flight controls into their hardware stack then their business proposition is going to run into the problem of any modifications to the flight control system (both digital and mechanical) to that level will necessitate a new type certificate from the FAA. That makes this system far less modular and turn key then they seem to be selling.
The reason you don’t see small helicopters or fixed wing aircraft with complex autopilot systems coupled to the flight controls is that it’s expensive for a lot of the reasons you want it to be - the reliability, airworthiness and usability requirements that make it safe are also expensive to implement. At that price point it’s usually easier to have a human do all that work, especially for the types of missions those aircraft do. The technology has been there for decades, and there’s probably a reason why it hasn’t trickled down to these sorts of small aircraft yet.
Also, do you really want your flight control system to be entirely reliant on ensuring that the latest update to iOS doesn’t inadvertently brick the app that lets you control your aircraft? Let alone the possibility of someone exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to degrade your flight performance. There’s a reason that flight software is not trivially updated.
I love quality tools and products, especially when you have taken the time to find what works for your specific use case or body type. That being said, I started slowly shifting to an attitude that, to paraphrase an over quoted movie, "on a long enough timeline, everything is a consumable". The biggest factor isn't so much buying something for life, but buying a product that 1) matches the lifespan of my usage 2) won't frustrate me with its quality 3) will last a length of time somewhat in line with the improvement cycle of that type of product.
Glad to see someone else referenced this book. For anyone who wants to learn more about just how difficult it is to peer into the minds of other creatures, I highly recommend this book. Also, it's filled with delightful anecdotes of animal behavior that you would only experience if you spent hundreds of hours observing an individual.
I'm curious, in your experience what is the delay between: knowing there's a need for a response - knowing where the individual is - getting someone on scene? I'm not familiar with mtn rescue so I'm not sure how long it takes vertical surface teams to get into place once the survivor has been located. I'm sure there are times where a vertical surface rescue will be required, but it takes a long time for the team to get positioned. In a situation like that, is it a significant gain to get a medic to that person even if it will be hours before they can get extracted?
If they survived the crash, it probably was something necessitated an auto rotation, rather than the main rotor departing the helicopter. If that happened they would almost certainly be dead. If the nut on the top of the rotor mast detached - called the Jesus nut - they would also be dead. Mast bumping probably wasn't the cause either since that is a problem mostly constrained to a type of rotor system that wouldn't typically be used in an air ambulance setting. I'm not sure if I know of any helicopters with an underslung rotor system that are used by EMS operators.
What's cool about the history of helicopters is that people immediately recognized the ability of a helicopter to save lives, and then they promptly started doing so. The first helicopter flight was 1939,and the USCG's first life saved with a helo was 1944 with the delivery of blood plasma. So who knows, maybe this will pan out and with a few years folks with start saving lives with this technology.
I don't want to say that there isn't any application of this tool in a Sar role, but I don't think that this tool is any better than what organizations currently have available. It isn't a game changer, and it isn't going to save lives that would have otherwise been lost. If you wanted to save lives of hikers, you'd spend $400k on personal locator beacons and let people snag them at a ranger station for their hike. That would save more lives than a fancy suit I bet. While I can see there is a scenario where first responders say "wow I'm glad we had the jet pack in the back of the truck" I don't see it being worth the effort to get an agency to the point where every truck and crew has that capability without sacrificing any other capability.
I guess I'm confused. If an aircraft can't go backwards or do a loop, does that mean it's not flying? Because as far as I know, every fixed wing aircraft is incapable of going in reverse, and most can't do a loop. Not trying to pick on your defenition of flight based on degrees of freedom, but that doesn't seem to match any definition of flight I've run across.
Well I think the question becomes, what sort of situations are actually happening, and then what capability is needed to mitigate those situations? If an area's data says that there are enough people whose position we know, but because they didn't get rapid, low level stabalizing triage care they ended up dying then a system like this might make sense. But if most of the cases involve searching, higher level care, an eventual medevac anyways, or any combination of the above, a SAR organization is probably going to need a helicopter anyways. If you already have a helicopter with hoist capability, then it will probably be hard to make the math justify the additional expense.
While having a smaller fleet of helicopters induces a smaller number of critical failures, if the advantage is the amount of time it takes to get to a location, you'd need a lot of jetpacks to be spread out enough to beat a helicopter. With an advertised endurance of 5-10 minutes, this won't do more than get you a small hop to a remote location. The searching and most of the traversing is going to have to be done by some other vehicle. If every 4x4,truck or ground search party needs to have one of these (and be trained to operate it proficiently), I have a hard time believing that you aren't going to be quickly running an operation that's more expensive then a helo operation. That being said, maybe some areas could use this. Perhaps a place with canyons or cravasses, where people could fall down but rescuers could still mostly move rapidly using ground vehicles.
As far as the downwash, while it is a concern it's also something that can be managed. The heavier the aircraft (more equipment, endurance, and reliability) , the more downwash. This jetpack has a small down wash footprint (but I bet it's still really high under the jets since it's a pure thrust aircraft) but the tradeoff is in endurance and equipment.
But again, there might be some areas that could benefit from it, but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. Other than the gee wiz factor, I doubt any of the SAR agencies in the US would set up a system like this.
Good points, but remember we can't only compare the initial capital outlay, we have to compare the hourly operating cost. I imagine that it isn't quite as cheap as you think, and we would also need to see sustained operations from these jetpack to know what the hourly flight time cost is. This is amplified if you need 10 to 20 jetpack to cover and area that could be serviced by two helicopters that are being leased under a maintenance contract. As far as the pilot requirements, sure a jetpack might be able to be just a sport pilot, but can they operate in a commercial capablity then? The FAA says no. Also, this probably isn't trivial operations (search and rescue is highly dynamic, especially in mountainous, maritime, urban or poor weather conditions. On paper my flight experience is 500 hours and a commercial license, which isn't that hard to get as a rotary wing pilot. But in actuality it's 500 hours of highly expensive military flying in dangerous environments, to the tune of well over a million dollars of initial training. Just like a commercial EMS operator isn't going to hand the keys to a helicopter to anyone with a commercial rotary license, are you really going to have a jetpack medic be someone with the bare minimum of certification?
My experience is focused on finding people over water, but a lot of the tools will be the same. Using NVGs if we're at night to pick up any sort of light, our electro optical sensor that has thermal imaging capability, and good old fashioned headwork for guessing where a survivor might be located over terrain. A helicopter isn't always going to be the only airborne search asset, so it's possible to imagine a fixed wing search asset locating a survivor, and then a jetpack medic getting to them to provide triage care. The economics of search and rescue are really tricky, and it's expensive to maintain such a specialized capability with a profit motive in mind. I don't know the specifics of the UKs SAR system, but I am pretty sure they have a civilian organization running their maratime search and rescue, but I don't know if the bill is footed entirely by the government. Was your economics question about the jet pack or helicopter based search and rescue?
Pretty cool usage scenario, since everyone can imagine a flying hero coming in to save the day. That being said, this feels like a solution looking for a problem. I am sure there are specific areas of responsibility that would benefit from a rapidly deployable single medic carrying a small triage kit with no patient return capability, but they are probably few and far between (especially when you factor in the above need with the capability to purchase, train crew, and maintain such a capability).
As a pilot of a helicopter whose purpose is search and rescue, this system seems a bit cumbersome. Yes, a helicopter can't land in all terrain types, but it is a pretty well established skill set to have medics lowered to survivors, and to have the capability to hoist and then transport survivors to higher level care. Maintaining this capability is expensive, which is why it is usually limited to public safety organizations, though some operators like Air Zermatt are private. While a jetpack medic might be able to compete with a subset up the capabilities of a hoist capable medevac helicopter, it won't have the range, speed, or full spectrum of services. If you end up needing a helicopter to evacuate the person anyways, you probably didn't gain a whole lot by having a jetpack medic fly out there first. Unless the jetpack bases are highly concentrated and very common in an area, they probably won't have a time advantage when it comes to onscene arrival either.