11–20 of 188 posts
Super neat project, although I agree with other commenters that "fully-electric commercial flight" is misleading.
If I walk down there and book a flight, I'm not going to be in an e-plane. It's still very much experimental.
Still seems a bit far from replacing jet engines? This article was going on about fuel emissions in the entire aviation industry, this is just an electric propeller. Anyone know how far we are from electric jets? Is such a thing even possible?
The title is a little misleading: This is not a commercial flight, currently the plane in question is licensed by the FAA as "experimental" specifically excluding commercial flights. Still cool! I think electric might have a great future in short-hop flights.
Still seems a bit far from replacing jet engines? This article was going on about fuel emissions in the entire aviation industry, this is just an electric propeller. Anyone know how far we are from electric jets? Is such a thing even possible?
I know people call Jet-powered aircraft "jets" but, that's really an abbreviation.
I think what you're asking though, is whether there are any electric propulsion systems with the same characteristics as jets - i.e. more thrust relative to speed. AFAIK, there are not, because a characteristic of chemical fuels is that increased compression and airflow can increase the efficiency of the reaction. Electric motors have a (relatively) fixed efficiency due to the battery.
Still seems a bit far from replacing jet engines? This article was going on about fuel emissions in the entire aviation industry, this is just an electric propeller. Anyone know how far we are from electric jets? Is such a thing even possible?
Electric will never replace long haul jets barring a revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology. But that's not the point. Much of commercial aviation takes place on distances of around 100 to 500 miles. That is, too far to drive but not quite far enough to take advantage of the efficiency of jet engines at high speed, high altitude cruise. For those applications electric propellor and ducted fan aircraft will be absolutely game changing. It will make these flights cheaper and safer by a factor of 10 at least. The vast majority of cost in a flight is maintenance of the engine. That all goes away with electric power. It will make commuter flights an affordable daily reality for normal people.
Off topic and stupid, but could an electric plane be outfitted with lightning rods and/or lightning rockets to attract lightning strikes in order to charge the batteries?
Utilizing the energy in lightning is hard, the voltage involved are hard to contain without damaging equipment and you can't charge batteries directly from the strike so it must be buffered somewhere.
(Hints of sarcasm, but some truth there too)
The title is a little misleading: This is not a commercial flight, currently the plane in question is licensed by the FAA as "experimental" specifically excluding commercial flights. Still cool! I think electric might have a great future in short-hop flights.
Licensed by the FAA in Canada?
Off topic and stupid, but could an electric plane be outfitted with lightning rods and/or lightning rockets to attract lightning strikes in order to charge the batteries?
Yes a single lightning strike contains roughly a similar order of magnitude of energy as an entire charged flight battery would but it is delivered in microseconds. That comes out to hundreds of terawatts of power while in comparison the new Tesla supercharger charges at an incredibly high rate of hundreds of kW. That's 1 Million times lower than lightning! There is no substance on earth that can absorb and store energy at that power rating.
On top of all of that, even if you could get it to work it would be such an unreliable source of energy that it would never make any economical sense to deploy on plane if you could just capture it on the ground and charge the plane from there.