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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.
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
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.
Ever seen a Tesla battery pack go up in flames?
Kind of hard to stop and jump out at 20000 feet.
Ever seen what a shotglass worth of vaporized gasoline can do with regards to explosive power?
Kind of hard to use your argument when the risk factor doesn't really change regardless of fuel source.
Lies.
Pipistrel Alpha Electro:
take off run MTOW 492 feet (150 m)
take off over 50' obstacle MTOW 885 feet (270 m)
The idea of an "automobile" probably sounds great to you too, provided someone walks in front of it at all times in order to warn people of the approaching vehicle.
You would not put a "generator" on it. But it surely has a RAT as an auxiliary power supply.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
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.
Li-Ion accumulators have about 0.7 MJ/kg or about 0.3 MJ/lb.
But because the energy efficiency of a jet engine is only about 40 percent, the 16 MJ/lb are more equal to 6.4 MJ/lb compared with Li-Ion, which has a nearly 100 percent efficiency. Still, effective Li-Ion-energy density is only a twentieth of that of jet fuel.
Starship is the word for today, of the morrow. Sieze the day by the ballz.
Do you sieze deez nuts?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Ever seen a Tesla battery pack go up in flames?
Kind of hard to stop and jump out at 20000 feet.
Ever seen what a shotglass worth of vaporized gasoline can do with regards to explosive power?
Kind of hard to use your argument when the risk factor doesn't really change regardless of fuel source.
Jet fuel as used in commercial turboprop and jet airliners is much more similar to kerosene than gasoline in terms of volatility. Its flashpoint is generally above 38C (depending on exact mix) while gasoline's is minus 43C. Jet fuel will explode if pressurized and vaporized, which is why airplane crashes can produce spectacular explosions, but it is actually difficult to light an open container of jet fuel with a match.
All that to say, uncontrolled combustion, let alone explosion, of jet fuel in a moving aircraft is a very unlikely event.
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
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.
Plenty such runway available. People call them 'Highways'. And the planes on them 'cars' or 'busses'.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
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.
Except we know how to handle jet fuel very, very safely, now. Extraordinarily safely. It also has a nice characteristic of not being explosive (or even combustible, really) in liquid form. We don't have jet fuel or gasoline spontaneously igniting under normal operations.
Compare with lithium batteries that are not yet to the same standard of safety. We see lithium batteries spontaneously ignite under normal operations pretty frequently still. That isn't to say that we won't figure out safe lithium battery operations, but we aren't quite there, yet.
So your comparison isn't very fair.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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
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.
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.
Jet fuel aka Kerosine is basically the same as Diesel.
You throw a burning match into it and it gets extinct (most of the time, with bad luck you have a thin burning layer on top of the oil).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It is easy to ramp up power of an electric motor and battery. Take off is easy for an electric plane. Endurance is a huge problem for an electric plane.
If you look at hydrocarbons, you mostly have about two hydrogen atoms per carbon atom (less for non-saturated compounds). So it makes sense to talk about mol and not about mass. If you for instance burn octane (C8H18), you get 8 mol CO2 and 9 mol H2O per mol of octane.
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 ]
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.
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"
And here is a Piper Cub taking off in ~10 feet. And the Cub can carry 4 people, not 2 like your Alpha Electro.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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?
My understanding is that fuel cells in widespread aviation usage are about the same as lithium air batteries. "Twenty years away" in perpetuity. Do you have any new information on any potential breakthroughs that contest this assessment?
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.
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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Composites can be shredded to make insulation.
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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.
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!
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.
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.
To my understanding, there were several pilot projects like HY4 and FCD. All of them ran into what has proven to be currently unsolvable issues with onboard storage of liquefied H2 used as fuel in fuel cells.
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."
Compare with lithium batteries that are not yet to the same standard of safety. We see lithium batteries spontaneously ignite under normal operations pretty frequently still. That isn't to say that we won't figure out safe lithium battery operations, but we aren't quite there, yet.
So your comparison isn't very fair.
OK, let's be realistic here and look at the numbers. I'd say there are a few billion lithium ion batteries running at this very moment. There have been many more billions constructed throughout history. Out of those billions, exactly how many of them have reported as catching fire for unknown reasons? There are about the same number of smartphones in the US as passenger cars, and yet we have over 150,000 cars catch fire every year (less than 5% of those are due to collision). Should I really believe we've achieved some fantastic standard of safety in automotive design with those numbers? I guess I don't see how lithium ion fires are happening pretty frequently.