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Electric / hybrid aircraft propulsion (NOT cars)

But if they use it for the island flights in Germany flight times are typically 5 – 10 minutes

EHLE / Lelystad, Netherlands, Netherlands

Should work for Scottish interisland flights within Orkney Islands, and some Hebrides flights IF recharging takes place on the island.
Should also work for the Aran Islands in Eire.
But it might be restricted in dubious weather due to holding and diversion requirements.
And that could make it unviable.

Maoraigh
EGPE, United Kingdom

It is feasible. Not that batteris have improved so much, but coming from fossil fuels we kinda underestimate how much you can power back electric airplanes. Look in this test flight of the Pipistrel Alpha Electro just how little power they use in cruise. Out of the 60kW max, 50kW continuous, they cruise at 90kt using only 22kw. That’s 36% of power – numbers you just don’t see with pistons or turbines.



Peter wrote:

The specs are interesting. Is this at all feasible?

Yes. Electric aircraft could very well put new life into short commuting flights. Today it is as good as dead. Widerøe (operating commuters all along the coast of Norway) is in a squeeze right now. No one is making short body Dash 8 anymore, no one is making anything resembling the Dash 8. The ones they have are getting older and older.

This Scylax is more like a micro Twin Otter than Dash 8, but still. If the alternative is 4-5 hours of car/boat and this airplane does it in 30 minutes, well.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

What I was getting at is not that you can stick a big battery in a plane and get it to fly for an hour or two. Obviously you can.

What about the charging? Somebody is going to install a megawatt-sized charger at the base airport and all the time the planes are plugged in, they can’t fly. So you would charge it at night, but with just 1-2hrs’ endurance you won’t get a whole lot of flying done during the day, either… Same issue for the proposed market for light GA electric planes. You need to get the endurance up to several hours.

This issue has not changed in some years.

It’s also really dumb to be charging an electric plane from electricity produced by burning coal The steam cycle efficiency is limited to roughly 40%…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

You could install a large Lead acid battery at the airports (or Lithium; whatever’s cheapest on the day) and charge the aircraft from that.

Charge times for consumer Lithium batteries can be quite short – minutes rather than hours – depending on how long you want them to last. So really the show-stopper would be range. I don’t see a solution to this yet – the range with VFR reserve is very low. In a training environment you can work around this limitation by only flying on good days; for a transport aircraft you want to be able to fly in poor weather as well.

kwlf wrote:

So really the show-stopper would be range

In the current regime it would, but electric aircraft are not part of the current regime. In all parts of technology, going forward in one direction, always means going backward in a few others, at least for a while. In the end it is purely economical considerations. Things always moves forward in the direction of economical benefit.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

From here

There is also no solution for trucks. I went to a presentation recently by one of the big people in the electric vehicle business. The current battery size for a 40T truck weighs 20T, and that’s before you start trying to charge it

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

There is also no solution for trucks. I went to a presentation recently by one of the big people in the electric vehicle business. The current battery size for a 40T truck weighs 20T, and that’s before you start trying to charge it

Tesla has 450 orders for the semi from companies like DHL and UPS source Battery weight hasn’t been revealed, but is expected to be 5 tons source Here’s a video of the non-existing solution for trucks:


And by the way, Amazon invested in Rivian and is planning to build 100,000 of these to deliver online purchases:

Last Edited by loco at 29 Sep 11:19
LPFR, Poland

If you go to that first link and search for “weight” you get basically nothing, with one estimate at 11T for the battery weight. Crucially no estimate for the total vehicle weight. Looking at the axles, it isn’t a 40T truck.

A 40T truck looks like ths

It has more axles than the Tesla mockup because there are legal limits on axle weights, to limit damage to roads.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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