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The Electric Airplane Revolution May Come Sooner Than You Think (robbreport.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now -- flying almost as far and almost as fast but for a fraction of the running costs -- could be in service within three years. But this isn't another claim by another overoptimistic purveyor of electric dreams. It's using current technology, and the first planes are being built right now. In fact, the process of gaining certification from aviation regulators for what would be the world's first electric commuter plane has already started.
The pressurised Alice from Israeli company Eviation is a graceful-looking composite aircraft with one propeller at the rear and another at the end of each wing, placed to cut drag from wingtip vortices. Each is driven by a 260 kW electric motor, and they receive power from a 900 kWh lithium ion battery pack.
Alongside its 650 mile range, the pressurised $3 million-plus Alice can carry nine passengers and two crew, and cruise at 276 mph -- up there with the speed of the turboprops that are widely used in the commuter role, if not anywhere near that of jets. But crucially, says Eviation chief executive Omer Bar-Yohay, "operating costs will be just 7 to 9 cents per seat per mile," or about $200 an hour for the whole aircraft, against about $1,000 for turboprop rivals.
The pressurised Alice from Israeli company Eviation is a graceful-looking composite aircraft with one propeller at the rear and another at the end of each wing, placed to cut drag from wingtip vortices. Each is driven by a 260 kW electric motor, and they receive power from a 900 kWh lithium ion battery pack.
Alongside its 650 mile range, the pressurised $3 million-plus Alice can carry nine passengers and two crew, and cruise at 276 mph -- up there with the speed of the turboprops that are widely used in the commuter role, if not anywhere near that of jets. But crucially, says Eviation chief executive Omer Bar-Yohay, "operating costs will be just 7 to 9 cents per seat per mile," or about $200 an hour for the whole aircraft, against about $1,000 for turboprop rivals.
Looked pretty good till I got to the bit about only carrying 9 passengers.
260kw engines x3 = 780 Kw power draw from engines at full throttle. Control surface actuators, radio, aircon, navigation, lighting all have to draw power from the same battery pack... I’d wager this has barely an hour of flight endurance at full engine power. Worse if wing de-icing were also battery powered.
They claim 650 mile range at 276 mph, which is a bit more than two hours flight time... I realize the engines shouldn’t have to be at full throttle for most of a flight, but this still seems like not enough to provide an operating reserve to divert to another airport or wait in a holding pattern for long
If these fly I can only see them being approved for very short hops.
Energy density is everything.
1 lb of Jet Fuel has xxxx KJ
1LB of lithium battery via prop =?? remembering Li batts are good for 4000 charges, but still a small finite number.
This is why missiles and rockets are a slave of energy density
I suppose hypergloic and supercooled LOX are eco friendly alternatives. Having 1000's of tons of lithium batteries subject to thermal cycling and water is not that safe either. Should they claim that the plane and wings are one big battery - stll worried.
This is a nine-passenger aircraft. No matter how cheap it is, it can't replace a common turboprop commuter aircraft like the Q400, which seats 80-90 people.
Below a certain capacity, the cost-per-seat doesn't matter because airlines can only get so many landing and gate slots, and general aviation airports aren't equipped to deal with the sort of volume that would be needed to replace them... not to mention that general aviation airports are usually MUCH worse accessible in terms of public transit and distance from population centers.
you wouldn't need an airport for take offs or landings.
I was curious about the de-icing electrical requirements as well, since winter turboprop trip make me nervous everytime.
Electric, compared to turboprop/jet, should be very low maintenance. This will also be a huge win for short-haul flights like these.
Google: How often do planes get inspected?
A check. This is performed approximately every 400-600 flight hours or 200–300 cycles (takeoff and landing is considered an aircraft "cycle"), depending on aircraft type. It needs about 50-70 man-hours and is usually on the ground in a hangar for a minimum of 10 hours.
They claim "current technology", but with current technology 900 kWh weigh about 9 tons (considering the battery pack). Ultimate density for Li-ion, according to this report (figure 6-12), could get it to 3 ton or just below.
That's in any case a lot more than the payload for a plane that size. In general, current battery technology cannot be used on regional flights, much less intercontinental ones. Hydrogen may be an alternative for regional (still not long-range), though it might require making the plane look like a beluga to accommodate the tanks.
900 kWh on a 9-seater? Vaporware, unless they show what battery pack they are using.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The idea of electric drive motors sounds great to me, BUT with the provision of a generator on-board that can produce at least one engines full power rating, plus accessory services.
Since the generator can be located anywhere on the plane it should provide all of the aforementioned benefits, allow the same service reliably, or longer distance service via recharging.
Doing it hybrid like that will require added weight for the generator, unless one of the engine locations could be mated to the generator, but provides optional energy density and supplemental power in case something goes wrong in the electrical system. I wonder if this design uses a single centralized battery system, or simulates the fuel tank design of most planes and includes separate wing/reserve tanks in case of fuel system failure.
We should have some hard facts, and not just hype, in this discussion. If the range on a single charge is 621 miles, how many miles does the National Safety Board require for, what's the term, staying in a holding pattern waiting for a landing? In other words, a commercial airplane carries much more fuel than is necessary to reach a destination, for safety reasons. Another factor to build into the equation is extra fuel for head winds. If all these factors are taken into consideration, the actual range might be 300 miles per charge, far less than the 621 miles touted in the article. An expert with some real facts should chime in on this discussion and clear out the hype.
What is the risk of a lightning strike in an electric airplane?
How much do the battery pack and the three propellor engines weigh, versus the weight of jet engines and full fuel tanks? What is the weight comparison?
What are the stresses from jet engines on an aircraft versus the stresses of propellor engines?
What is the take off speed of the propellor driven electric airplane?
What is the runway length required for the new plane?
How much cargo can it carry in addition to the 9 passengers and 2 crew members?
How cramped or roomy are the seats? Can Shaquille O'Neal sit comfortably in a passenger seat?
How long does it take to exchange batteries during a stop? What equipment and skill level does it require?
What is the check list prior to take off in an electric plane versus the check list in a jet airplane?
What is the maintenance comparison between a jet engine, a turbo prop, and an electric engine, expressed in dollars per thousand miles of flight?
What is the real cost per hour of flight versus the touted cost? Does the touted cost include take off and landing?
Ever seen a Tesla battery pack go up in flames?
Kind of hard to stop and jump out at 20000 feet.
This is what Bloomberg says: Pioneering Electric Plane Needs $200 Million for Final Push
" Electricity storage media " I'm not sure you know what a battery is because you invented a new term there, but yes, you can run a highly efficient electric motor to replace a highly inefficient gasoline engine for x time.
Your engineering may vary, but for a short flight on a light body this is IN PRODUCTION NOW. Lol. You can doubt it will replace all other combustion aircraft, yes. It won't. That's not the preposition here.
Read carefully dude lol.
Starship is the word for today, of the morrow. Sieze the day by the ballz.
Perhaps economy could be fitted with pedals
Electric planes' biggest problem is at takeoff. They need ginormous runways to gather enough speed. Cuts out 90% of small airports.
Um... no. You can buy an electric airplane such as Pipistrel no problem. And obviously it's possible to scale it up. Question is though, where are the practical engineering and economics limits? Just as obviously as it's possible to scale up electric airplanes, it's currently not feasible to scale it up to rival an intercontinental airliner. But there is a lot of middle ground between a Pipistrel and A350.
Yeah, the feasibility started with model airplanes and has crept steadily up in size. Some model builders even build human-capable planes using new powerful parts and their experience from electric model builds. As battery tech improves, larger planes will become first feasible and then later economical.
Air-breathing batteries may be needed to get all the way.
Even without going into the (very dubious) numbers they claim, the best batteries that can be made with current technology have an energy density less than 8 times that of kerosene. "Normal" (i.e., cost-efficient) batteries would have less than half of that. The only way this could be cheaper is if both the batteries and the electricity are very heavily subsidized. Also, it only carries 9 people, which is ridiculous. You might as well make a solar-powered glider that only carries one person and say it's "more efficient" than [absolutely anything] because it doesn't use any fuel.
About 20 years ago, Morton International (now Autoliv) used a private jet to shuttle explosive airbag initiators between the Tremonton, Utah and Brigham City, Utah plants. It was a 20 mile flight and ridiculously-expensive (because Learjet), but the initiators were illegal to transport via the freeway. Ultimately, the Tremonton initiator plant was closed. The airport closed a short time later because that jet was the only real reason it stayed open.
There's a lot of distance between cities in Utah. Brigham City isn't that big at ~18,000 people and it's a 30 mile flight North to Logan with a population of 50,000 or a 30 mile flight South to the Ogden Metro area with a population around 500,000. It's a further 30 miles to the Salt Lake City Metro area with a population over 1,000,000.
Booking full 9-passenger flights between Brigham City and Salt Lake City would be easy. A round-trip would be faster and cheaper than the FrontRunner train (which is supposed to link to Brigham City in the distant future) in terms of operating expenses, even at half-capacity. Engineers, Doctors, etc, who live in the less-crowded Brigham City area already commute to Salt Lake. Saving an extra two or three hours a day on the commute (not to mention the stress of traffic) is something people with the money would gladly pay for.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
So, it is still vaporware? Yawn, that's worse than reblogging a Grimes' ex-boyfriend's tweet.
Shouldn’t we at least have an idea about what to do with the growing waste, before creating yet another unmanageable problem? There appears to be no plan for, or even expectation that recycling composites will ever be economically viable. For technologies to be sustainable, recycling must be practical and affordable.
This has the potential to become a huge problem, one which advocates of wind energy consistently ignore: millions of large composite turbine blades scattered across the earth, all needing periodic replacement, indefinitely. Wind energy only appears inexpensive while neglecting the waste problem, and the need for batteries to buffer the energy increases the difficulty and cost.
Wind and solar both require a staggering amount of materials to be recycled or disposed of on a regular basis, and advocates expect others to continue absorbing the cost. It is a massive fraud to assert that these technologies are sustainable or even affordable, when they are produced almost exclusive with fossil energy, and refuse responsibility for their waste. Meanwhile, mainstream “greens” (funded by big oil) focus the conversation on trivial amounts of “nuclear waste”, which are responsibly contained and recyclable. Or plant decommissioning, which is self-funded.
If efficiency gains can be made using lots of small engines, why not do that with turboprops? Why be specific to electric aircraft?
depending on what the power plant burns. Just say'n.
with smaller planes.
Fascinating stuff though. I wish them well.
Complexity. Combustion engines are much more complex than electric.
Just a few weeks ago this popped up on the local news in Europe as well.
I did some calculations to find out what it would take to keep a single medium-size airport going when all planes are electric. For this, I took the amount of kerosine pumped into planes every day, and then translated that to the equivalent electric energy. It would take 3 to 4 decent nuclear power plants at every medium-size airport in Europe.
Never mind that getting the energy into the batteries in a reasonable gate turn-around time, you'd need either swappable battery packs, or 100.000V at 2000A connected to each plane. What could possibly go wrong.
Go ahead. Do the math. And find out if reality stands between today and your green Utopia.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Sorry but your calorimetry is wrong
Most of the energy when burning hydrocarbons comes from breaking the C-H bond and creating a H-O bond. Sadly my thermo data book has been eaten by grues so I can't post the exact analysis. But you are wrong.
An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now -- flying almost as far and almost as fast but for a fraction of the running costs -- could be in service within three years.
Any discussion of distance traveled in an aircraft without also indicating the weight of the cargo (including passengers) it can carry is either marketing hype or fanboyism. This is EXACTLY the same problem discussions of flying cars have. The problem isn't getting something aloft. The problem is getting something aloft that can do something useful and do it reliably and economically. Batteries are (currently) heavy and they stay heavy no matter their charge state.
Another problem. So let's say it can go 621 miles as indicated for argument's sake. Great. How long does it take to recharge because turnaround time in commercial aviation is an important economic issue. If the plane can only fly once per day it's not going to be economical to operate even if the fuel is free.
Ever seen a Tesla battery pack go up in flames?
Not with my own eyes, no. And according to the data neither have you. I have however seen literally dozens of gasoline powered cars burning by the side of the road over the last half century however with my own eyes and there were about 174,000 vehicle fires in the US in 2015 versus 40 total Teslas ever.
How many large-scale electric thingies can be tolerated before the local, regional or even national power grid falls over? All well and good talking about lots and lots of electric motors, but when the power is produced "over there" and used "over here"... And there has to be transmission loss.
And even if the grid holds up to the load, where is the power going to come from?
Puddle-jumper airlines need to make multiple flights back and forth. Can't include an 8 hour recharge time. Maybe that would work for some sort of charter plane instead of private jets where the executives will be on the ground overnight or something.
How much does a 900 kWh battery weight? Google tells me that a Tesla battery pack of approx 90 kWh weights 1,200 pounds. My solar calculator tells me it would take ten of them to get to 900 kWh, resulting in a weight of 12,000 pounds. If use a little rounding and say our electric plane can hold 10 people, that's about 1,200 pounds of fuel-weight for each passenger. I should probably double that since this electric plane has half the range of a turboprop.
Is anyone familiar enough with turboprops weights & measures to provide a similar calculation?
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
mm, looks like a lot of hype for something they have not made 1.
All the figures look to be bullcrap, based on estimations from a model...
wake me up in 5years when they get closer to being ready
Wow, it's like nobody has ever thought about multiple battery packs that can be swapped.
Wow, it's like you never thought about the fact that swappable battery packs weigh more than ones that aren't and that weigh matters a LOT on an aircraft.
Do you have any idea how much new infrastructure would be required to swap battery packs at the gate of a terminal? How much the extra structure and weight the aircraft has to carry to facilitate swapping? Swapping battery packs the size we are talking about here is a huge logistical and engineering problem. Maybe it can be made to work but it isn't obvious that it's a good solution.
With automation, maybe they only need a crew of one. They can autoland at the nearest airport if something happens to the human.
Not any time soon. You are hugely overestimating the state of the art in automation. Co-pilots are going to be a thing in commercial aviation for the foreseeable future. Its unlikely automation is going to advance to the point where co-pilots are redundant any time soon.
I'm sure larger versions of this will be built, too. Even two or three more passengers means a significant change in the economics.
A) it's not obvious that larger versions are feasible. The power to weight issues with electric motors and batteries don't scale linearly.
B) A handful of extra passengers doesn't change the economics wildly.
C) What matter is the total amount of cargo the plane can carry (including passengers) for what distance and at what cost. Basically $/km/kg. Any discussion that does not involve cost+weight+distance is a waste of time.
What's the turnaround time for either swapping out the batteries or recharging it? If it can fly for 2 hours and then take 8 to recharge that's not a very practical airplane even for puddle jumpers.
Tesla model 3 battery pack is 475 Kg for 75 kWh. Works out to 5700 kg. So we are already 1350 kg over the limit, and we have not added the motor yet. So what to do?
Tesla pack has active cooling and is designed for automotive use and it has some heavy shielding for road hazards etc. We should be able to save 20% on cooling. At altitude there is unlimited supply of very cold air, which can be used for cooling the battery pack. And during charging on ground, we would design a charging/cooling connections to blast it with refrigerated air and charge. We are at 4560 kg under this assumption.
Design the structure and the cell for aero application we can probably save another 10%. We are within ball park now 4100Kg. We have about 200 kg for two 260 kW motor. Not possible, but not totally out either.
Looks like it is a stretch to say we can do it with present day technology. But it needs just a some evolutionary improvements, not revolutionary breakthroughs to make this plane possible
A nine seater with such low operating cost will revolutionize Pacific island nations, Carribean islands, Australian outback, Alaska etc. So there is a huge market for it. Looks like it can happen. Sooner than we realized, is a defendable claim.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think it's another claim by another overoptimistic purveyor of electric dreams just solar feakin' roadways.
I have however seen literally dozens of gasoline powered cars burning by the side of the road
Let me guess: you're currently demonstrating while wearing a gilet jaune ?
over the last half century however with my own eyes
Ah okay, my bad.
----
Yes, I know. Obviously trolling.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
However, with a clear mandate on time frame and direction, it's possible this will be 'solved' by 'the market'. I'm just not sure what the cost of that solution would be.
By using a network of locally generated power.
Currently, the "flat EU consumption" is produced centrally by a couple of nuclear reactor, a couple of big hydro electric dam, or a giant park of wind turbine, etc. (depending on the European country considered) and routed from this central production to the couple of villages or city which depend on this power plant, with the only routing being between such large area.
The point to counteract such increased electrical needs is to cover every single roof with solar panels (or put a windmill next to each house, etc.) and add the capability to route power from house to house based on needs.
That going to dramatically increase power output, but progressively and spread over a long period instead of need a giant multi-billion project to quickly add a new nuclear plant to double power.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Having flown lithium-powered UAVs for a few years now, I can tell you how scary it is when a supposedly fully charged battery craps out a couple of minutes into the flight. This is never going to work until a different battery technology comes along.
Every large aircraft company already has an electric plane: https://www.airbus.com/innovation/The-future-is-electric.html
What's the turnaround time?
One of those turboprops it's supposed to replace can be back in the air in an hour. Can this thing be recharged in an hour? Or are we talking buying four or five of these to replace every turboprop? Or 40-50 of these, if they only carry single-digit passengers....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I've seen the Pipistrel Alpha Electro in action. Almost silent, quick-change battery packs. Cute as hell.
And short legs: an hour plus reserve in the air. If it was good for two hours I'd be interested in getting checked out in one and renting it for local flights. Four hours and I'd look thoughtfully at my bank account. Here in B.C. it would plug in to hydro dams, so its carbon footprint is nil.
...laura
Cool looking plane but....
Two engines short-radius props, one at each wingtip? That thing must scream like a banshee.
Also, I have to question what it is like to fly if one engine goes out. It doesn't look like there is enough rudder there to compensate. (Looks of course don't count but if they did calculations I wonder what they came up with.
It is interesting, however, how small an electric engine is compared to a turbine equivalent.
The air up there is very cold. Air is bled off from the engine compressors to heat the cabin. How will an electric aircraft do this? Resistance heating from the batteries, I assume? How many more kW capacity will be need for that?
It is called synthetic ga.. ga... *corrects glasses*... gasoline. A liquid that's infinitely recyclable and requires no usage and mining of nasty materials.
It turns into electrons, a gas and literal water in these engines called "fuel cells", which can be re-used practically infinitely.
The gas is collected in a filter, and the water can just go into the air. Then at the "charging station", you put the filter into the device there, and take out a new one. The filters get processed back into gasoline, using only sunlight or wind, and of course water.
The recycling is not very efficient, but it can be done whenever there is sunlight or wind, even half a year in advance. Since storage is trivial and gasoline doesn't "go bad".
And the whole system, engine and tank, takes very little space, and/or can take you a loong way.
I think it's the green future, to get away from those nasty, inefficient and heavy batteries that will always be a half-assed and primitive solution.
It's using current technology,...
Swappable packs don't necessarily weigh more
Ahh but they do as a general proposition. They have to be enclosed in some sort of packaging which necessarily adds weight and bulk. Might not be a lot but it's definitely more than zero. Plus there has to be additional structure to accommodate the now bulkier enclosure for the batteries with a safety margin if you are swapping batteries in the field. I'm not saying it's going to be a vast amount of weight but the number will almost certainly be significant and will affect performance.
The bigger problem though isn't the idea of swapping battery packs even in light of the extra bulk/weight. That might be worth the tradeoff in the end. No the real problem is the economics and logistics of it. Airport gates would have to be totally redesigned to accommodate this completely new fueling system, the logistics of getting the batteries charged and where needed would need to be worked out, the batteries would need to be available everywhere the plane flies and preferably standardized to keep costs down. The economic problems are perhaps a bigger obstacle than the technical ones.
Airplanes spend enough time sitting on the ground that a typical fast charge period is not a hardship anyway, so who cares?
Sometimes they do but turnaround time on a lot of commercial aircraft is often less than 1 hour. That's not nearly enough time to recharge in a lot of cases given the current (and near future) state of the art in battery tech - at least if you want the batteries to last. Don't get me wrong, if they can get the charge times down along with the power/weight of the battery packs enough to make it all work I'm all about it. I just think it's going to be many years (if ever) before a battery electric plane is a realistic technology in day to day use and I'm pretty confident that aviation is going to be one of the last places we see battery-electric vehicles.
If anything will help spur the evolution of battery technology to produce higher energy density, electric aircraft will.
Of course one thing that might be a problem: how long does it take to recharge, versus refueling a jet?
Then there's battery safety. If it's a car, then sure there's a fire risk if a cell fails and causes a cascade failure of the entire pack, but you can emergency stop and jump out. Not so much with an airplane.
We'll work it out or we won't. It has to happen one way or another though, we can't keep burning fossil fuel forever.
Seriously I'm not kidding, there's at least one crazy youtuber who built it out of parts from Lowe's and RC Model parts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So while it doesn't fly very long, it most certainly works.
The summary clearly indicates more than four people.
These are sometimes called puddle-jumpers for short distance, small number of passengers.
Even if a route has more demand, it may be cheaper to have multiple flights of smaller planes/passengers more frequently.
It's amazing how often this silly argument turns up with respect to charging electric vehicles. Somebody calculates the peak charging rates and then extrapolates that to some ridiculous amount that has to be supplied continuously from the original source.
People don't do this with other consumables, like water or gasoline. Noone ever says, "a toilet requires 1 gallon to be refilled within 60 seconds. There are 5 million toilets in NYC, so the NYC water system must be designed to supply 5 million gallons per minute". Nope, that's silly, because obviously not all toilets are going to be flushing continuously. Having intermediate water storage allows us to work in terms of average demand, not peak demand.
Well, guess what? You can store electricity, too. Just charge up a large battery at the airport slowly from the utility infrastructure (or hell, from solar panels for that matter) and use that battery to quickly charge planes when they need to be refilled.
The battery just has to be sized based on average demand (with some buffer). This is pretty much exactly how airport fuel tanks work.
The new Tesla Semi is also going to have a >900 KWH battery. Tesla sells passenger sedans with ~100 KWH batteries. It's just not a big deal. All you have to do is charge an even larger stationary battery from some utility feed, and then use that stationary battery to quickly charge (i.e., supercharge) the 900 KWH EV battery.
This story is old. I posted the following on eng-tips.com two years ago.
https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=427361
The picture does not look like one of a functional aircraft.
Turboprops have to be relatively large to get sufficient airflow through them, so making them small doesn't work in terms of efficiency compared to making them large. Yes, you can get small jets for model aircraft, but they are not as efficient, but putting a big jet or turboprop on a model stops it being a model. With electric motors you can make them pretty small.There have been experiments in which multiple drive shafts are used from a reciproacting engine (maybe turboprop too), but there are losses from drive shafts and a lot of added complexity, not to mention vibration
List of busiest passenger air routes
Please contact the airlines and let them know they should cancel all these flights immediately.
Has there ever been a more consistently anti-technology forum than the comments section of any Slashdot post?
An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge
Now it just needs to be able to fit in my garage, fly itself (Take off, Navigate, and Land autonomously with no requirement for runway), AND
come at an affordable price tag. That will tick the boxes for the flying cars that have been 20 years late for us....
VTOL takes a lot more power than conventional fixed-wing takeoff.
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Please contact the airlines and tell them you have an aircraft with range of 650 miles. They'll laugh you out of the room, because that's not how short range turboprops actually work.
That's a no-reserve distance. All ICAO states require at least 45 minutes of fuel reserve, plus divert fuel to transit from the intended point of landing to the alternate. This thing is marginally capable of flying across the channel. .
I can't find a photo/video of a physical prototype anywhere. Like every other major tech hype, read the words carefully and check for graphical renderings. From the summary: "... could be in service within three years."
Wow... another startup saying that their potential product might be available sometime soon. "Please invest in us."
This is futurism crap. The tech doesn't exist yet and won't exist for a long time yet. When it does exist, it will cost more than this guy thinks it will AND THEN he'll have to admit that no one wants to fly inside Rubbermaid tub and thus to sell these and keep the potential mileage up, he'll have to use even more exotic materials. Suddenly, it becomes a green-taxi toy for the mega-wealthy instead of an "Electric Airplane Revolution".
We currently have nowhere near the battery power density (kW/kg) to make this a viable, safe, mass producible product yet. Until we do ALL these neat ideas will just be CGI renderings and VC failure fodder.
and they receive power from a 900 kWh lithium ion battery pack
#whatcouldpossiblygowrong
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
lithium ion battery fires are uncontrollable and if it happens in the air, you're fucked.
It is my understanding, that they already exist, and are trivial to use.
1. I know there are German submarines that use large fuel cells.
2. Get some of those. and mount them at the ideal place inside the plane for weight balance.
3. Connect their intakes to the fuel tanks in the wings.
4. Connect their exhausts to the back of the plane. Preferably add filters.
5. Connect the plane's computer to their controller bus, and add a hardware abstraction layer driver to replace the normal engine one.
6. Connect their electric wiring to a large amount of small propellers, attached to the front of the wings.
If nobody has done that yet, then it's not a problem of the technology as you suggest.
If somebody has done that yet, and failed, you need to show us, to back up that argument.
Hmm, now I'm thinking I should build a small model version of it. It would be quite a cool project.
Or do you honestly not understand that you can use one battery to charge another?
> All you have to do is charge an even larger stationary battery SLOWLY from some utility feed, and then use that stationary battery to quickly charge (i.e., supercharge) the 900 KWH EV battery.
The article is way, way too optimistic. They are not building their first production planes right now. They might be building their first full size prototypes right now. These numbers are a fantasy wish list until they have a full size flying airplane. If it ever gets made, expect the cruising speed to come way down, the range to be cut in half, and the available load to be enough for 5 people (including pilot) + minimal luggage.
"In fact, the process of gaining certification from aviation regulators for what would be the world’s first electric commuter plane has already started." - So, they applied for an tail number? Notified the aviation authority they've got a prototype? Filled out a form or two? Because they certainly haven't started certifying a plane that hasn't even been built, let alone flown yet.
We've seen this story before. June of 2017 "While it was the prototype’s debut this week, Eviation says that they are already flying proof of concept missions, and they plan to move into certification and commercialization as soon as next year." - the "prototype" turned out to be about 18 inches long. They still haven't built a plane yet.
From a year and a half ago: https://electrek.co/2017/06/21/all-electric-aircraft-eviation/
They've got a great PR department.
You're wondering whether they can possibly afford that sort of technology at a couple of gates of an airport? Perhaps this isn't common knowledge, but airports already consume quite a bit of electricity. It's not rocket surgery.
Nice euphemism there. There's your cost saving. :)
$200 an hour would not even pay for the pilot and copilot.
I just can't wait for the batteries to catch on fire.
Yes, 2 crew + 9 passengers COULD equal 4 people IF those 4 people brought their seeing eye peacocks and anxiety comfort llamas and one of the llamas brought its bonobo handler. Passengers are not always people, Mr Knowitall.
Environmental Control Systems ( you need cabin pressurization, not just heaters) use (literally) tons of compressor bleed air.
I'll be curious to see how they manage that.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You just can't let go of your oil, can you? You're worse than a crackhead. Fuck, your syngas actually is a great metaphor. You're a junky who swears they're not a junky cause oxycontin is synthetic opium so it's not that bad.
I vaguely remember a country, back about 100 years ago, that could Notsee the problem with using hydrogen in aviation...