Propellers - is that the latest greatest invention?
Nothing like some govt gravy to keep your engineers on the payroll while commercial sales are sucking bilgewater.
No way I’m getting on an electric airplane, no way, no how.
“It was in the air for 15 minutes. I leave it to you to convert that to parsecs if you wish.”
Parsecs is distance, not time.
’Cos I’m leavin’ on an e-planeNope; doesn’t work.
Don’t know when I’ll be back again …
No fuel fluid dynamics.
A thousand points of failure reduced to 4 connections to the drive motor.
Battery stability and charge analytics at near perfect reliability.
I’m in.
In fact, as a former hang glider pilot I would drop my fear of combustion engines and learn to fly one of these.
Want one.
Let’s dig into that a bit. According to JetPack Aviation, a liter of jet fuel has an energy density of 9.6 kWh and weighs about 0.8 kilograms. That translates to 12 kWh per kilogram. In comparison, some of the best lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of 265 Wh per kilogram. The net result? Jet fuel has almost 50 times more energy available per kilogram to power an airplane than batteries do.
The same applies for electric cars too. Hauling all that weight around is not free. Also batteries put out less and less energy as they age. But they never weight less. Compare that to liquid fuel. As you use it up it weighs less and less.
Just one on many reasons why electric vehicles make no sense.
Not that many light, 300 MPH airframes out there.
NXT
SX300
Lancair
to name a few...
I'd get one but I have a rule I follow "Never fly a plane that you outweigh"
Roughly 500 HP? We were up against Germany and Japan in the 1930s and didn’t have enough horse power in our airplane engines until we could generate about 2,200 HP to rival their designs for power. 500 HP is useless except for a private light plane. Sure, it’s fun to work with battery technologies, but this means absolutely nothing except to a hobbyist. I’ll stick with oil powered flight for now.
Batteries with higher energy densities will be the key that unlocks their potential.
Sounds suspiciously like the same claims made about every other supposed wonder tech
Basically “one day the miracles will happen and we will have x tech at low cost efficiency”
So “geniuses” what the environmental costs of producing, and disposing, of all those magic batteries?
Read later.