On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals.
There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).
What sucks is that normal "for fun" prop pilots used to be able to use the basic $50 roaming plan, and then Starlink pulled the rug out from under them by taking it away, instead offering the new plan 5X the cost with 1/5 the bandwidth limit. Total scumbags. Even your hated local cable company doesn't have the balls to 5X your monthly bill suddenly out of the blue.
"Investor documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal said the goal is for the plane to be the first light jet to focus on artificial-intelligence flight."
Oh cool, can't wait for the vibe-coded autopilot to CFIT into the Rockies or dump itself into the ocean that it thought was totally a runway while a completely untrained, inexperienced hot shot with $10 million to blow flies this generation's V-tailed doctor killer[1] to their final destination.
Airplanes have had autopilot (the genuine kind, not Musk's snake oil) for ages now. Commercial airlines have been using autoland on well-equipped airports for decades. Garmin's fully autonomous emergency autoland has already saved a few Cessna owners' lives. With the ongoing adoption of CPDLC the ATC-to-pilot link is also actively being automated and standardized.
There are no big technical hurdles left to solve! The main thing preventing fully-automated flight from taking off is the industry and regulators (rightfully) being incredibly conservative, and preferring paying pilots over the horrible PR fallout of an incident aboard an automated flight killing hundreds of people. Artificial intelligence isn't going to be of any help here!
You seem to be confused about the reasons. Fully automated flight is technically feasible (with the right equipment) under normal conditions. However, it will never be a replacement for a pair of human pilots for Part 121 commercial passenger flights — at least not without some fundamental advancement in AGI. The problem is not with routine flight operations but with emergency procedures. By their very nature, emergencies can't be anticipated and it's impossible to write code in advance to handle them. Whereas humans can improvise solutions on the fly based on first principles. A prime example is US Airways Flight 1549 "Miracle on the Hudson" where the pilots intentionally disregarded parts of the emergency checklist to safely ditch in the water.
The Garmin Autonomí autoland system is an amazing technical achievement but it's intended as a last-ditch way to save the passengers when a Part 91 single pilot is incapacitated. It would never be approved for routine non-emergency use and can't even take VHF radio instructions from controllers.
The technical hurdle to solve they feel is getting the barrier to 'flying' dumbed down even more. They want this to be something that Joe off the street can get in with minimal flight training and go zip around in a high performance jet once their vesting clears and they can cash out a few mill.
So... basically, an even more digital cockpit with more touchscreens and less verbatim information presentation on the screens. Why give you multiple engine gauges for N1, N2, temps, etc, when we can just give you one dumb "Thrust" gauge? Why make programming the autopilot a fifteen day course on the ground when you can just have a LLM figure out what your flight plan should be and punch it all in automatically?
It's like how Cirrus positions themselves to be the family SUV of the skies with their products and falls back on "just pull the chute / push the Autoland button, bro".
Now if only Sony would let us even have a smidgen of our own code on our Playstations. But nope, Sony would rather gatekeep that one to Hell and back.
Instead, they keep stripping stuff off the console. I'm still so annoyed that PS5 doesn't even have an integrated web browser anymore (especially trying to troubleshoot network issues from the console itself).
But hey, Sony can leave bullshit exploit vectors open like PPPoE clients on the console itself (why? just use a router?)...
Gotta love the new suckered generation of "Fiber-Powered With Asterisks Internet" being advertised by the cablecos. "Fiber powered and delivered to the home by HFC!"
If you're in a rural area (and heck, even in an urban era) the primary ISP of a region dropping is likely to cause a lot of congestion from cellphones falling back to the operator network.
I found it quite absurd that Spectrum (my cable operator) wants to sell me a modem with integrated 5G/4G backup knowing that as soon as the cable plant drops, hundreds of local phones are going to congest the network as well and my "Invincible WiFi(tm)" will end up dead as a dodo.
I'll just throw a Peplink up and throw the cable and Starlink into it and run that as my load balancer.
Managing wireless at a large corporate campus we’re tucked away far enough we have a couple cell towers for the operators on site.
If our site wireless dies, it’s a near instant logjam as we watch 1500 phones and cellular devices on our WiFi alone dump back to the macro network for data to the sole tower on campus.
Out of hand management also becomes an immediate nightmare in this scenario when we need to swim upstream of the phones.
More than, considering Apple is willing to openly advertise Neo at $499 for education. The minimum-advertised-price on these won't ever drop below ~$529 for a hot minute.
There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now).
https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d...
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