this is cool … so is everything going to be electric based with n 10 years or so ?
With battery technology similar to that of an electric car or a cell phone and 30 minutes of charging, the nine-passenger Alice will be able to fly for one hour, and about 440 nautical miles. The plane has a max cruise speed of 250 knots, or 287 miles per hour. For reference, a Boeing 737 has a max cruise speed of 588 miles per hour.
One of these things is not like the other.
ETA: 440 nautical miles is 506 landlubber miles.
I am math challenged and usually get things wrong, but if it has a max speed of 287 miles and hour and a battery life of 1 hour, it is not going to have a range of 506 landlubber miles…
Yeah, that’s exactly what @running_coach was pointing out.
But even if this is possible for extremely short hops (precisely how short we don’t know, because presumably the reporter screwed up), there’s a big difference between short hops and long flights. No battery technology, current or any time in the foreseeable future, has anywhere near the energy density of a tank of hydrocarbon fuel, and you need that kind of energy density to make overseas or cross-country flights even remotely plausible.
The company’s website lists a 250NM range: Aircraft – Eviation
It’s time for Big Extension Cord to up its game.
The first electric vehicles had much less range than we have now. I see this as a good first step.
They note this as the “Day VFR” range. Thus, the range when it’s not necessary to carry a 45-minute fuel reserve, as is the case for IFR.
VFR = visual flight rules: flight in good weather.
IFR = instrument flight rules: flight when conditions might restrict visibility of the ground or other aircraft. (Applies to almost all commercial flying.)
Well, maybe. Battery tech is improving, but it’s not improving by all that much. Most of the improvement in electric land vehicles has been in figuring out ways to make batteries different shapes, to fit into all of the odd little spaces in cars, so they could pack more batteries in. But with flying, the limitation isn’t on shape or volume, but on weight, and so the only way to make progress is by inventing batteries that hold more energy per weight.
It might happen eventually, but I think that we’re more likely to see planes powered by supercapacitors (which are also very far off). And more likely than either of those, is planes much like the current ones that still use hydrocarbon fuels, but with the fuels created through some green process.
I saw a TV show on electric planes, they seemed to think that hybrids will take over first, so that jet fuel will help the plane take off, and batteries will take over for lighter duty cruising.
I’m far from an aviation expert, or batter expert. I just figure we have to start somewhere, and the first version is likely to be quite different from what we get 10 years down the road.
But then the electric propulsion needs to haul around not only the plane and its passengers, but also its jet engine(s), which are probably not cheap, featherweight, or especially low-drag.
Maybe it makes up the remaining 200 miles by dumping its batteries and gliding the rest of the way.
I’m not up on VFR fuel requirements but there would still need to be a reserve, 30 minutes?
I wonder how well this plane glides.
Day VFR has a 30 minute fuel reserve requirement. Night VFR is 45 minutes. IFR is typically fuel to your destination, plus enough to get to an alternate, plus 45 minutes. There are differences between jurisdictions and some types of flight, but that’s typical as far as I can remember.
No, not even close. Even Eviation is saying they need another generation of batteries with higher power density to be practical. And this is a short-hop communter plane.
They also admit that lithium ion batteries still have some major certification hurdles having to do with potential thermal runaway before they are ready for aviation use. They are making a bet that by the time their airplane is ready for certification trials there will be better batteries available.
Still… we are getting to the point now where you can see some of these specialty electric aircraft getting close to being viable. But it’s still a long, long way to go.
In ten years you might see some electric flight training aircraft, some very short haul commuters like the Harbor Air Beavers getting use, and other electric aircraft in various stages of development. If they need new battery tech, expect at least 20 years before new batteries such as silicon anode lithium to be ready for aviation.
But there will never be an electric replacement for large, long distance aircraft. Even if we could double the energy density of batteries it wouldn’t be nearly enough.
The best hope for large aircraft long distance flying is something like hydrogen or biofuels. But aircraft built today are expected to last for decades. There will still be commercial jets burning Jet-A 30 years from now. And there are hundreds of thousands of aircraft in the general aviation fleet that also last for decades and cannot easily be converted to electric.
Aviation will be the last industry to convert to zero-carbon fuels, and it could take 50 years to get there, if we can even figure out how to do it at all.
Alice, I think she’ll know, is a wonderful name for an airplane.
This. I don’t want to be cruising at 20,000 feet and have a battery fire.
I said this in the other thread. The important thing now is to get electric motors certified and scalable in anticipation of better batteries.
There’s probably already a niche for island hopping planes that would justify a production run.
Let’s all recall that EV doesn’t have to mean BEV, although it usually makes sense to have at least some battery capacity. You can run an electric plane or other electric vehicle 100% on jet fuel. And the longer the trip and larger the plane, the more you need to rely on dense energy storage.
Electrification of aviation has its own challenges and advantages. Some of the challenges include the state of medium voltage DC power electronics. You need to up the voltage to reduce wire weight.
just like hybrid-cars you say? … and yet they are a thing that make a lot of sense in a lot of circumstances … (and not much in others)
But getting a small ICE engine (think: the 3 cyl. turbo 1.0L 200hp car engine equivalent) that does the heavy lifting at take-off - could work at fringe applications …
again, seeing a classic “jet-airliner” run on batteries - that is many years (decades?) out for the low energy density