> It uses electric motors for zero-emission short hops up to 124 miles and backup reserve generators for an extended hybrid range up to 300–500 miles.
I was wondering how they're gonna deal with alternate airports and "fuel" reserves, but it seems they also have generators on board (supposedly used in case of emergency / unplanned detours).
I think the generators are meant for intentional longer range trips as well. You get the cost savings for a big share of the trip even if you have to use the generators for part of it.
At 120 miles of useful pure electric range, I can't imagine there are many US corridors where that pure electric range makes sense. That's still a range where the door to door time of a car can still win. I wonder why they don't push the idea of it being a hybrid more, as it seems to me a lot of useful routes are going to rely on the generators.
I'd love to see something that can do around 250mi. It would be nice to electrify transit in the Texas Triangle if we end up never being able to actually build useful HSR.
VTOL aircraft have the same distance capabilities and make more sense in a lot more scenarios than this, with way more flexibility. It’s obviously larger but I’m just not sure of potential advantages over other modes of transport currently available and in the near future
I really like the STOL "blown lift" Electra design. It never has to do the dangerous transition to an inefficient VTOL mode, and can still land in very small places. Although, this is a much small aircraft, and it's a hybrid.
The problem of the jets on September 11 is the use of the jets themselves as weapons.
Even without the jet fuel on board, the destruction would still have been substantial. Whether the Twin Towers would have fallen without the fuel is not really relevant.
Most of the security is security theater. The primary improvements to security have not been people taking their shoes off or emptying water bottles. It was locking the cockpit doors and passengers knowing that they cannot rely on the hijacker wanting to survive. Other than that, making sure passengers are on board if their luggage is has meant no more Lockerbies.
All the other stuff is pretty much a waste of time.
Lots of places have water or mountains preventing car or train travel or making it go the long way around. Ferries are slow. Those would be natural applications for this. Tallinn-Helsinki city pair for example.
I wonder, if this can get approved or certified somehow now, if then modifications and improvements are relatively easy, as long as many aspects like the pilot interface stays the same. Battery technology improves constantly after all.
As an example, going from the current 200 km range to 400 could make it very useful in numerous regions certainly.
There are really weird short hop routes like Adana/Mersin Turkey to Northern Cyprus and Bahrain to Dammam (Saudi). The latter trip is 1 hr by CAR. Gulf Air flies wide body aircraft on that route and the plane doesn't even have time to properly take off before it needs to start landing. They hand you your juice box while you enter the plane and you never get to recline the seat or open the tray. Surreal stuff :)
Does anyone know if there is a theoretical limit for how energy dense a battery could be?
I wonder if there is a possible future where some sort of commercial long haul flights could be done by a fully electric plane. I've never gotten a great answer on this, and maybe we don't have an answer for certain since battery chemistry is some sense is still early days
Lithium air batteries theoretically can reach 10000-12000w/kg though they have only reached 1200w in labs so far. Gasoline is 13000w/kg. We don't need to match gasoline as it is inefficient.
CATL just got it's 500w/kg batteries for commercial aviation approved I am betting China is going to do the same with electric planes that it did with cars. They can't build a efficient enough jet engine to be competitive yet but they already can build the narrow body planes replace the jet engine with electric take over the market for short haul aviation once the battery densities cross 1000w/hr.
27 mins endurance (?) for $5 of power. Not bad. I rent a 172 and have been paying a $5/h fuel surcharge for the past few months due war in Iran - but at UK avgas prices 27 mins in my plane would be $55ish. Haven’t looked into the details but kind of crazy impact on economics of aviation if this size plane (10x 172 MTOW) can actually do useful short haul
I’m thinking they got this wrong by an order of magnitude.
The region they did this flight in charges ~$.25/kw. So they would have had to do the entire flight with 20kw/h or an average of 40kw of output. That’s 60hp, or about a third what your Cesnna uses on climbout. Even if you give them a very low price of $.10/kw then they are flying with less than the Cessna on climbout. Hell, a Cessna in level flight uses ~80 kw.
In other words, they are claiming that they can fly this thing on a VW beetle engine, or the PR guy got the number wrong.
Yeah, fully charging my EV (0-100%) at home on night-time discounted electricity of $0.07/kWh would cost me $6, so even allowing for really cheap electricity this doesn't feel right.
A Dornier 328 (roughly similar in size) has two 1625 kW engines. Heart stated they "delivered more than one megawatt of power" during the flight, so maybe comparable to one of the Dornier's engines at 60% power? Even the DC-3 could take off with one engine but 60% seems iffy.
At 1000 kW and $0.10/kWh (being very generous I think), the plane would be using $100/h (at 1000 kW level) or $1.67/minute. You'd blow past $5 in 3 minutes.
I don't like that they don't share the basic numbers. It's as if they don't want folks doing the math.
> Powered entirely by batteries, X1 used approximately $5 worth of electricity during its first flight
It's fun to look at the arithmetic behind this to pull out the assumptions. To lift a 25000 lb mass 1100 ft in the air requires just over 10kWh, but that's assuming no air resistance or friction, so let's triple the energy needed to 30 KWh.
Let's add another 10 kWh for forward distance covered (assuming it was mostly gliding). Then let's pad it up to 50kWh for anything else. If they say that was $5 in electricity that implies an electricity price of $0.10/kWh, which is possible with utility scale solar.
I'd guess the actual flight time was only 10 of the 27 minutes, 30 kWh used over 10 minutes is 300kW of peak power.
300kW seems very low compared to equivalent jet powered planes, which output an order of magnitude more power for a 30 seater plane. Even if the electric drivetrain is far more efficient than a jet engine it stretches credulity.
Air transport in general, not just this airplane, could benefit from a catapult or winch takeoff at airports. It could be electric, it would reduce the most energy-demanding part of flight and make takeoff safer.
They could also use electric tugs to and from the runway, not just at the terminal.
GOOD POINT by my wife. Is there a super high density battery they could use just to have available to count for reserves even if it’s one time use. Just plan never to use it in normal flight.
All FedEx express packages in my area come and go via a dedicated twin-prop plane that flies 35 miles to the hub. I'm sending a package today, and $14 of the 54$ total is a fuel surcharge. I wonder if I will be seeing electricity surcharges in the future.
$5 of energy at even $0.10/kWh is 50 kWh. One horsepower is roughly ~754 watts. 50 kWh for 27 min at 100% efficiency means 111 kW sustained output which is 147 HP. The math is wrong, there’s no way this plane flies with only 147 HP. That’s roughly what a Cessna 172 has for engine power.
Conclusion: AI wrote this article and it has at least one and probably several more errors.
34 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 43.5 ms ] threadI was wondering how they're gonna deal with alternate airports and "fuel" reserves, but it seems they also have generators on board (supposedly used in case of emergency / unplanned detours).
I'd love to see something that can do around 250mi. It would be nice to electrify transit in the Texas Triangle if we end up never being able to actually build useful HSR.
I wish them luck on continuing to try!
https://electra.aero/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4INw9bclxeI
that could make it much more convenient and appealing as a travel method
Also, I'm not so sure the passengers involved would be thrilled at your suggestion.
Even without the jet fuel on board, the destruction would still have been substantial. Whether the Twin Towers would have fallen without the fuel is not really relevant.
Most of the security is security theater. The primary improvements to security have not been people taking their shoes off or emptying water bottles. It was locking the cockpit doors and passengers knowing that they cannot rely on the hijacker wanting to survive. Other than that, making sure passengers are on board if their luggage is has meant no more Lockerbies.
All the other stuff is pretty much a waste of time.
"Largest" is just straight-up a false claim. [Solar Impulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse) and [Helios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype...) were electric and had over double the wingspan, just to name a few of the ~dozen examples.
Heart's engineers should be proud of this genuinely impressive accomplishment, but they need to rein in whoever is writing their PR pieces.
I wonder, if this can get approved or certified somehow now, if then modifications and improvements are relatively easy, as long as many aspects like the pilot interface stays the same. Battery technology improves constantly after all.
As an example, going from the current 200 km range to 400 could make it very useful in numerous regions certainly.
I wonder if there is a possible future where some sort of commercial long haul flights could be done by a fully electric plane. I've never gotten a great answer on this, and maybe we don't have an answer for certain since battery chemistry is some sense is still early days
The region they did this flight in charges ~$.25/kw. So they would have had to do the entire flight with 20kw/h or an average of 40kw of output. That’s 60hp, or about a third what your Cesnna uses on climbout. Even if you give them a very low price of $.10/kw then they are flying with less than the Cessna on climbout. Hell, a Cessna in level flight uses ~80 kw.
In other words, they are claiming that they can fly this thing on a VW beetle engine, or the PR guy got the number wrong.
A Dornier 328 (roughly similar in size) has two 1625 kW engines. Heart stated they "delivered more than one megawatt of power" during the flight, so maybe comparable to one of the Dornier's engines at 60% power? Even the DC-3 could take off with one engine but 60% seems iffy.
At 1000 kW and $0.10/kWh (being very generous I think), the plane would be using $100/h (at 1000 kW level) or $1.67/minute. You'd blow past $5 in 3 minutes.
I don't like that they don't share the basic numbers. It's as if they don't want folks doing the math.
It's fun to look at the arithmetic behind this to pull out the assumptions. To lift a 25000 lb mass 1100 ft in the air requires just over 10kWh, but that's assuming no air resistance or friction, so let's triple the energy needed to 30 KWh.
Let's add another 10 kWh for forward distance covered (assuming it was mostly gliding). Then let's pad it up to 50kWh for anything else. If they say that was $5 in electricity that implies an electricity price of $0.10/kWh, which is possible with utility scale solar.
I'd guess the actual flight time was only 10 of the 27 minutes, 30 kWh used over 10 minutes is 300kW of peak power.
300kW seems very low compared to equivalent jet powered planes, which output an order of magnitude more power for a 30 seater plane. Even if the electric drivetrain is far more efficient than a jet engine it stretches credulity.
Which of my numbers is off?
They could also use electric tugs to and from the runway, not just at the terminal.
https://youtu.be/fEudbAjschs?is=707pjOJKf4chS4O2
Conclusion: AI wrote this article and it has at least one and probably several more errors.