alioth wrote:
LiFePO4 batteries are vastly less likely to go on fire than LiPoly.
Not just vastly less likely, but near impossible. Here are a few videos with LiFePO4 and LTO batteries subjected to all kinds of abuse. The most relevant is this one:
I doubt any “high power” consumer products use LiFe because AFAIK they hold a lot less power.
I agree a fire is unlikely if just carrying an e-bike in the plane, but do you feel lucky? 
It would be a pretty horrible death. Like one of those UL or homebuilt crashes where burning fuel sprayed into the cockpit.
OTOH an e-bike is very tempting in this context. I ride a normal full-suspension bike around 1hr every day around the local tiny country roads and tracks, for a) fitness and b) great thinking time for writing software. Like most leisure gear today, my current bike was obscenely over-priced. It is a high spec German (read: Taiwanese) carbon one, but being the “current fashion” 29 inch wheel size it is not as light as they were 10+ years ago, at 13kg. But an e-bike, even a “really cheap” one (£1500), will completely thrash it. It is much faster on any route other than dead flat or downhill, not because it is much faster on the flat but because a normal bike is quite slow on uphills. The overall result across a mix of terrain is probably a 3x speedup and you don’t have to work
I have recently rented e-bikes on trips, to cover a lot of ground, and they are a great tool for getting around. The other day I went all around Alderney (EGJA) in a day on one of these, with ease. A proper e-bike, say a £5000 Cube, is of course faster but you will find it hard to find one for rent. I rented one for 1 day a while ago; it has enough power to effortlessly go up a 30% hill. At 25kg, not possible to carry it and not possible to really move it very much except on its wheels. You could get one in the back of something like a PA46 with most of the seats removed; a PA46 can hold normal bikes without dismantling.
But none of the above, manual or electric, can be carried in a normal 4-seater plane, without dismantling. One needs a specialised product for that. And it’s a hassle. Today at LFAT I watched some people in a D-reg Bonanza, which had a completely empty luggage compartment (not even a spark plug spanner in there, I reckon) produce two folding bikes. It was a bit of a “birth” They had them in protective bags so the compartment didn’t get dirty.
We must have done this bit already here but overall, GA airfields tend to be too far from anywhere for me to find a bike useful. You would not want to ride say 20km, even on an e-bike.
Not my experience. My destination is almost always less than 10km from the airfield. 10km is no problem. Even non-electric, this is just 30
minutes of quality time.
The big problem, with a non-electric, is indeed in climbs. My foldable in particular doesn‘t allow anything but shallow/short climbs. And when you take up fly&bike, you realize just how almost every airfield seems to sit on a hill….
That‘s why I still keep the lookout for foldable, light-weight e-bikes.
I am always looking for alternatives for carrying in the plane. For a while, I considered roller blades but after trying them I decided that of you consider GA risky, this was 10 times more risky.
I then thought of an electric scooter. They are a good method of going to town from an airfield, but not legal on the streets of the UK unless you hire one from the local council. In the streets of Brest I have come across this single wheel thing (not a unicycle) It is just a wheel about the size of the wheel on a folding bike which you stand on. The wheel has a filled interior. I have seen people in Brest whizzing along on these things with the dog trying hard to keep up and others racing the trams. How hard can it be? I must Google to find out what they are.🤩
After I sold my two folding bikes (2×8kg Bt-win), I started renting two of these from neighbours
I am impressed how easy one can ride on these, I think there is an exemption of their use in UK countryside by pilots
Try under electric gyrowheel bikes.
There’s some interesting ones there. Sadly the really good performers are very heavy at around 29kg. But the cheaper versions although having.less range and speed could still be very interesting to stick in the back of a plane and weigh in at 10 or 11kg.
The trouble is those wheels are also illegal in a lot of places and they tend to attract more attention.
I have an ARCC conversion on my Brompton and it uses this Bosch power tool battery: https://www.arccbikes.com/collections/accessories-1/products/bosch-battery
I keep this in a shopping bag on the back seat so that if anything untoward did happen I can get it out the window. The battery itself is very physically robust. The downside of this particular battery is that the range at full assist is only 20-25km, but the charger is lighter than a second battery and the charging time is about 15 minutes.
Having now done 4 long away trips with folding bikes we would almost never consider not taking them.
Not only have we regularly cycled to our destinations but then all around while there.
We quickly realised on our 1st trip that cycling in a city or town means you will discover so so much more than walking or taxis. Walking is great but really takes too long and if you spot something from a taxi, in reality you’ll not ask him to stop incase it’s a false alarm.
When the distance from the field is too far, we take the bikes, all bagged, in a taxi.
Our considerations so far have been-
Bikes are widely accepted/expected in most areas
Bikes (middle if the range folders) are more common so attract less attention from thieves when chained and unattended than most of the different electric options.
Bikes will easily cope with most surfaces so if you cycle a track or unmade road as part of your route, not a problem.
We’ve done 6 or 7 miles on some busy (unintentionally, i.e. didn’t check properly) roads and although I keep looking at eScooters, I wouldn’t like to do that on these roads alone so I would never do so with my wife.
Plus eScooters are no good once the battery has depleted.
So despite going around and around in circles with this, I think I’m settled in electrifying the bikes we have, as they are quite light.
If I discover a better folding cheap ebike in the mean time I’d be interested but generally prices are above my comfort zone.
GA_Pete wrote:
If I discover a better folding cheap ebike in the mean time I’d be interested but generally prices are above my comfort zone.
I have an Agogs Barack, which weighs 19.5 kg, has a range of 110 km with a 600 Wh battery, and retails for about €1600 new. However, used ones can be found for some €600 (though probably with a smaller battery, e.g. 370 Wh).
