If this plane qualifies as a twin-engined IFR trainer the DA-42’s market is dead.
But apparently it is not intended to be series produced in its current form.
what happens when someone has an accident that closes the runway and the pilot who is airborne in his Airbus electric gizmo with 15 minutes of fuel on board needs to divert
The same thing that happens to any other plane: if a suitable runway can be reached, declare mayday and land there. If none, declare mayday-pan-none as per personal preference, and land in a suitable field.
@PiperArcher: I am afraid your likes and dislikes will not weigh in very much
I know ;-) And one day I will probably be hit by a Toyata Prius just for having these views, but nevertheless it makes me feel better writing it anyhow :-) I grew up loving Ford Mustangs, Concordes, Harley Davidson’s and the like, and OK I cant call it a backwards step in technology all this electric stuff, but exciting it isn’t – well not me for anyhow.
I wonder what the legally required ‘electric’ fuel reserve will be (compared to the current recip / turbine 45/ 30)
Some more data from an earlier article:
I am not sure ducted fans are specially efficient.
The big bypass jet engine makers (GE and RR) are testing engines on which the fan is not shrouded. Apparently they are getting big efficiency improvements – of the order of 20%. But nobody believes the passenger acceptance of the scary looking blades sticking out in full view is going to be easy to achieve, and it is reportedly very noisy.
Such short endurance is a joke. Not because most flights can’t be done in 1hr but because an actual endurance of 1.something hrs leaves you with zero options.
It’s a proof of concept which, with some tweaks and a massively reinforced landing gear, could be used for the core part of PPL training.
So what happens when someone has an accident that closes the runway and the pilot who is airborne in his Airbus electric gizmo with 15 minutes of fuel on board needs to divert somewhere else?
You would surprised how many full-size Airbuses arrive at their destination with about that much reserve. 
Remember last summer when there were those thunderstorms over Madrid and a lot of low-cost carrier planes had to declare fuel ermergencies…
True, but they have precise fuel metering, etc.
A plane with say 90 mins’ battery life isn’t actually going to know the battery life to the nearest minute (or few). The technology for accurate estimation of how much is left simply doesn’t exist. You can integrate current in, integrate current out, etc, etc, but in the end you have no way of knowing how much energy is actually stored in the battery chemistry. It’s all indirect stuff.
The only time you know it reasonably accurately is when the battery is about to die, and the voltage is dropping fairly rapidly I suppose they can activate the BRS chute at that point…
You can do this by taking a very conservative approach. My car stops driving and refuses to go even a single meter when the battery is at around 10%. No way to override the behavior. Obviously to the user it is presented as 0% with plenty of warnings ahead.
Airbus has added an emergency batter for this purpose.
There are so many uses of an aircraft. You don’t take a hot balloon to travel to the EuroGA fly-in and yet there are thousands of people that love hot air balloons and don’t fly a TB20. The electric aircraft with 75 min endurance has many applications, I am sure about that. Heck, I would even consider buying one.
This is what I’ve been banging on about for years over at Pprune. Electric is the save-all and the future for “all human transport except ironically rockets”, as Elon Musk said. It’s still early days, still baby steps, but it will happen. Electric propulsion as the prime mover has virtually zero drawbacks. When the power storage problem can be solved, it will be all over in an instant for fossil fuelled engines. Literally overnight.
This is a move in the right direction.
Where will the electricity come from?
Nuclear fusion is the only known source, and that doesn’t work (yet). Fast breeders (which do work) are going nowhere, for purely political reasons.
And if fossil fuels get displaced sufficiently, the governments will have to raise taxes on other stuff. They can’t really tax household electricity (the bills are already big) so they will implement road pricing. Suddenly you will have “Eurocontrol-style” mileage charges on your electric car. The honeymoon will be over. I went to a presentation by one electric car developer and that was his exact view. The party will last until the activity becomes significant in tax revenue terms – only.
Aviation use of electricity will have to be equally taxed. The framework for this already exists, so Mode S will be made mandatory and Eurocontrol will be tasked to radar-monitor and bill all airborne traffic, by the hour. Maybe mandatory flight plans for all – like some of Europe already has. The only people who will escape will be ultralights flying illegally at a few hundred feet AGL, avoiding radar.
The whole electric thing is a huge party for the early adopters because the govts have not yet got around to doing anything about it. That doesn’t stop people working in the field, because it is interesting and exciting and a lot of the usual “to hell with tomorrow” VC money is going into the field.
As soon as they see taxes from fossil fuels fall significantly, they will move to new taxes. In the UK, they put up the diesel fuel tax immediately diesel car sales became significant – they burn probably 1/2 of the fuel per mile of petrol cars, on average.
Renewable doesn’t work on a large scale. The wind farms collect more money from subsidies than from electricity users. It’s is a subsidy collection scam – one of many in Europe.
Renewable works on a very small scale. I know a guy who has a 6kW windmill and loads of PV cells, and he can run his electric car off that. He lives on a small island so this is ideal. But the windmill is huge and nobody in any normal scenario would get the permission for it. Also nobody would pay out for the PV cells.
Musk will make a fast buck, long before the party is over.
IMHO electric will co-exist with fossil for decades more. It will fulfil niche roles, appealing for local trips and – in the short term – appealing to fashionable people, and maybe will reach a natural stagnation point when the govts move to tax it “properly”.
Ultimately, there is no known cheap way to move about. All transport costs a broadly similar amount per mile. An A380 burns about the same mass of fuel per mile for every four passengers as a modern car would burn carrying four, the same distance. There is no free lunch. Well, not until nuclear fusion is cracked and then we can all go electric. Somebody will then just have to pay for replacing all the grid wiring with thicker stuff 
And most airfields, being in the middle of nowhere, will have to find pretty significant money (well into 5 or even 6 figures) for the feeds. I paid about 1000 quid for a 3 phase feed, about 30m long, to my previous house.
