I think the FAA can see the writing on the wall – with Musk being so closely linked to the President-elect, come January 20 there is going to be a lot of pressure on them from the White House if they aren't keeping SpaceX happy. So might as well get ahead of the pressure and make them happy now.
General aviation has been on the decline primarily because of the way US liability law is structured and the cost of FAA airworthiness certification. A quirk of legislation made it such that old models of planes are shielded from lawsuits, among other issues. If you are a manufacturer, why bother designing a new plane when you can keep selling the same world war 2 era stock? It's not like you will have any competition. The cost of certification is also why Boeing tried to avoid certifying the 737 max as a new plane.
Fewer people are learning to fly except to go work for the airlines. Most of the small aviation manufacturers and engine producers have been snapped up by China. It's so expensive to certify an engine for flight that most of general aviation is using engines where you burn leaded fuel and manually control the carburetors and fuel injectors. In aviation, a 1940s era airframe is considered perfectly safe, and it is completely acceptable to use vacuum pneumatic instruments despite them being significantly less reliable than MEMS or solid state ring laser (or fibre optic) gyros. Even something as simple as a radar altimeter would cost well into the 5-6 figures. It's a very backwards industry similar to medicine and pharmacy. The doctors believe in hazing new grads through residency, while biotech legislators holds the view that right to try and loosening clinical trials lead to moral hazard; better ten people die from disease than for one to be accidentally killed during drug testing. It is the same in aviation, safety is written in blood and all that so the best way to stay safe is to make it too expensive to fly. Many flight schools preach training with old airframes and technology. A lot of pilots refuse to admit the real reason is because of cost, and instead come up with all sort of post-hoc fantastic explanations that students learn better when they are flying rickety vehicles with century old technology. If you want to learn to fly, find a school that offers the DA-20/DA-40 (or even better, the DA-40NG with push button start) manufactured in the past ten years. Avoid the Cessna-only places.
The FAA is trying to improved the situation with the new MOSAIC light sports aircraft policy (that's mostly half baked) and certifying more engines for unleaded fuels. But unless the White House comes down hard on them for their inaction, they are going to drag out the issue for another decade (and hopefully kill off the general aviation industry all together). Regulators don't like general aviation, especially post 911. Between drones and climate change, and the fact that general aviation pilots are mostly Midwestern farmers and upper middle class people curious about aerospace, the industry doesn't have any real advocates. Not enough nouveau riche tech bros fly, and the ones that do are often rich enough to buy their own legislators and presidents that the costs don't matter. It's the aviation version of the middle class being squeezed from both ends.
If general aviation continues to decline, it's going to become a national security issue. It's not a good world where aviation becomes a professional luxury, where aviation manufacturers cater primarily to foreign clients, and where most aerospace engineers would never have the opportunity to actually fly what they build.
Why do people hate Elon so much? If the government is gonna be in bed with any capitalist I am ok with it being the guy who has repeatedly almost destroyed his personal fortune trying to build rocket ships, electric cars, WiFi satellites, and other push the envelope type stuff. I find it hard to believe he is selfishly motivated because he could have just sat on his billions and accrued more money/power instead of taking wild risks to do new things.
Beats being in bed with bankers, pharmaceutical companies, arms dealers and people selling our personal data.
He knowingly sells fatally defective products that he misrepresents with a reckless disregard for the truth at the cost of killing his customers and members of the public.
He has resisted all calls to rectify obvious and public fatal design defects since they would harm his profits.
He has a pattern of abusing the legal system and the natural extensions of the “benefit of the doubt” to shield him and his companies from their responsibilities.
For all of this, he has been richly rewarded and made the richest person in the world, yet demands the lowest level of scrutiny. He is a role model and a blueprint showing that the path to riches is lying your ass off and killing your customers for a profit as long as you can spin it as “for the greater good”.
Because he hurts people, different people in different ways. There are plenty of examples, e.g. handling the Twitter employees and Twitter users. Elon does a lot of genuinely useful things, but that doesn't mean he doesn't also do bad, selfish things. And even people who aren't directly affected by that see those bad things.
You could say the same about Steve Jobs being a tyrant boss, but despite this he achieved God-like status in tech circles. So did Elon for that matter, before he became a pariah seemingly overnight.
Steve Jobs also had a lot of critics, so I don't see any contradictions here. Many people would disagree about God-like status of Steve Jobs. Same for Elon Musk, he didn't start doing bad things overnight, it was accumulating, until at some point, which was different for different critics, he was worthy of robust criticism.
Steve's assholarity over the years was well documented (he was known for parking in handicapped spaces in a car with no number plates, exploiting a loophole in CA law). They both contributed greatly to the advancement of technology - by telling other people what to invent - yet I never saw the same deranged, visceral hate for that man.
Jobs was really selfish as a person but he wasn't anti-LGBT like Musk. Nor getting involved in politics. He was just like that to the people around him, not the general public.
AFAIK he was only personally an asshole (parking in handicapped spaces), not advocating for everyone to be an asshole (e.g. declaring handicapped spaces a form of "wokeness" and "government inefficiency").
What you can't say about Steve Jobs is that he ran a hostile workplace environment based on sex and minority status. They are very far from being the same.
I think it's 90+% political. The right and left are at war. It's beyond any real civility -- anything short of actual physical violence is fair game. This doesn't leave room for a lot of nuanced views of different political figures.
> It's beyond any real civility -- anything short of actual physical violence is fair game.
I think that's sort of the problem, the person we're discussing is a significant purveyor of that sort of incivility. When someone chooses to play in the mud like that it should not come as a surprise that people respond with distain.
But he didn't choose any more than a soldier chooses to bring a gun to the battlefield. It's not a few guys in one party. The whole thing is covered in mud.
Ridiculous. He's not a random guy, he's a major MAGA political player now. You will find that Democrats do not like most major MAGA figures. Works similarly the other way around.
He can't choose not to be a troll and memelord? To level baseless accusations against people he disagrees with, like "pedo guy", etc? This started long before his alignment with the current political movement.
However, it seems unlikely that this document—which has been in the works for more than a year—was unduly influenced by Trump's election. It was prepared by an FAA still under the Biden administration.
Because we live in a world where people are more upset if the government is in bed with the space-n-rocket guy than companies engaging in mass surveillance, censorship, and suppression of ideas at their behest.
