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Elon Musk's Next Great Idea? Electric Air Travel (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR: Elon Musk is changing the world one idea at a time. First, with Tesla, the man so many people call the real life Tony Stark has done an incredible job of bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream. Second, Musk has been doing an impressive job over at SpaceX in the realm of space travel. And third, Musk's effective rough draft of a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop is being contemplated and conceptualized in a very real way by some extremely smart people. So where does Musk go from here? Why, Mars of course. Recently, Musk said that he plans to unveil SpaceX's Mars roadmap next September. But on another front, Musk has also been thinking about developing an electric airplane capable of taking off and landing vertically. While answering a few questions during a Q&A session at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Award Ceremony last week, Musk was asked what his 'next great idea' was. The answer? Electric-powered air travel.
If it takes off vertically, you could possibly provide electrical power from the ground for a certain distance, overcoming the initial lift off energy use at least. But still, better hope battery tech evolves dramatically for any real prospect of fast long distance E flying.
To every upvoted point, there has to be a counterpoint.
Sure jet fuel has a higher energy density, but that isn't the end all to the problem. You also have energy efficiency, which to my knowledge is pretty terrible on jet or turbo prop engines. I've been flying LiPo/Brushless RC aircraft for a while now, and in the right conditions your power efficiency comes right on par there with gas (minus any of the issues with ICE engines) In even better conditions, an electric plane can "recharge" batteries on descent.
There's a brand of starter electric planes called "Parkzone" One model (F-27 Stryker Brushed) was a particular favorite of mine. I went to a Gforce Lan event at Fort Mason, and on a lull between matches I flew it out in the heavy winds of the big green lawn. I kept that thing up there for 3 hours on a NiCd battery (usually only went for 15 minutes) I just sort of hovered it, more like "sailed" it and the motor just kept recharging the battery.
You can't really put jet fuel back in the tank like that. All sorts of crazy tricks you can do with electric though.
The model airplane community is where a lot of delusions about the possibility of electric air travel come from. I'm sure you've seen the "man-carrying" many-copters that even university teams are working on. Do I need to point out why that is a bizarre and stupid waste of time and resources? Quad copters are a great way of building small vehicles, because small propellers accelerate quickly, so steering by modulating the propeller speed is easy and works well. This doesn't scale up. Large multicopters are hilariously inefficient and difficult to control compared to more conventional helicopter designs. Small electric models beat ICE models hands down because internal combustion engines don't scale down well to that size. Just because something works well when you're flying one or two pounds of foam doesn't mean it's a good idea for an actual plane.