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Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

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Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#181
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I see a lot of parts that can fail. What do you mean?

Compared to a jet engine that moves at high speeds under great pressure and heat?

For sure, you're right that compared to a jet engine there are fewer parts. The caveat is you're comparing a large engine (and aircraft) with a much smaller one. Electric aircraft of today can't go anywhere near the range of jet engine powered aircraft, and hence the engine sizes are similarly sized. It's not a fair comparison, but you are right.

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Obviously this would be impossible if airframe designers incorporate battery cells in structural members, as some suggest to offset the weight penalty." Why not do both? Swap one part and charge just the internal batteries. But internal batteries does not sound so clever with limited lifetime anyway.

Charging is limited by two factors: - the power you can get from the charger to the batteries - the power the cells can accept You can reasonably easily fix the first point with custom infrastructure, so the second point will be the limiting factor, and that one means that it always takes e.g. 20 minutes to charge your batteries, regardless how many you're charging (because with a bigger battery, you're simply chargi…

I've always wondered about this, do electric cars charge each cell in parallel? or are there some series connections?

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#183

One of the things that helped Southwest dominate in the short-haul space, particularly in the Texas Triangle, was optimizing "turn-time" with a target of less than 10 minutes to both deplane and board passengers (10 minutes!)[0] I wonder how lengthy charge cycles will affect the viability of fast turn times, especially for the short-haul segments that they're targeting for these new airliners. It seems like they'll n…

Small-market, heavily subsidized short-haul segments fly half empty, and have a low flight cadence.

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said for a while that electric planes are the perfect use case for aluminum-air batteries. Aluminum-air batteries have up to 8x the energy density of lithium ion, but are not rechargeable, so using them only makes sense if you have a system to recycle the used batteries. This doesn't make a ton of sense with cars, because cars are constantly going from random place to random place, and having to include a stop a…

What's the process for recycling an aluminum-air battery? And is it cost/energy effective to do so? (If you think about it, closed-loop recycling of energy storage is just another form of recharging, but with extra steps.)

There is no "recharging" an aluminum-air battery, you add the energy back through recycling (smelting) it.

One of the big synergies is with renewables: With the right industrial process, you can treat this smelting process as a way to dump excess energy in peak production times.

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#185

I recently had a pie-in-the-sky business idea and I would love for someone who knows more about the industry why it will definitely fail. I assume it's unworkable for a lot of reasons, but it is just plausible enough to be a fun idea for a sci-fi novel. Get a fleet of 2-4 seater unpowered glider planes [1] Get a bunch of rural properties spaced ~100km apart. Put little glider landing and launch strips on each propert…

A few points:

-- I don't know of any glider mass-produced after WW2 that seats more than two individuals, ± a water/sand ballast tank, ± a range-extender or self-launching engine.

-- Have you ever experienced a winch launch? Try it. It's about 3g of acceleration, sometimes more. I quite like them. Most normal people probably wouldn't.

-- At the top of the winch launch, you pretty much need to immediately find a thermal and gain some height before flying off cross country. You've got about a minute or two to do so, before entering the circuit and needing to re-launch and try again.

-- Replace "200 kph" with "about 80 kt IAS". Remember that gliders fly beneath the weather 99.9% of the time and the winds in clouds are strong -- although the only youtube videos I've seen of an aircraft landing "backwards" on a runway are of a Russian high-wing aircraft, it's entirely plausible that you could end up getting a negative tack speed in a cloud.

-- Cloud flying, or flying in inclement weather is insanely dangerous for a glider. They're relatively light, have large aspect ratio wings, and don't usually have a whole lot of instrument navigation equipment on board. If the wings are wet, their coefficient of lift goes down...which would have very bad consequences for your business model. There's a reason that cross-country glider pilots have a friend with a land rover and a trailer, and train to land in fields, after all.

-- You have absolutely no opportunity to make a go-around in a glider landing. Zilch. Nada. Screw it up and Plan-B is a well placed field. This is less likely to be acceptable commercially.

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#186

I recently had a pie-in-the-sky business idea and I would love for someone who knows more about the industry why it will definitely fail. I assume it's unworkable for a lot of reasons, but it is just plausible enough to be a fun idea for a sci-fi novel. Get a fleet of 2-4 seater unpowered glider planes [1] Get a bunch of rural properties spaced ~100km apart. Put little glider landing and launch strips on each propert…

A winch gets you maybe about 1/3 of the cable length (and thus strip length) at best. A typical cable length is between 1 to 2km long. Let's say you can gain 500 m height. A glide ratio around 50 is probably on the higher end of what's achievable, so you're looking at 25 km of range. That's before you account for wind, that the world is not flat or the fact that you don't start your landing at 0 m, but more like 200/…

You can get almost infinite range on hot days by riding thermals.

This assumes thermals are available in the area (some days are better than others, as are some locations), and the s/w knows how to ride them.

But that is a much harder problem than just launching and gliding.

Also, gliders that could carry even a handful of passengers + baggage would be huge, and likely far too heavy for a simple winch lift.

As for the automation - airliner flight is more or less a solved problem, for flights in good weather that don't suffer any emergencies.

It hasn't been taken further because most passengers don't want to fly without a human in charge. And also because the edge cases - unexpected turbulence, difficult weather, mechanical failures, unruly passengers, software failure - happen often enough to be a problem, and they need someone trained on board to take over.

Otherwise people die. And that's very bad.

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LNA, an aviation industry newsletter, recently came to a very different conclusion [1]. The biggest difference to Wendover Productions's numbers is a hugely higher estimate in the cost of replacing the battery every 5-10 years due to battery degradation. [1] https://leehamnews.com/2021/07/01/the-true-cost-of-electric-...

So, by that article, a fully-loaded turboprop (let's say 19 100 kg passengers, 4900 kg airframe, 320 kg fuel, 308 kg reserve fuel) flying 200 nm weighs ~ 7500 kg and consumes just under 4 MWh of fuel, of which 1 MWh is useful work. The battery model will weigh at least twice that for the same useful work, so how the hell does it fly as far ? Could it actually fly the mandated 100 nm + 30 min contigency*

Not unless they’re using magical 1000-3000 Wh/kg batteries. I expect practical transports will use electric motors with hybrid power. And as far as I know, the ONLY electric airplane currently for sale is the two-passenger Pipistrel Alpha Electro.

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#188

One of the things that helped Southwest dominate in the short-haul space, particularly in the Texas Triangle, was optimizing "turn-time" with a target of less than 10 minutes to both deplane and board passengers (10 minutes!)[0] I wonder how lengthy charge cycles will affect the viability of fast turn times, especially for the short-haul segments that they're targeting for these new airliners. It seems like they'll n…

I think that the turnaround time is less important for the really small jets they are considering.

I think it’s more important. A wide body long-haul plane takes a significant amount of time to turn around w.r.t. many other aspects — more passengers, cargo/luggage, fuel, food, etc. the bigger the plane, the longer this takes. I’ve been on small commuter planes that turn around in 20-30 min, landing to take off. These are the planes that turn around quickly as there are fewer passengers, they carry less baggage, and you don’t always need to refuel.

If anything, these shorter routes are more time-sensitive.

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya poorly worded on my part. Gist is going from internal combustion with a ton of supporting or fully necessary tech to fully electric, fully SW-driven, really skeeves me out given the above testimonial and others like it. I openly allow it's quite possible that airplanes can't fly these days but for software though.

Modern turbofan/turbojet/turboprop (really, any engine) has a ton of SW involved. Engine controllers [1] literally control the engines. Your point is completely wrong, I've worked on this software and they go through many forms of verification for things to work. Look at the failure rate of avionics and compare that to other industries. Sure you or your friend may have had a bad experience at that company, but the bi…

Eh,I did say it was only that eng's view of the world, but the big players certainly do let bugs through.

Boeing code leaked in '20 [1] and it was ugly, however it was ~network vs. app layer so unclear how it worked at the engine level.

Add in the track record of CAN bus security difficulties and knowing airplanes use similar tech, "generally won't let bugs through" when paired with the footnoted security leak is a gross overstatement.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-787-code-leak-security-fl...

Before you write it off as an overhyped wired article, it was also a presentation at blackhat [2], so vetted by a fairly rigorous CFP.

[2] https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Wednesday/us-19-Santamarta-Arm...

Re: Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements

#190

I recently had a pie-in-the-sky business idea and I would love for someone who knows more about the industry why it will definitely fail. I assume it's unworkable for a lot of reasons, but it is just plausible enough to be a fun idea for a sci-fi novel. Get a fleet of 2-4 seater unpowered glider planes [1] Get a bunch of rural properties spaced ~100km apart. Put little glider landing and launch strips on each propert…

>Develop software that can fly the planes autonomously from strip to strip (I assume this is the really hard part, but I am under the impression that autonomous flying is a much easier problem than autonomous driving?).

I guess it could be easier in some ways, still the idea of passenger UAV(?) seems insane for some reason

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