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Battery-Powered Plane Taxis, Set To Fly Soon
bigdaddy writes "'WORCESTER - At 10:01 a.m. yesterday, Cary Dillman fastened her shoulder belts in the pilot's seat of a sleek twin-seat airplane, closed the cockpit canopy, and taxied into aviation history sounding - in her words - "like a sewing machine." Dillman was piloting the first conventional airplane powered by electricity.' How cool is that! Full details in this story."
No, because it depends where the power is generated.
If it's here where I am, most (if not all) of my electricity comes from hydro and nuclear. If it's in the US, it'll likely be fossil fuels, but since it's produced in large quantities it will be less fossil fuels than what the plane would produce...
So it isn't completely 'non polluting', but it's still much better than a regular plane.
As a private pilot, I saw the headline and became excited. But alas, when I actually READ the article, I learned that this fancy all-electric airplane has not actually FLOWN yet!
Taxiing is hardly a proof of concept when the point of the vehicle is to FLY!
I don't see how this could possibly represent a first in aviation history until the thing actually flies...
Actually - it would be a good thing. For example, if the jet that hit the pentagon was electrically powered rather than by aviation fuel, then it would not have done anywhere near as much damage. A great deal of the damage was due to to the fact that jets are essentially a flying fuel tank. All that fuel is heavy, and it's explosive.
You can have a very well silenced piston engine aircraft, but most of the noise comes from the propeller. The Chevvron 2-32C sounds like an electric strimmer two gardens away, with its 32hp two-stroke engine. At full throttle, all you can hear is a faint buzz from the engine, and quite a bit of noise off the prop.
That's unlikely. Batteries weigh far too much for the amount of energy they can store. Jet fuel is hard to beat from an energy density standpoint. Weight matters a lot on an airplane.
A practical electric car would be much more useful. Cars spend more time idling, have less efficient engines, and do all their polluting in a relatively small space. Airplanes, in contrast, fly efficiently, generate thrust efficiently, and spread out their pollution better. There's a lot less need for electric planes, even if the weight and refueling problems could be solved.
At least he didn't suggest hybrid planes that employ regenerative, um... braking.
One last question: why did the electric motor cost $20,000?
Not to mention that a simple eletric motor ought to be inherently more reliable than a piston engine.
A much better approach would be to determine how we can produce gasoline from CO2 and H2O or coal, using some other source of energy to get the job done. It's already possible to produce natural gas this way.
There've been electric-powered planes for at least 25 years. Paul MacCready's team, the same ones who built the first human-powered airplane in the 1970s, built a solar-powered (and thus, obviously, electric) airplane called the Gossamer Penguid.
And six years ago, a team at the University of Stuttgart built this, a fully solar-powered self-launching motorglider (that is, an airplane which is intended to shut off its engine and glide once it reaches altitude).