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

[Rei]

And meanwhile, in the real world, electric planes are a real thing, actually rather popular in the light aircraft world, and a market that's growing by leaps and bounds every year. And actually have excellent performance vs. price figures compared to their ICE equivalents. Ranges are usually similar to those of electric cars, 150-400km.

Can we ditch with the old battery-energy-density-versus-fuel-energy-density canard, as if a gallon of petrol is an entire vehicle? Even the long-range versions of the Model S, the batteries are only a third of the vehicle weight. There are other parts to a vehicle. An electric motor the size of a roomba has the power output of an entire typical gasoline engine in a typical passenger car. And you can ditch the transmission and a lot of other hardware as well. And it's only logical that this size difference would be the case. Electric motors have vastly less heat to dissipate - heat dissipation means mass. Electric motors have vastly fewer parts; complexity equals mass. Electric motors create force directly applied as torque on a driveshaft linkage (or even directly on the wheel), while ICEs produce it as pressurized gas, change that to linear momentum, then change that to rotational. Obviously the latter is going to cost you signfiicantly in terms of mass.

This headline makes it sound like electric airplanes are new. They're not. They're not even in the one-off-prototype stage, there are a number of serial producers out there. The market is expected to be over 22 billion a year three years from now. I'm not sure I believe it's going to scale up that fast, but it most definitely is growing. It's not even just small manufacturers, even Airbus is currently tooling up to market their E-Fan.