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Yeah I have wondered about this option as well. Hydrogen fuel cell cars make very little practical sense for a lot of reasons, but most of those reasons don't s
by NickM 7y ago
Yeah I have wondered about this option as well. Hydrogen fuel cell cars make very little practical sense for a lot of reasons, but most of those reasons don't seem to apply so much when you're dealing with air travel:
- It'll be a long time before fuel cells are cost competitive with gas or electric cars, but for planes the cost of fuel and operation is much more significant than with a car, so the upfront cost for building the plane seems less significant in comparison
- Refueling infrastructure is much easier to implement at a (relatively) small number of airports than it is to build many small consumer refueling stations everywhere
- Space is more important than weight in a car, but the opposite may be true for a plane
- Crash safety is a much bigger problem for cars than planes - plane crashes are rare, and if a plane crashes there's a good chance everyone dies anyway, but if you're designing a car you're going to have to be really careful to make sure every other fender bender doesn't result in a hydrogen explosion
Of course there's the issue that most hydrogen today is created from fossil fuels, but perhaps there are ways to generate it sustainably and still remain competitive with the cost of jet fuel?
Electric cars can be a very competitive alternative to gasoline cars, but electric batteries are not yet energy-dense enough to make long-distance air travel viable, so it feels like hydrogen planes might be the least bad solution if we want to get off of fossil fuels.
- rootusrootus 7y ago> if a plane crashes there's a good chance everyone dies anyway That's actually not the case. Overall your odds of surviving an accident in a plane are something like 95%. Still above 50% for "serious" incidents. Sure, if the plane drills the ground everyone is going to die, but planes crash somewhat regularly with most/all surviving.
- base698 7y agoTo further the above point, here is a searchable database provided by the NTSB: https://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/index.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/index.aspx
- tomatocracy 7y agoAlso one of the most dangerous places to be in a plane, statistically, is on the ground. A surprisingly large proportion of historic fatalities in air accidents have been crashes on the taxiway or runway between two aircraft (eg plane lands on top of another or taxis across a live runway when it shouldn't do).
- khuey 7y agoThere's a lot more stuff to hit on the ground than there is in the sky.
- NickM 7y agoThanks for the info! I stand corrected on that point.
- sheldonth 7y agoI wonder what a YC application with such an idea might look like. Design the plane and the fuel containment/loading systems at 2 airports. Start America's first "carbon free" aviation route. Maybe move freight instead of people at first for an easier regulatory pipeline. It's absolutely crazy and would almost certainly fail but so are most of the revolutionary startup ideas that deal with earth heating in any meaningful way.
- nradov 7y agoWe can basically have "carbon free" aviation today if we want it by manufacturing synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels using renewable power. The US military has already run successful experiments. It works fine, it's just more expensive than burning fossil fuels.