I see no positive relation between surveillance and safety.
The FAA, airlines, and corporate aviation do. That's why we have FOQA.
Merely surveillance on its own doesn't do anything. It's surveillance combined with ensuring that the pilot knows they did something and corrects it. Hell, I recently uploaded all of my flight data for the last few years to FlySto, and discovered a few mistakes I hadn't realized. I know I've discovered some things in the past just from looking at my own data.
It would also allow for ensuring the correct training has been received. For example, if you don't want to go to an unpaved strip, great - But if you do, let's get an hour of instruction and 5 landings in, and note that in the system. Don't have the training? Panel alerts you when you put it in your flight plan and you have to specifically accept all liability on that flight or something.
Sorry, but I'm not seeing it, and the experiential data from similar attempts in other industries doesn't support it.
I'm not sure something to this level has actually been attempted in other industries.
If this worked. we would have seen a massive reduction in accident rates, cost, and price from automotive "nannies" like OnStar. The savings haven't materialized. What we HAVE seen, though, is higher prices for purchase, insurance, and repairs, due to the added system cost and increased complexity of the overall vehicle and systems.
Because their goal was never to make safer drivers, it was to make more money.
Of the ideas you're posting up here, I think this one is the most likely to end up driving prices higher, not lower.
I'd sure love to hear some other ideas for getting the large liability slice of the pie to be lower.
"it's even better if we can prevent accidents in the first place."
your post made it seem like you think we don't prevent accidents.
We don't do very well at it. We keep doing the same dumb stuff we've been doing for the last 50-75 years: Running out of gas, flying into situations you haven't trained for, botched buzz jobs and other such stuff. So how do we make these stop happening?
While I think your pricing is not realistic on several levels, the key to this is not developing the aircraft first but the viable market first, ie., who and how many would realistically buy a new aircraft? With that number you could then set your wants vs potential costs. This is basically SOP in the aviation industry and is still practiced today. Two prime examples are the Sky Courier and Denali. FEDEX wanted a twin-cargo aircraft for their feeder ops so approached Textron, after which they settled on the specs for the clean-sheet Courier. While Textron saw a potential larger market, they pulled trigger on the Courier with only FEDEX's 50 firm/50 option order for a total of 100 aircraft. And its a similar history for the Denali. So it doesn't take 1000s of new aircraft to make a market. Just committed individuals in that market which unfortunately the Part 91 recreational side has a historically bad track record with.
Yep... I think the best you can do with the goal of expanding GA is to charge a price equal to the incremental cost of the first aircraft off the line, and if that price is low enough, you might have enough demand that economies of scale kick in which let you recoup R&D costs after the first couple hundred and then start making a profit. Of course, this is utterly unrealistic in terms of meeting the expected quick-profit targets set by investors today, so the investment would have to come from people with an interest in making GA a healthy industry once again.
Economy of scale: if 3000 buyers want a 2-seater and 3000 want a 4-seater, it's cheaper to design and build a 4-seater for all of them.
Unless you end up with a 4-seater that's too expensive for the 2-seater buyers and too slow for the 4-seater buyers.
One of the issues with higher speeds is that you can't easily get there with a fixed pitch prop. And once you go to adjustable/constand speed prop, there will be significant purchase/maintenance costs.
Very true - But since I mentioned efficiency in all areas, I kinda think an adjustable prop of some sort is almost a requirement.
However, while today's CS props may be expensive, I'm sure we could do better... And I say that because I met a guy who has a constant-speed prop on his rubber band powered airplane and the prop weighs something like 1/10 of a gram. The world record holder has used that to get flights over an hour long on a tiny rubber-powered plane!
It's possible that we could use a simpler mechanism that's controlled and actuated electrically and based on airspeed and power setting. It wouldn't have to react super-fast the way a C/S prop does, it could simply be at a flat pitch for takeoff, transition to a higher pitch for climb, and go to fully coarse as necessary at cruise.
I see significant difference between monitoring an employee during his work-cycle to verify the quality of his work and the monitoring of a private person during his leisure by a company to determine the person's eligibility as a customer, especially when that company might then sell the data they record.
I'm not sure who would be particularly interested in that sort of data, beyond where you were going (which is already available thanks to your cell phone), other than an insurance company, which we'd be eliminating from the equation as part of it. There could be an agreement that your data only be used for purposes of safety improvements and not sold... If this particular idea were to work, there'd have to be an extensive purchase/operating agreement between the company and the buyer anyway.