I got to wondering about the current state of Electric Aviation and what is the best range on a single charge. I couldn’t find much bacause most of the google hits were for EVTOL aircraft. Those might get 100 miles, although I have doubts about that figure.
However, there was a hit for the FB post below which claims an electric aircraft (image in the second post) flew 500 miles. But I couldn’t find out the name of the aircraft or company. The FB post does not give either of those pieces of data.
Is that even a real picture? Does that plane actually exist?
If it was real, I’d expect it to show up somewhere else besides a single facebook page with 22k followers filled with AI pictures.
Because it doesn’t exist; the image and (likely) the text are AI generated and there is no electric aircraft operating today with a rechargeable electric battery (using LiPo or LiFePO4 chemistry) that can get anywhere near a 500 nm range.
This is the state-of-the-art for battery electric aircraft with an operating endurance of 50 minutes (20 in reserve) and an estimated maximum range of about 180 km:
It has what I can only assume are supposed to be some kind of turbine engine in each of the twin enpennages but no apparent control surfaces, room for landing gear, and (even assuming the fuselage serves as a lifting body) the wings don’t have enough surface for low speed gliding on approach so landing it would be an exercise in anticipating both wobble and stall. Also, the way the cockpit appears you either have to disassemble the entire top of the canopy to get in or else magically phase through the glass.
It isn’t the only one but it has the longest range of any operating electric plane that I can find. Most electric planes are actually “motor gliders” which require a taxi for takeoff and for which the motor just provides supplementary forward thrust for lift in areas with no updrafts.
The rules for aviation generally say that an aircraft must have 45 minutes fuel reserve in addition to its flight plan. (or is it for commercial craft, ability to reach alternate destination?) I don’t think there are many electrical aircraft that can come close to that, presumably there are exceptions for test units. Best I’ve seen is articles suggesting half an hour to 45 minutes flight.
That’s a personal aircraft looks like a 4-prop drone and it mentioned 20 minute flight time. est suggested applications for e-copters would be shuttles like between NYC airports. The weight to charge ratio isn’t there yet. Some company was testing an aircraft for shuttling from offshore islands to the mainland in Sweden IIRC, and another was testing flights from Vancouver Island to the city.
Fun fact: “Pipistrel” means bat, from the Latin “Pipistrellus”, in Italian is “Pipistrello” and Batman, in an excess of literal translation was called…
In general, getting battery electric aircraft to the kind of range and power comparable to avgas and gasoline powered aircraft is going to require something close to an order of magnitude improvement in mass energy density. Electric aircraft are certainly competitive (and in many ways superior) for short range VTOL air taxi and ambulance roles that are currently performed by helicopters but getting something comparable to performance and range of even turboprop regional airliners is going to require some pretty large jumps in energy storage density.
After a bit more research, I find that a couple years ago CATL claimed to have made a “condensed battery” that has roughly twice the energy density of typical li-ion batteries. Unfortunately, they’re keeping most of the technical details secret:
At any rate, last year they said they’ve incorporated one of these into a 4-ton aircraft and are working on putting one into a larger plane:
Fantastic new battery tech is always just around the corner.
Seriously, the technical issues seem to be about ensuring service life. They can make energy-dense batteries with assorted tchemistry, but they often tend not to survive enough charge cycles to be practical. So then the research works on imprving that…