Airbus electric plane takes flight

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http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/11/tech/airbus-electric-aircraft/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

It's decades away, but GA will probably follow the car development and become battery based. Who knows, there will probably be new technology by then anyway.

"It costs about two cents per hour to fly the electric plane"
I'm not sure how they arrived at that figure. Even the cost to recharge the batteries must be more than 2 cents per hour?
 
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Looks awesome. I hope the price tag won't only put it in the hands of the very wealthy and it die out before it can catch on.

I like the way it looks and I like that it is powerful enough that they have a 4 seater coming. I like the idea of the additional gas powered engine. Less concern of engine out.

Curious about the specs.
Wouldn't Useful Load, Cruise speed, diminish as the charge are used?

Either way, I want one.
 
I just noticed it's a two wheeler with support 'feelers'on the wings. I'm sure this saves a lot of weight
 
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Curious about the specs.
....

some info in French and metric:
e-fan.jpg
 
So, you can fly around the pattern once or twice before hitting your day VFR reserve?
 
So, you can fly around the pattern once or twice before hitting your day VFR reserve?

Yes, let's not experiment with anything until it's perfect for real world use....
 
Heh.

On the one hand, I am tempted to discount this as a stunt - not enough lifting capacity or range or speed, yadda, yadda...

...but then again, it's a start, and if the energy storage density problem can be licked, the idea of a practical electrically-powered aircraft is marvelously appealing. You have to believe that an electric plane would be inherently more reliable than one entirely dependent upon a big, honkin' piston engine.
 
agree with 'it's a start'

if weight and material performance allow, they'll probably combine this with solar cells to charge/maintain the batteries.
 
Well, anything's better than digging up dinosaurs. But I still think hydrogen holds more promise.

-Rich
 
It is a waste of time and money to work on electric airplanes until battery energy density improves by at least a factor of 10.
 
It is a waste of time and money to work on electric airplanes until battery energy density improves by at least a factor of 10.

I'm inclined to agree. Everything else is ready now. It's energy storage that makes it impractical.

-Rich
 
Yes, let's not experiment with anything until it's perfect for real world use....


Well, the article was going on about how much "money this will save for flight training". I just thought they were jumping the gun a bit, that's all.

Yes, if batteries improve, this will be viable.
 
Let's see....a half hour of flight training. 4-8 hours of charging. Doesn't seem economically viable.
 
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Let's see....a half of of flight training. 4-8 hours of charging. Doesn't seem economically viable.


Not just yet, but it will be. Tesla's superchargers charge batteries at a rate of 120kW, which is about 163 hp. For a Cessna 150 class trainer (100 hp), that should let you charge for a typical 90-minute training flight--only a fraction of which is at high power--in less than 30 minutes, which is usually the time you need to brief, preflight, etc. for a lesson anyway. The batteries, chargers, etc. won't be cheap, but compared to the costs of Avgas (only likely to go up) and of maintaining piston engines, it could very well be a real bargain.


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The thing about innovators is, most fail. It's too easy to criticize & laugh at them; often their plan doesn't work out. But every once in a while a Wright Bros comes along.

I am going to cut these guys some slack; maybe not in our lifetime; but who knows....
 
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I fail to see how charging anything unless it's off solar or green generation saves a darn thing.

When you plug up to a 220V outlet to charge, the turbines at the plant load down and burn more coal or whatever... your meter starts spinning like a top and your local utility company thanks you.

Right now, they're just glorified electric toy-like airplanes on a 1 to 1 scale.
 
Building an electrically powered airplane is a waste of time. The best electric motor efficiencies, battery power densities, and recharge rates are well known. The kW required to make an aircraft of a specific weight and configuration fly is common knowledge.

Using those values it's possible to predict the performance of such an aircraft within a couple of per cent of the optimum possible. What that will tell you is considering the high cost and limited utility of that aircraft it makes no sense at all to build it.

So Airbus did it anyway, even though they knew in advance what the airplane was capable of and that the cost made it highly unlikely anyone would buy it.

As someone already posted, until there is a breakthrough in battery power densities and weight reduction, it's just a fool's errand.

Using the same thought process, Bombardier Recreational Products could build an electric personal watercraft, an electric motorcycle, and an electric snowmobile. What would be the point of the exercise?
 
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Not just yet, but it will be. Tesla's superchargers charge batteries at a rate of 120kW, which is about 163 hp.

a "rate of 120 kW" isn't a rate. The 120 kW is a measure of power, a rate involves time and the amount of power transferred.
 
a "rate of 120 kW" isn't a rate. The 120 kW is a measure of power, a rate involves time and the amount of power transferred.

It seems that you may be confusing power and work (a.k.a. energy), and possibly kW (a unit of power) with kWh (a unit of work or energy). Power is the rate at which work is performed or the rate at which energy is consumed. You will find that definition if you look up the term in a dictionary or on Wikipedia.

A kilowatt (kW) is the same thing as a kilojoule (a unit of energy) divided by a second (a unit of time). Saying that the Tesla supercharger charges at 120 kW is the same as saying that it transfers 120 kJ of energy to the batteries every second. Or in other common units, that it transfers 120 kWh of energy every hour. That is quite plainly a rate of charging.

The more common unit of power in the general aviation world is the horsepower. When you say that your aircraft has a 200 hp engine, you are not saying that there is 200 hp of something in the engine, to be transferred in or out. Rather, you are saying that the engine does work (to propel the aircraft forward) at a rate of 200 hp. Or equivalently, that the engine transfers energy from the heat of combusted fuel and air to torque on the propellor at a rate of 200 hp.
 
I fail to see how charging anything unless it's off solar or green generation saves a darn thing.

When you plug up to a 220V outlet to charge, the turbines at the plant load down and burn more coal or whatever... your meter starts spinning like a top and your local utility company thanks you.

Right now, they're just glorified electric toy-like airplanes on a 1 to 1 scale.

As it stands now energy delivered through your power company is a lot cheaper than energy delivered through your local gas station. Transferring it into the "tank" and the weight of the "tank" is the problem.

It's cheaper I think just because of scale- a giant turbine is just more efficient than a piston engine.
 
I fail to see how charging anything unless it's off solar or green generation saves a darn thing.

When you plug up to a 220V outlet to charge, the turbines at the plant load down and burn more coal or whatever... your meter starts spinning like a top and your local utility company thanks you.

Right now, they're just glorified electric toy-like airplanes on a 1 to 1 scale.

Well, as it turns out, gasoline (to say nothing of Avgas) at current prices is a very expensive source of energy. On a BTU for BTU basis, Avgas probably approaches ten times the cost of natural gas, for example. There is a reason they don't burn gasoline in power plants! And centralized power plants convert BTUs to useable energy with greater thermodynamic efficiency than a small piston engine. (Combined cycle natural gas power plants will easily exceed 50% thermal efficiency.) So in terms of the cost of fuel, switching from burning Avgas in your plane to burning natural gas at a power plant to generate electricity for use in your plane is a huge improvement.

It is also a significant improvement in terms of emissions, because natural gas burns much more cleanly. And, on top of that, wind and solar photovoltaics have reached or are about to reach price parity (without subsidies) with fossil fuel-generated electricity in much of the world. So, when and if electric airplanes actually become common, much of the electricity they consume will be generated by wind or solar.

But, that doesn't mean that they make sense. That depends on whether all of the other stuff you need (batteries, motors, etc.) can be made cheap, light, and reliable enough that the overall system is better than what we have today. That's not a question you can answer by back-of-the-napkin thermodynamics. It's a serious engineering and economics question, one that can probably only be answered by trying to actually build the things.
 
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Well, anything's better than digging up dinosaurs. But I still think hydrogen holds more promise.

-Rich

Agreed. At least some sort of fuel cell seems more practical than batteries at this time. I'm really surprised that somebody hasn't built a hydrogen fuel cell airplane yet.

As to the Airbus Efan in the article, I think it is likely just to make European governments happy. They need to show they are working on this whole 2050 carbon reduction thing. However a plane like the Efan could be useful as a primary trainer if it were designed to be a motor glider. During WWII, the Germans started all their pilots in gliders. I think it was a pretty good idea and it served them well. As the Efan is now, I think it's pretty useless and just a technology demonstrator for some pretty ordinary technology.
 
..."It costs about two cents per hour to fly the electric plane"
I'm not sure how they arrived at that figure. Even the cost to recharge the batteries must be more than 2 cents per hour?

I think they just got their units mixed up. They also wrote that it's "up to 20-50 times cheaper than the normal fuel costs," which would be consistent with two dollars per hour.
 
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