71–80 of 83 posts
The largest single cost was the $400K+ engine that allows him to take off in a very short distance as well as fly extremely high for this type of plane. He added oxygen, and numerous improvements.
i wonder if he considered an electric motor. no horsepower penalty for high altitudes with that. just the battery problems..
Battery problems for planes are huge. Atleast for a big plane like a 787 MAX the battery to achieve same performance would easily weigh more than the aircraft by an order of magnitude. I imagine even for bush planes the battery weight will be immense due to the much much lower energy density (it's about 2-3 orders of magnitude and you loose fuel while you fly, batteries don't change weight when discharged). edit: ele…
however, but they are not insurmountable, and many people are doing it:https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/cheaper-lighter...
also, the high altitude penalties for electric motors are completely negligible. cooling efficiency for an electric motor has nothing to do with power output.
This is very cool. I had to look around a bit, but I found a link to DRACO taking off at at a competition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp3402SOk8A Apparently this distance is about 100ft. Stats are all over the place, but "DRACO will climb at 4,000 feet-per-minute (FPM) and cruise at 180 mph (290 km/h) at 16,000 feet." which apparently blows everyone else out of the water (and it should for a 1M+ plane) Also, 5 m…
That short take off took me totally by surprise. That's not even 100m
Woo, turbines are great; fantastically reliable, awesome power-to-weight, able to use cheaper and safer fuel than gasoline piston engines. They are pretty expensive though, wikipedia says the PT6 used in this project starts at around $500K. There's a few companies designing smaller turbines (100-200 kW size) for aircraft, http://www.turbotech-aero.com/ and https://www.turb.aero/ , competing with Rotax 912, Lycoming,…
They were bought by a company in China and are now being marketed in the US by Continental. There are STCs for many Cessnas, which seems like a pretty appealing option.
http://www.continentalmotors.aero/diesel/diesel-engines.aspx
It's an impressive achievement, but I would say the true beauty of good engineering is in being the best while also keeping costs under control. Getting 50-80% more performance isn't hard when you cost 5x as much (or more).
As someone who does this kind of work, the timeline is absolutely insane. The aircraft started out as a PZL-104MA Wilga 2000 but he redid part of the wing, built an entire carbon fiber cowling and redid the wiring, all on top of the engine install, though that and the carbon fiber he had fairly extensive previous experience with. One thing you'll notice if you watch the build videos is he makes extensive use of very…
He has/had a prototyping company. The plane didn't take him 5 months, it took him his whole life thinking and only 5 months execution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Carbon: One of the most popular high performance light bush planes at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubCrafters_Carbon_Cub_EX Turbines: The money makers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_DHC-3_Otte... (plus it's twin cousin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherpa_Aircraft_Sherpa So these aren't bush planes? Edit: further, there's nothing inherent to carbon or turbines that make them unsuita…
They certainly do push the limit of what I'd call a bushplace. Are we going to define anything that lands on grass a bushplane? They operate in the woods, but can they actually live in the woods? Turbines need to be sent away for servicing and are very expensive. They cannot be disassembled or inspected without things like bore scopes. These are the planes that service logging camps, commercial operations, and fly ba…
Also, a bush plane is, by definition, any logistics aircraft that doesn't need a runway which those very much fall into.
It's an impressive achievement, but I would say the true beauty of good engineering is in being the best while also keeping costs under control. Getting 50-80% more performance isn't hard when you cost 5x as much (or more).
This is an expensive plane, but $1M isn't that expensive for a plane. It's would be like buying a $80k car.
The current most popular 4-seater, the Cirrus SR22 goes for about $600k-750k new depending on options.
Even the turbine-power Lancair Evolution comes in right around $1M, and that's for a fully certified-factory built aircraft.
The aircraft in the OP is an expirimental (e.g. you can't make money using it) aircraft and the quoted price did not include hundreds or thousands of hours of labor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That short take off took me totally by surprise. That's not even 100m
One of the 2017 competitors took off in a little over a tenth of the distance DRACO took[1]. Of course, a stripped down Cub is probably much less useful overall, but taking seeing it take off in ~14 feet is fun. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7-BuNiP6Y
Interesting. I would have expected bush planes as needing more cargo space that this plane appears to have. The PT6A-28 is also a surprising and interesting choice... though I suppose once you get past the idea of not using a piston engine, it's less surprising.