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Airbus E-Fan Electric Aircraft Makes First Flight
An anonymous reader writes "The aviation industry has taken a tentative step toward electric power with the successful maiden flight of the Airbus E-Fan. The manufacturer known for the massive A380 jetliner began testing this small experimental aircraft last week, with the ultimate aim of lowering the huge carbon dioxide emissions from commercial flights. The E-FAN is powered by 120 lithium-polymer batteries, and can fly at speeds up to 136mph. Measuring just 19 feet from nose to tail, the compact aircraft show that Airbus probably isn't ready for commercial zero emissions flight just yet, but it does highlight the potential benefits."
For this version of the plane.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Great range, zero emissions, they've already been tested.
This is very doable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
And I don't see any potential downsides
More music, fewer hits
the compact aircraft show that Airbus probably isn't ready for commercial zero emissions flight just yet, but it does highlight the potential benefits.
I really thought the grammar was wrong, but as I read it again, it looks like the subject-verb agreement may be just fine.
aircraft may be describing a fleet, and so can be plural, so the word "show" is okay.
isn't can refer to Airbus
it could also refer to that same company
Reading in this way, everything checks out.
Still, the presence of so many nouns and pronouns did result in plenty of room for potential confusion about whether everything was right.
Nothing to see here, folks.
If it was so practical, why did they wholly cut funding. Seems like they had a long way to go to make the nuclear design feasible to where the crew was safe.
And how many civilians would fly with a nuclear reactor?
Replacing the nuclear reactor with batteries means A LOT of batteries. So I'm not sure how you can claim the whole idea is feasible just from a working nuclear design.
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Every time I see these cool machines it just makes me want to learn how to fly. Can you imagine where this is going when improvements in battery technology make the simplicity of electric motors available to this field?
" lowering the huge carbon dioxide emissions from commercial flight" - Until the energy density of batteries goes up and and we have an efficient, carbon dioxide free way to charge them, I'm not sure I see the value here.
Exactly. I don't see why they bothered in the first place. They should quit. Now.
The aft main wheel includes an electric motor with 6kW power, which provides taxiing and acceleration up to 60km/h during the take-off
This may give the "plane on a treadmill" problem a bit more traction.
Knowledge Brings Fear
in my area, which has the busiest airport in the world some years (other LAX takes the title), we get 55 percent of our power from nuclear energy
For Elmos sake! Dont start your sentence in the headline, faggot!
i know, its sad that u dont understand the interwebz, but plz kill yourself
Electric vehicles are not (necessarily) zero emission - you need to consider where the electricity used to charge the batteries comes from.
All from wind and hydro? Not bad (depends on how much fossil fuel went into the construction of that wind and hydro, so not necessarily zero emission but close). All from the coal plant? Ermmm...not so much.
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...of quadcopters from 3dr and DJI, I can say that this will be great for those trips where you need to be in the air for, like, 6 minutes.
Just what the doctor ordered after what happened with the 787.
So which is worse - carbon footprint or trying to dispose of nuclear waste. Either way, there is no such thing as a zero-emission engine. Somewhere there is something that is creating waste products that have to be dealt with.
With only 45 minutes to one hour of flight time I don't see how this is considered viable or even safe.
I don't want to do a sig now
Using electric vehicles (planes, trains or automobiles) is not just about shifting the CO2 emission point.
It allows use of energy sources that would not otherwise be viable for transportation (liquid hydrocarbons have a significant premium over other forms such as gas or solids). In addition land based power facilities have significantly higher efficiencies (open cycle gas turbines are lucky to get 40% efficiency, stick a waste heat recovery boiler on the back end and it is up to 60% efficiency).
The other alternative fuel for air transport I can see would be LNG (liquified natural gas), at that point we need several generations of improvement in scramjet technologies (air breathing rockets anyone?).
That's still a good amount of time to be useful for things like island hopping.
The article states endurance between 45 minutes and 1 hour. But lets be optimistic and assume 1 hour ...
... maybe a 60 mile one way (plane stays and has time for recharge) or 25 mile round trip (plane immediately returns)?
:-)
Not all that time is "available", at *least* 20 minutes should be reserved for safety. Lets subtract 5 minutes at each end for traffic patterns. So we're really looking at something closer to 30 minutes in practice.
Once you factor in taxiing, climb, descent, etc
Now if you are being pessimistic and going with a 45 minute endurance then we're looking at about 15 minutes in practice. Maybe a 25 mile one way flight?
Yes those numbers are not linear. The difference between 1 hour and 45 minute duration is coming entirely out of cruise time. Safety margin, traffic, ascent, descent, taxiing, etc are unchanged.
That said, this aircraft is incredible. But it is only a technology demonstrator.
However it should be awarded bonus points for resembling the A-10 a little.
Does it have snakes?
So I know that the lack of a commercial hydrogen distribution infrastructure is the main drawback for a move towards hydrogen fuel cell powered electric vehicles. Wouldn't it be much easier to set-up distribution to commercial airports? As such, would't fuel cell based electric aircraft (with battery backup for emergencies) be a more viable solution than battery based electric planes?
So which is worse - carbon footprint or trying to dispose of nuclear waste. Either way, there is no such thing as a zero-emission engine. Somewhere there is something that is creating waste products that have to be dealt with.
4th generation nuclear reactors will use the waste of previous generation reactors as fuel. So dealing with current waste is storing it for 30 years until the 4th gen reactors arrive commercially (research reactors are already running) and can burn it up as fuel. The waste from the 4th gen is far less dangerous and only remains hazardous for a few hundred years rather than tens of thousands.
3rd gen reactors are starting commercial construction and while they don't have the waste/fuel benefits of 4th gen they are much safer than previous generations.
With only 45 minutes to one hour of flight time I don't see how this is considered viable or even safe.
Well if you consider it a technology demonstrator its pretty impressive, and that is all it is claimed to be. Plus it gets bonus points for resembling an A-10, see pictures from front.
Range probably isn't a real issue as it is offered as a 'trainer'. But a trainer should be paying for itself and this will spend too much time on the charger for that.
But the flight school won't be impressed with 45 min flight and an hour (is that all?) on the ground to recharge. On good days (and this isn't a bad day plane) we turned around the small trainers in minutes for the next student. Unless this is half the price for half the flight time it's just another feel-good product that no one will actually buy.
Now we could have used one of these I suppose, but it would have been 1 of these mixed with several Cessnas and several others. Unique enough to get some use most likely. Any operation with only a couple trainers wouldn't want this as one of them with the limited flight time available. Spending more than half its time on the ground makes a pretty sucky trainer too.
With no info on handling, it may not even be much of a trainer anyway. The Grumman Americans we used were marketed as a 'trainer' also but were not for everyone.
Jet fuel has at least 50 times the energy density of lithium batteries ...
And various aircraft ranging from a Boeing 777 to a US Navy F/A-18 have been flown using aviation biofuel, carbon neutral. Its experimental an hellaciously expensive but its a more realistic future.
that's a VERY mature technology...
I fly electric r/c planes with li-poly batteries and I've seen what can happen when one goes belly-up and start spewing fire like a flame thrower....
Can we please stop trying to insinuate that electric vehicles do not have a carbon footprint?
Test platform for them, but would make a great weekend flyer. If battery tech double or tripled capacity, this would actually be useful.
Until the energy density of batteries goes up and and we have an efficient, carbon dioxide free way to charge them, I'm not sure I see the value here.
Sort-of agree, and energy density is definitely a problem with batteries in any application. However, batteries make a LOT of sense when it comes to a carbon-neutral way to charge them. With a conventional engine you're almost always limited to fossil fuels. With a battery you could still end up burning coal to charge, but you've decoupled the ultimate power source from the plane so you don't HAVE to use fossil fuels. The battery could be charged by nuclear, even though you could never put a reactor on a plane.
I doubt we'll see an electric airliner anytime soon. Where you might see them is for recreational aircraft. Many pilots just buzz around locally for a while and land, and battery power might be ideal for this - there is no urgency to refuel quickly, maintenance could be lower, aircraft could be quieter, no leaded fuel, cheaper costs, etc.
It's as beneficial as sailing on top of a rock. No carbon footprint there either!
I have no idea if this would help, but with developments in solar technology, would it make a significant difference if the tops of the wings, fuselage, tail and fan ducts were all solar panels? Seems like a simple thing to do to help with range... maybe not done because it's not reliable.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
At least having no avgas there will be a few less items on the checklist to do before you ditch.
...for argument's sake, that CO2 is discovered to be an insignificant contributor to what is an almost totally natural, climatic variation. What then, will all of this posturing have achieved?
The headline should be just a quick reference. It should not contain any information that is not present in the body.
Would it not be feasible to have a small wind farm near the airport?
Obviously you'd need to place it to the side of the runway rather than under the landing/takeoff flight paths, and given their height there'd probably need to be some distance all the same. But if a small training airfield has its own windfarm a mile down the road with power piped up and storage at the hangars, it seems it could become independent of both the grid and fuel supplies for the most part.
I assume the airfield would still need to store some fuel in case of an external aircraft making an unexpected landing (fuel shortage, mechanical problem, etc), and might even make some money selling fuel to other aircraft that pass through, but being able to switch to electricity for most of its own operations would significantly reduce its operating overheads. Even if we assume an electric aircraft has similar maintenance costs to a traditional aircraft, reduced fuel overheads and the potential to sell excess power to the grid or local households would be a huge boon.
Let's just say, for the argument sake, that fossil fuels are available in limited quantities. When we run out of them, how do you make your Cessna 172 fly?
Solid-oxide fuel cells are a much more efficient way to burn hydrocarbons then conventional combustion engines. An electric airliner that used solid-oxide fuel cells could potentially get more range for the same weight of fuel - and unlike with batteries, you're not trading off fuel mass.
I share the opinion of numerous previous posters, when Airbus shows us their electric 380 with 45 minute of flight time, they'll be laughted at. 45 minutes just isn't enough, they should drop that stupid electric fan idea.
AFAIR, you're not allowed to plan a flight with less than 30 minutes of fuel left at landing. So this is for very short hops indeed. Source: Have a (mostly unused) pilot's license.
or twisted rubber band.....
Solid-oxide fuel cells are a much more efficient way to burn hydrocarbons then conventional combustion engines. An electric airliner that used solid-oxide fuel cells could potentially get more range for the same weight of fuel - and unlike with batteries, you're not trading off fuel mass.
Have they managed to extend the lifetime of fuel cells that work on anything other than hydrogen? That has always been the problem with burning hydrocarbons in fuel cells.
97% of the scientific papers disagree.
...for argument's sake, that oxygen were bubble gum. What then, will all of our breathing attempts have achieved? One cannot breathe bubble gum so we might as well stop breathing now.
In industry, we burn hydrogen for heat because it takes too much space, attackes metals, leaks where nothing else can and has little value. Somebody supposed it would be a great fuel, began touting how green hydrogen fuel would be and the race to market hydrogen was (still) born.
But a trainer should be paying for itself and this will spend too much time on the charger for that.
But the flight school won't be impressed with 45 min flight and an hour (is that all?) on the ground to recharge.
Non experimental-versions of this aircraft (such as potential trainer that you mention), could implement swappable batteries.
(As it's the case with Tesla Model S. The battery is designed to be swappable and Tesla is working around a "fresh battery rental" system).
In that case, the thing which is spending time on the charger is the spare battery pack, while the other pack is flying in the air craft.
Have 2 (or 3) sets of battery rotating, and you don't need to think about charging times.
The time schedule now looks much more like fuel (except you swap in a fresh battery, instead of pumping fuel).
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No idea - but the general point was that pure electric air propulsion is a technology that doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's lots of ways it could become viable.
Agree. Fuel cells actually make a lot of sense in any kind of transportation situation. They're far more effective than batteries at storing power. They're just not all that practical yet. As far as I'm aware the only fuel cell that REALLY works reliably is the hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell.
carbon footprint is worse.
Install bigger motors, ditch the batteries, and use a 100KW fuel cell ot power it...then it is a workable aircraft. ;-D
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