– Steve Hitchen
When air taxi companies began talking about entry-to-service times, they were predicting certification in the era 2026-2030. It was distant future, and many sceptics weren't convinced it would happen at all. Now that 2026 is only next year, some of those sceptics need to have a re-think! The news that Joby Aviation is routinely doing full-transition flights with a pilot on board should have people understanding that air taxis could be in operation in Dubai by the end of this year; early next year at the latest. What we once called the future we now need to call the present. The Joby is a five-place tilt-rotor design; simple but very effective. Australia's AMSL Vertiia is similar, but uses the boxkite concept and eight motors instead of the Joby's six. Others, such as the EVE, use rotors for vertical flight and lift, but have a separate pusher propeller for forward motion. What is going to set eVTOLs apart is the source of the electrical energy. The Joby is urban-only at this stage, needing charging stations to keep it operational, whereas AMSL is looking toward hydrogen-electricity to give the Vertiia the range to sortie into regional areas. Given that, the two probably don't compare equally with each other. However, success of the first eVTOLs will lay a carpet of confidence on the general public on which later designs can tread, smoothing the path forward for the entire industry.
Recognising overseas engineer qualifications is a good step forward in solving aviation's most crippling problem: a lack of maintenance people. But keep in mind this is only one step, not the whole journey; there's still a lot of work to be done in straightening out a problem Australia created for itself. CASA notes that this is one of the promises flagged in the 2024 aviation white paper, the very same document that notes a correlation between the decline in new engineer licences and the point of transition from CAR 31 to Part 66. Almost since that day, general aviation has been on the back foot as it has tried to live with Part 66 and at the same time make a series of work-arounds–such as modular licences and CASR Part 43–solve the engineer shortage. The fact that the government's ADS-B subsidy program has lost momentum is due to a lack of people qualified to install the equipment, which we can take as evidence the engineer shortage is not improving. You have to wonder if this is actually a retrievable situation, particularly for private owners who generally use small shops for maintenance. It's the small, local engineering houses that are smashed for staff, and most of them are unapologetic about prioritising money-making aircraft ahead of private owners. Downtime for routine maintenance on private aircraft is now measured in weeks rather than days, enticing owners to skip non-mandatory maintenance if they can get away with it. There is an old saying in aviation that when things go pear-shaped suddenly, undo the last thing you did. In this case the last thing done was CASR Part 66 ... maybe we need to undo that.
I have flown quite a range of aircraft types in my time (last count 35), and of all those I have never encountered a model more tolerant of mishandling than the GA8 Airvan. Designed to get heavy loads into and out of postage-stamp airstrips, it can rotate at 35 kt and is really hard to land badly. So, you can imagine that I was a bit stunned to read that one over-ran the runway at Whitsunday Airport last year. Had you asked me, I would have guffawed and said it was impossible to do. But this accident highlights to me the dangers of complacency and reinforces that every aeroplane has limits no matter how placidly it handles. Complacency is an unwanted side-effect of experience; the more we fly a type or–worse–a specific aeroplane, the more we think we know it. But it has been said to me that there is a difference between 1000 hours of experience and one hour of experience flown 1000 times, meaning unless we have encountered a specific situation before, confidence that we can deal with it may be misplaced. You can't land an Airvan safely like that, and I am pleased this pilot found that out before I did.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch