NASA Unveils Plans For Electric-Powered Plane (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New York Times: A new experimental airplane being built by NASA could help push electric-powered aviation from a technical curiosity and pipe dream into something that might become commercially viable for small aircraft. At a conference on Friday of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Washington, Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, announced plans for an all-electric airplane (Warning: source may be paywalled) designated as X-57 and nicknamed "Maxwell," part of the agency's efforts to make aviation more efficient and less of a polluter. "The X-57 will take the first giant step in opening a new era of aviation," Mr. Bolden declared. Maxwell is equipped with 14 electric propeller-turning motors located along the wings, which will all be used to create sufficient thrust during take-off and landing. Only two large motors on the tips of the wings will be used once it's up in the air. The plane is a result of NASA's "New Aviation Horizons" initiative: a 10-year program to create a new generation of X-planes that will make use of greener energy, use half as much fuel, and be half as loud as commercial aircraft in use today.

Comments

Re:We've been over this

[Jonathan_S]

The issues with electric planes have been beat to death here

Where? Slashdot? I can't recall ever reading about electric flight beyond drones, though I'm sure there has to have been some in the past.

What issues?

The main problems are batteries, not electric propulsion itself. That batteries are far heavier that fuel on a lbs/kw basis, plus you don't get the bonus of the plane getting lighter the longer it flies. And high bypass turbines on planes aren't as inefficient in use as the ICE in cars (and planes are much more weight sensitive than cars) so you can't trade weight and drivetrain efficiency for useful range like you can in electric cars.

Also, for commercial planes they spend very little time on the ground between flights; so you don't have time to recharge batteries. So you're looking at a battery swap technology as well to keep the turnaround time comparable to refueling.

That said, if the distributed electric propulsion is as efficient as NASA thinks it might still be a net win even if you have to pair up the electric motor and prop placement of this X-57 with an onboard electric generator. In which case all the downsides of batteries are irrelevant. (Then you could look into whether a hybrid design with a some batteries and a smaller generator made sense)