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Projects like these are neat, but I don't understand where the money for them comes from. At least electric cars had a use case that was achievable from the sta

Projects like these are neat, but I don't understand where the money for them comes from. At least electric cars had a use case that was achievable from the start (driving around locally) and are now usable for pretty much any kind of driving people want to do (maybe cross-country road trips are still challenging). But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. The batteries take up a lot of weight and weigh the same at the start of the flight as at the end, and while I'm sure battery technology will continue to improve, the weight issue is going to be a problem for a long time. Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money. Edit: I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come.

ortusdux 6y ago
The best use case I have heard is flight schools. Last time I quoted lessons, half the cost was the fuel.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Spitballing a few more potential applications: Just imagine how cheap getting your multi-engine qualifications will become. Floatplane cert could become a lot cheaper too.
- francoisp 6y ago
  I wonder if the rating would be electric only after a while... I would imagine that the various authorities would create a different license, like for seaplanes and IFR. It would make some sense as mis-managing the fuel-air mixture on a small piston plane can lead to catastrophic failure. (frozen carb for ex)
  - bdamm 6y ago
    It makes sense to me that moving from electric to piston would require an endorsement. Asking for a rating seems like overkill.
    - steffan 6y ago
      > It makes sense to me that moving from electric to piston would require an endorsement. For a long time, it will be the reverse; the default will be a requirement to be able to fly a conventional-engined airplane, with electric propulsion being an endorsement (probably devoted primarily to battery & power management)
      - bdamm 6y ago
        Perhaps either way should require an endorsement. Gasoline is hard to fly... tank switching, carb heat, warm-up requirements, power output limitations, mixture at takeoff, mixture at altitude, thermal management in power reduction, weight of fuel in load calculations. In some models even CG due to fuel load. The list goes on and on. Electric ought to be much simpler to fly.
        steffan 6y ago
        Flying gasoline-engined airplanes is already the default. I suspect it will stay that way until the numbers shift noticeably
  - steffan 6y ago
    > It would make some sense as mis-managing the fuel-air mixture on a small piston plane can lead to catastrophic failure. (frozen carb for ex) Carb freezing doesn't occur as a result of mixture mismanagement, but rather by failure to apply carburetor heat when flying in conditions conducive to carb icing. Mismanaging the mixture is far less likely to have any acute effects. Descending with a lean[er] mixture may cause issues at lower altitudes where the mixture would be too lean, but it would be unusual for that to lead to an engine stoppage. Further - a pilot inexperienced in mixture management would likely not lean the mixture at all and just fly full-rich which again, wouldn't likely lead to any acute failures, just higher fuel consumption and longer-term issues with the engine.
    - earleybird 6y ago
      I can see a series of errors causing issues; eg. flying rich long enough that any buffer fuel in the tanks is exhausted prematurely.
      - jsight 6y ago
        Unfortunately that is a fairly common cause of fuel exhaustion incidents.
NegativeLatency 6y ago
> Antweiler says Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable.
standeven 6y ago
From the article: "...Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable." While batteries may not be viable for longer commercial flights, these short hops make sense.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  With the Canadian/US land border closed, but 5m (minute or meter) flights over the border being kosher, the sweet spot right now is temporarily massive.
  - lytfyre 6y ago
    Looking at their website, Harbour has actually cancelled their usual Vancouver/Seattle flights due to Covid - they don't seem to be running cross border at all right now.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Interesting. But when? The snowbird business would have died off a month ago. It probably was a good business for them, and something that popped up in areas that didn’t already have short-haul flights. Maybe they still do them as charters for those that don’t want to sit with rando pax. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snowbirds-canada-u-s-border-drive-winter-travel-covid-19-1.5810104 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snowbirds-canada-u-s-border... But I’m sure many/most just flew down deeper into US and forwent their Canadian car (possibly buying a beater/long term rental for US).
      - lytfyre 6y ago
        Appears to have been at least initially cancelled back in March, initially until the end of April - https://www.vicnews.com/news/harbour-air-cancels-all-seattle-flights-amid-covid-19/ https://www.vicnews.com/news/harbour-air-cancels-all-seattle.... I haven't seen any announcement of them resuming between now and then, but nothing that rules it out. I'm sure there are folks on HN who could tell us from public flight records. Not to say there haven't been problematic purposes for charter flights to non-us destinations going on, either - https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-couple-charged-after-chartering-plane-in-yukon-and-getting-covid-19-vaccine-say-officials-1.5279469 https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-couple-charged-after-charter...
aphextron 6y ago
>But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. The batteries take up a lot of weight and weigh the same at the start of the flight as at the end, and while I'm sure battery technology will continue to improve, the weight issue is going to be a problem for a long time. Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money. It makes sense for short flights. The vast majority of costs associated with aviation are in maintenance, with the majority of those costs coming from engine overhauls. This means you have a high fixed cost of operation per flight hour regardless of distance traveled/passengers carried. Electric motors will reduce that cost by orders of magnitude and make these small flights economically feasible. > I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come. The key is that you don't need the same performance of a piston engine aircraft. Batteries are just good enough now for these types of short flights to be possible. And with the maintenance savings, you come out ahead. Electric motors will also be vastly safer and more reliable than single engine piston aircraft, leading to insurance savings.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I don’t think the data bears out that there’s a vast safety opportunity for electric motors. From the 2018 Nall report (the most recent I could readily find on my phone), mechanical failure is sub 20% of accidents and sub 7% of fatal accidents. Pilots are around 75% of the primary link in the accident reports.
  - bdamm 6y ago
    Yes, although there may be gains there too. Electric motors can provide high torque more quickly than piston engines, and of course much more quickly than turbines. Maybe this will result in faster stall recoveries, and with new uses of motors flight envelopes might get more stable as well.
    - earleybird 6y ago
      You don't have to worry about torque on the ground. In the air near stall speed more torque is not necessarily your friend.
ozborn 6y ago
You may be right and this will lose money (I haven't done the math and don't know enough specifics), but you also need to figure in maintenance and fuel costs which are much lower with electric planes. The trick is picking the correct use case and short flights to an island are probably the first target for these aircraft.
notatoad 6y ago
The float plane operators in the lower mainland doing quick hops from Vancouver to Victoria or Whistler don't really have a lot of concern for money, I don't think. Their passengers aren't especially price-sensitive and there's more demand than supply a lot of the time. And the motor manufacturer is funded by a Singaporean private investor. It's a gamble that people will care about environmental concerns more than price. In Vancouver that's a decent bet.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  While the pax may not be sensitive to price, the providers still want to drive down their costs. Probably plenty of people in BC that would loooooove the combo of quick transport and looking down on those carbon-burning ferry/bus riders going to the islands/Whistler. Could likely sell tickets for more. Taking a gas plane and buying offsets sounds as unfun at parties as someone saying they bought a Corolla and offsets. Technical correctness matters less than image.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    The provider here is the one developing the plane though - harbour air isn't building a plane to sell to other operators, they're the one operating the flights. If they really want to drive costs down, they must have decided this is a good way to do it. But yeah, I think they're mostly selling the image here. Being able to fly to Whistler in half the time of driving and tell the people you're meeting there that you took the greener method is worth a lot to some people (and that's a good thing)
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Entirely possible the airline is getting paid to trial the tech. Not sure where else in the world people would even pay more for such short hops because it’s electric. I’m sure Whistler city council is looking for a way to ban carbon av emissions on their landing lake. Probably can’t because feds, but they would if they could.
madhato 6y ago
I've flown Harbour Air before and the flight from Vancouver to Victoria is just 30mins. Electricity isn't too expensive in BC and also generated cleanly. Perfect testing ground for the viability of electric planes.
- 99_00 6y ago
  As a passenger, how noisy are the planes?
  - ChrisKingWebDev 6y ago
    Very noisy. I've flown on them a couple times from Nanaimo. They pass out earplugs to every passenger, and you need them. I think the electric ones will be much quieter.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      Most of the noise of a prop-driven airplane is the propellor, not the engine. Electrics will be quieter, but not sure they will be "much" quieter.
inglor_cz 6y ago
The main advantage of electric planes is that VTOL capability is much easier with electric motors. You can have twelve cheap electric motors on the plane instead of one combustion motor. With that comes great maneuverability. The second advantage is that they are fairly quiet. Together, this is great for short "taxi" flights across natural barriers (fjords, mountain ranges), even at night and without need for actual airstrips at either end of the journey.
- baybal2 6y ago
  No, by far. Try to land such thing in a crosswind without lateral control authority. That's hard even with just 10kg quadcopters, and a "flying car" will be completely unlandable without extra rotor mechanisation, negating electric power advantages.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Why would there be a crosswind for a VTOL aircraft at the point of touchdown? Why not yaw the aircraft into the wind?
    - baybal2 6y ago
      If the wind is any much changing, you will wobble the aircraft to pieces, and even if you try to, you will still not get enough control authority to land safely in such conditions. You don't get anywhere near the amount of control authority, and its speed if it depends on rotating the whole body of the aircraft weighting many tons.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    Hmm, at least, it's way easier to put extra rotors where you want them to be, since you don't need a gearbox + transmission from the main engine, and can just put a secondary, smaller electric engine. Crosswind is really less of an issue near the ground, so you could first lower your altitude and precisely adjust later.
    - 6y ago
novok 6y ago
Actually ‘fuel’ cost wise an electric plane is significantly cheaper. Avgas is also significantly more expensive in canada than the usa due to taxes. The 30m short hop propeller flying here is actually the sweet spot for electric craft and I estimate they will spend about 10x less in energy costs alone.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Most of Harbour Air’s non-electric fleet are Jet-A burning turbines. Only the Beaver is possibly avgas fueled. (There are also turbine conversions of the Beaver.)
ericbarrett 6y ago
People need to look at the actual numbers, which I think are revealing. Top-end lithium-Ion batteries have an energy density, fully charged, of about 700 Watt-hours per kg, which converts to 2.5 MJ/kg. Jet-A, and basically all similar refined hydrocarbons, have an energy density of 42 MJ/kg. Is an electric plane impossible? Clearly not. Are batteries getting better and better? Absolutely; a few generations ago their density was < 1 MJ/kg. But the numbers are still bad. 5% of the energy density for electric versus fossil fuels IF you use the latest & best.
- FL33TW00D 6y ago
  You beat me to it. Any time someone mentions an electric plane the MJ/Kg jumps to mind. Until battery energy density increases by an order of magnitude electric planes aren’t going to happen, at least commercially.
- bluGill 6y ago
  True, but these seem to be very short haul flights, so they can probably get by. Just don't expect it to scale to the general case.
- nickik 6y ago
  Very reductionist analysis. - Electric engines are far more efficient. Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio. - Lighter engines on the wing mean lighter overall plane structure - Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel - Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery You can also do far more with differential thrust and potentially remove the planes tail. Actually you could do that even with normal planes as Chief Scientist at NASA H. Bowers has discovered. Look at the next generation Tesla battery pack. The batteries are literally what is holding together the car and the resulting weight is not much larger then the structure you would have needed without the battery. We are not there yet, it takes a complex vertically integrated approach to build such a plane, but it is not impossible. Just like with EV you need to re-engineer and rethink every aspect of the plane. Your range might still not be as good, but hell of a lot better then 5% and also far, far cheaper to operate.
eloff 6y ago
Actually they're doing this not for environmental reasons but for financial reasons. There's been articles written about it, including interviews with the executives of the company itself talking about why they're making the switch, which you can find on Google if so inclined. It's cheaper to operate these electric seaplanes to the point where it's worth the capital investment for the company.
newsclues 6y ago
There is regular flights between the mainland and the island, and a more environmentally friendly option would get traction in the market even with a price premium.
nickik 6y ago
Electric planes where used have already shown to be significantly cheaper to operate. Even if you need more overall energy, as electricity is cheaper then fuel, that is not necessary a problem. Also, I think people really need to think about this some more and not just look at first order effects. ery reductionist analysis. - Electric engines are far more efficient. - Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio. - Lighter engines mean less structural load - Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel - Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery - Electric engines have efficiency that stays the same, not optimized for one altitude - Electric engines can go higher and use less air resistant To achieve all of this you need to completely re-engineer planes and that is very expensive and batteries are only just getting close to the required power. The necessary investment to completely redesign plans to take advantage of these has not been made. If you look at Alice plain for example, they have taken advantage of some of these things I mention. They were able to get away with thin wings. However they still don't exploit many of these things as they are just an integration company. Their plane carries the battery like cargo, rather then having the battery be structural.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  One other thing is electric motors are much more reliable than piston engines. And they can be ganged on the same drive shaft for redundancy. I don't have numbers myself but 'internet says' engine maintenance for light aircraft is around $10/hr of flight time.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery Good point. Airplanes waste tons of (potential and kinetic) energy while getting lower, slowing down for landing, and finally breaking. Energy recovery sound like an excellent safety (and energy saving) feature.
ska 6y ago
> But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. This just isn't obviously true in all cases. Here we are talking about a successful small private airline that doesn't seem to be run by idiots, so it's pretty easy to make the jump to "huh, I'm probably missing something here". After all, it's not like they've committed to converting their fleet, just a pilot project to prove it out. Seems sensible.
TheRealPomax 6y ago
> I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come. Let's have the folks who are actually doing this because they think they can make it economically viable determine whether that's true or not eh?
throwawaygh 6y ago
> Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money. Vancouver <-> Whistler/Victoria. If it's cleaner and quieter than the conventional planes then there will be a market. But yeah it's a niche "1%er + novelty" market for sure.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
It's a defeatist attitude. Experiments have to start somewhere, right? People wrote the same kinds of comments about digital cameras. Fifteen years later it is difficult to buy anything else. So, let the engineers work on the problems.
johnwalkr 6y ago
Harbour Air flights are mostly about 35 minutes long, so are essentially the equivalent use case to early electric cars (and I mean early as in 90s and 2000s, not the much earlier attempts).
saberdancer 6y ago
The plane needs most power on takeoff. This partly mitigates the fact that batteries weight the same on takeoff and landing. You could probably use altitude to recover part of the energy expended by using the propeller to regenerate energy (like in braking), especially useful for emergency power.
Hypx 6y ago
It's pretty obvious that the future of aviation is either hydrogen or some kind of synfuel. I'm amazed that people are still even thinking of batteries here. It's like people are still trying to push floppy disc drives or something.
mkonecny 6y ago
Not saying you're wrong, but go read the criticisms of Tesla when it first started, and your comment mirrors those. Of course there are difficult hurdles to overcome, otherwise everyone would be doing it
MisterTea 6y ago
> Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money. Yeah the best option is to just sit around and wait until better technology appears out of thin air. Much easier than wasting all that money and time on R&D.
throwawayboise 6y ago
I don't know a lot about batteries -- it is obvious that weight doesn't change as the charge is depleted, but is there any (even theoretical) reason to think that batteries can be made much lighter? E.g. any research into very lightweight battery technologies? Maybe supercapacitors could be lightweight?

ortusdux 6y ago

The best use case I have heard is flight schools. Last time I quoted lessons, half the cost was the fuel.

Scoundreller 6y ago
Spitballing a few more potential applications: Just imagine how cheap getting your multi-engine qualifications will become. Floatplane cert could become a lot cheaper too.
francoisp 6y ago
I wonder if the rating would be electric only after a while... I would imagine that the various authorities would create a different license, like for seaplanes and IFR. It would make some sense as mis-managing the fuel-air mixture on a small piston plane can lead to catastrophic failure. (frozen carb for ex)
- bdamm 6y ago
  It makes sense to me that moving from electric to piston would require an endorsement. Asking for a rating seems like overkill.
  - steffan 6y ago
    > It makes sense to me that moving from electric to piston would require an endorsement. For a long time, it will be the reverse; the default will be a requirement to be able to fly a conventional-engined airplane, with electric propulsion being an endorsement (probably devoted primarily to battery & power management)
    - bdamm 6y ago
      Perhaps either way should require an endorsement. Gasoline is hard to fly... tank switching, carb heat, warm-up requirements, power output limitations, mixture at takeoff, mixture at altitude, thermal management in power reduction, weight of fuel in load calculations. In some models even CG due to fuel load. The list goes on and on. Electric ought to be much simpler to fly.
      - steffan 6y ago
        Flying gasoline-engined airplanes is already the default. I suspect it will stay that way until the numbers shift noticeably
- steffan 6y ago
  > It would make some sense as mis-managing the fuel-air mixture on a small piston plane can lead to catastrophic failure. (frozen carb for ex) Carb freezing doesn't occur as a result of mixture mismanagement, but rather by failure to apply carburetor heat when flying in conditions conducive to carb icing. Mismanaging the mixture is far less likely to have any acute effects. Descending with a lean[er] mixture may cause issues at lower altitudes where the mixture would be too lean, but it would be unusual for that to lead to an engine stoppage. Further - a pilot inexperienced in mixture management would likely not lean the mixture at all and just fly full-rich which again, wouldn't likely lead to any acute failures, just higher fuel consumption and longer-term issues with the engine.
  - earleybird 6y ago
    I can see a series of errors causing issues; eg. flying rich long enough that any buffer fuel in the tanks is exhausted prematurely.
    - jsight 6y ago
      Unfortunately that is a fairly common cause of fuel exhaustion incidents.

NegativeLatency 6y ago

> Antweiler says Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable.

standeven 6y ago

From the article: "...Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable." While batteries may not be viable for longer commercial flights, these short hops make sense.

Scoundreller 6y ago
With the Canadian/US land border closed, but 5m (minute or meter) flights over the border being kosher, the sweet spot right now is temporarily massive.
- lytfyre 6y ago
  Looking at their website, Harbour has actually cancelled their usual Vancouver/Seattle flights due to Covid - they don't seem to be running cross border at all right now.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Interesting. But when? The snowbird business would have died off a month ago. It probably was a good business for them, and something that popped up in areas that didn’t already have short-haul flights. Maybe they still do them as charters for those that don’t want to sit with rando pax. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snowbirds-canada-u-s-border-drive-winter-travel-covid-19-1.5810104 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snowbirds-canada-u-s-border... But I’m sure many/most just flew down deeper into US and forwent their Canadian car (possibly buying a beater/long term rental for US).
    - lytfyre 6y ago
      Appears to have been at least initially cancelled back in March, initially until the end of April - https://www.vicnews.com/news/harbour-air-cancels-all-seattle-flights-amid-covid-19/ https://www.vicnews.com/news/harbour-air-cancels-all-seattle.... I haven't seen any announcement of them resuming between now and then, but nothing that rules it out. I'm sure there are folks on HN who could tell us from public flight records. Not to say there haven't been problematic purposes for charter flights to non-us destinations going on, either - https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-couple-charged-after-chartering-plane-in-yukon-and-getting-covid-19-vaccine-say-officials-1.5279469 https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-couple-charged-after-charter...

aphextron 6y ago

>But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. The batteries take up a lot of weight and weigh the same at the start of the flight as at the end, and while I'm sure battery technology will continue to improve, the weight issue is going to be a problem for a long time. Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money. It makes sense for short flights. The vast majority of costs associated with aviation are in maintenance, with the majority of those costs coming from engine overhauls. This means you have a high fixed cost of operation per flight hour regardless of distance traveled/passengers carried. Electric motors will reduce that cost by orders of magnitude and make these small flights economically feasible. > I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come. The key is that you don't need the same performance of a piston engine aircraft. Batteries are just good enough now for these types of short flights to be possible. And with the maintenance savings, you come out ahead. Electric motors will also be vastly safer and more reliable than single engine piston aircraft, leading to insurance savings.

sokoloff 6y ago
I don’t think the data bears out that there’s a vast safety opportunity for electric motors. From the 2018 Nall report (the most recent I could readily find on my phone), mechanical failure is sub 20% of accidents and sub 7% of fatal accidents. Pilots are around 75% of the primary link in the accident reports.
- bdamm 6y ago
  Yes, although there may be gains there too. Electric motors can provide high torque more quickly than piston engines, and of course much more quickly than turbines. Maybe this will result in faster stall recoveries, and with new uses of motors flight envelopes might get more stable as well.
  - earleybird 6y ago
    You don't have to worry about torque on the ground. In the air near stall speed more torque is not necessarily your friend.

ozborn 6y ago

You may be right and this will lose money (I haven't done the math and don't know enough specifics), but you also need to figure in maintenance and fuel costs which are much lower with electric planes. The trick is picking the correct use case and short flights to an island are probably the first target for these aircraft.

notatoad 6y ago

The float plane operators in the lower mainland doing quick hops from Vancouver to Victoria or Whistler don't really have a lot of concern for money, I don't think. Their passengers aren't especially price-sensitive and there's more demand than supply a lot of the time. And the motor manufacturer is funded by a Singaporean private investor. It's a gamble that people will care about environmental concerns more than price. In Vancouver that's a decent bet.

Scoundreller 6y ago
While the pax may not be sensitive to price, the providers still want to drive down their costs. Probably plenty of people in BC that would loooooove the combo of quick transport and looking down on those carbon-burning ferry/bus riders going to the islands/Whistler. Could likely sell tickets for more. Taking a gas plane and buying offsets sounds as unfun at parties as someone saying they bought a Corolla and offsets. Technical correctness matters less than image.
- notatoad 6y ago
  The provider here is the one developing the plane though - harbour air isn't building a plane to sell to other operators, they're the one operating the flights. If they really want to drive costs down, they must have decided this is a good way to do it. But yeah, I think they're mostly selling the image here. Being able to fly to Whistler in half the time of driving and tell the people you're meeting there that you took the greener method is worth a lot to some people (and that's a good thing)
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Entirely possible the airline is getting paid to trial the tech. Not sure where else in the world people would even pay more for such short hops because it’s electric. I’m sure Whistler city council is looking for a way to ban carbon av emissions on their landing lake. Probably can’t because feds, but they would if they could.

madhato 6y ago

I've flown Harbour Air before and the flight from Vancouver to Victoria is just 30mins. Electricity isn't too expensive in BC and also generated cleanly. Perfect testing ground for the viability of electric planes.

99_00 6y ago
As a passenger, how noisy are the planes?
- ChrisKingWebDev 6y ago
  Very noisy. I've flown on them a couple times from Nanaimo. They pass out earplugs to every passenger, and you need them. I think the electric ones will be much quieter.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    Most of the noise of a prop-driven airplane is the propellor, not the engine. Electrics will be quieter, but not sure they will be "much" quieter.

inglor_cz 6y ago

The main advantage of electric planes is that VTOL capability is much easier with electric motors. You can have twelve cheap electric motors on the plane instead of one combustion motor. With that comes great maneuverability. The second advantage is that they are fairly quiet. Together, this is great for short "taxi" flights across natural barriers (fjords, mountain ranges), even at night and without need for actual airstrips at either end of the journey.

baybal2 6y ago
No, by far. Try to land such thing in a crosswind without lateral control authority. That's hard even with just 10kg quadcopters, and a "flying car" will be completely unlandable without extra rotor mechanisation, negating electric power advantages.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Why would there be a crosswind for a VTOL aircraft at the point of touchdown? Why not yaw the aircraft into the wind?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    If the wind is any much changing, you will wobble the aircraft to pieces, and even if you try to, you will still not get enough control authority to land safely in such conditions. You don't get anywhere near the amount of control authority, and its speed if it depends on rotating the whole body of the aircraft weighting many tons.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Hmm, at least, it's way easier to put extra rotors where you want them to be, since you don't need a gearbox + transmission from the main engine, and can just put a secondary, smaller electric engine. Crosswind is really less of an issue near the ground, so you could first lower your altitude and precisely adjust later.
  - 6y ago

novok 6y ago

Actually ‘fuel’ cost wise an electric plane is significantly cheaper. Avgas is also significantly more expensive in canada than the usa due to taxes. The 30m short hop propeller flying here is actually the sweet spot for electric craft and I estimate they will spend about 10x less in energy costs alone.

sokoloff 6y ago
Most of Harbour Air’s non-electric fleet are Jet-A burning turbines. Only the Beaver is possibly avgas fueled. (There are also turbine conversions of the Beaver.)

ericbarrett 6y ago

People need to look at the actual numbers, which I think are revealing. Top-end lithium-Ion batteries have an energy density, fully charged, of about 700 Watt-hours per kg, which converts to 2.5 MJ/kg. Jet-A, and basically all similar refined hydrocarbons, have an energy density of 42 MJ/kg. Is an electric plane impossible? Clearly not. Are batteries getting better and better? Absolutely; a few generations ago their density was < 1 MJ/kg. But the numbers are still bad. 5% of the energy density for electric versus fossil fuels IF you use the latest & best.

FL33TW00D 6y ago
You beat me to it. Any time someone mentions an electric plane the MJ/Kg jumps to mind. Until battery energy density increases by an order of magnitude electric planes aren’t going to happen, at least commercially.
bluGill 6y ago
True, but these seem to be very short haul flights, so they can probably get by. Just don't expect it to scale to the general case.
nickik 6y ago
Very reductionist analysis. - Electric engines are far more efficient. Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio. - Lighter engines on the wing mean lighter overall plane structure - Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel - Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery You can also do far more with differential thrust and potentially remove the planes tail. Actually you could do that even with normal planes as Chief Scientist at NASA H. Bowers has discovered. Look at the next generation Tesla battery pack. The batteries are literally what is holding together the car and the resulting weight is not much larger then the structure you would have needed without the battery. We are not there yet, it takes a complex vertically integrated approach to build such a plane, but it is not impossible. Just like with EV you need to re-engineer and rethink every aspect of the plane. Your range might still not be as good, but hell of a lot better then 5% and also far, far cheaper to operate.

eloff 6y ago

Actually they're doing this not for environmental reasons but for financial reasons. There's been articles written about it, including interviews with the executives of the company itself talking about why they're making the switch, which you can find on Google if so inclined. It's cheaper to operate these electric seaplanes to the point where it's worth the capital investment for the company.

newsclues 6y ago

There is regular flights between the mainland and the island, and a more environmentally friendly option would get traction in the market even with a price premium.

nickik 6y ago

Electric planes where used have already shown to be significantly cheaper to operate. Even if you need more overall energy, as electricity is cheaper then fuel, that is not necessary a problem. Also, I think people really need to think about this some more and not just look at first order effects. ery reductionist analysis. - Electric engines are far more efficient. - Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio. - Lighter engines mean less structural load - Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel - Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery - Electric engines have efficiency that stays the same, not optimized for one altitude - Electric engines can go higher and use less air resistant To achieve all of this you need to completely re-engineer planes and that is very expensive and batteries are only just getting close to the required power. The necessary investment to completely redesign plans to take advantage of these has not been made. If you look at Alice plain for example, they have taken advantage of some of these things I mention. They were able to get away with thin wings. However they still don't exploit many of these things as they are just an integration company. Their plane carries the battery like cargo, rather then having the battery be structural.

Gibbon1 6y ago
One other thing is electric motors are much more reliable than piston engines. And they can be ganged on the same drive shaft for redundancy. I don't have numbers myself but 'internet says' engine maintenance for light aircraft is around $10/hr of flight time.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery Good point. Airplanes waste tons of (potential and kinetic) energy while getting lower, slowing down for landing, and finally breaking. Energy recovery sound like an excellent safety (and energy saving) feature.

ska 6y ago

> But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. This just isn't obviously true in all cases. Here we are talking about a successful small private airline that doesn't seem to be run by idiots, so it's pretty easy to make the jump to "huh, I'm probably missing something here". After all, it's not like they've committed to converting their fleet, just a pilot project to prove it out. Seems sensible.

TheRealPomax 6y ago

> I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come. Let's have the folks who are actually doing this because they think they can make it economically viable determine whether that's true or not eh?

throwawaygh 6y ago

> Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money. Vancouver <-> Whistler/Victoria. If it's cleaner and quieter than the conventional planes then there will be a market. But yeah it's a niche "1%er + novelty" market for sure.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

It's a defeatist attitude. Experiments have to start somewhere, right? People wrote the same kinds of comments about digital cameras. Fifteen years later it is difficult to buy anything else. So, let the engineers work on the problems.

johnwalkr 6y ago

Harbour Air flights are mostly about 35 minutes long, so are essentially the equivalent use case to early electric cars (and I mean early as in 90s and 2000s, not the much earlier attempts).

saberdancer 6y ago

The plane needs most power on takeoff. This partly mitigates the fact that batteries weight the same on takeoff and landing. You could probably use altitude to recover part of the energy expended by using the propeller to regenerate energy (like in braking), especially useful for emergency power.

Hypx 6y ago

It's pretty obvious that the future of aviation is either hydrogen or some kind of synfuel. I'm amazed that people are still even thinking of batteries here. It's like people are still trying to push floppy disc drives or something.

mkonecny 6y ago

Not saying you're wrong, but go read the criticisms of Tesla when it first started, and your comment mirrors those. Of course there are difficult hurdles to overcome, otherwise everyone would be doing it

MisterTea 6y ago

> Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money. Yeah the best option is to just sit around and wait until better technology appears out of thin air. Much easier than wasting all that money and time on R&D.

throwawayboise 6y ago

I don't know a lot about batteries -- it is obvious that weight doesn't change as the charge is depleted, but is there any (even theoretical) reason to think that batteries can be made much lighter? E.g. any research into very lightweight battery technologies? Maybe supercapacitors could be lightweight?