This is more like a car with just the bare essentials: an engine, steering wheel, brakes, and the like.

No: radio, air-conditioning, seat padding, wipers, lights, radar, etc...

Oh, and no maintenance.

It'll drive... for now. But that's it.

More like a racecar without maintenance. Heres an example checklist what they need: https://www.teamstradale.com/frequency-of-maintenance-keepin...

>As someone paraphrased, a car without breaks and steering wheel works just fine until you hit the first bend.

On the other hand, a car without a second and third steering wheel, 20 windscreen wipers, and an oven in the back, keeps running just fine, even after the first bend...

True, you might be also forced to sell the windshield, doors and the seats to pay the $4 million in interest each day you didn’t have to before

Unless the first steering wheel is prone to breaking. Redundancy is the difference between a million dollar company and billion dollar company.

Of course getting workers to come on on weekends and midnight hours accomplishes the same thing.

That might be fine but do you want to fly in a plane that only has one engine? What about if it has no fallback if the main sensors freeze?

>That might be fine but do you want to fly in a plane that only has one engine?

I've done that lots of times. As do almost all people flying Cessnas, Moonys, Pipers and the like...

Sure, but the question isn't whether you can, it's whether you want to. General aviation's accident and fatality rates are atrocious.

Have you considered consulting for Boeing and Airbus and telling them that their fallbacks are bloating their planes?

Boeing et al are forced to implement all those safety systems due to regulations.

Then go consult for the FAA and tell them those safety systems are just bloat for aeroplanes.

I'm not saying they're bloat. They're a tradeoff between cost (man hours of work) and lives. They've increased the cost of small planes tenfold but have saved tens of thousands of lives.

Have you also taken into consideration the death rate in smaller planes, much higher than commercial craft. The moment you attempt that with a 'high capacity' craft you'll suddenly find yourself regulated out of existence by a book written in blood.

But the trick here is to discover which analogy we're dealing with.

We don't know. It could be a situation with one steering wheel and 40 wipers. And as long as it's the wipers that fail, we're fine.