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Tell that to Airbus. It will work well on 500 miles trips with 50 passengers, which is most air transportation.
by larshen 5y ago
Tell that to Airbus. It will work well on 500 miles trips with 50 passengers, which is most air transportation.
- Robotbeat 5y ago500 mile trips are easily doable with battery-electric aircraft.
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y agoNo way, not even close. Maybe for single seat or double seaters, but not for commercial airliners with 50 or so seats.
- nickik 5y agoWe already have the first 8 seater that can go around 400 miles in testing. And that is using pretty conservative battery tech. And there is a significant amount of potential optimization left. Using the batteries as load structures is just one of them, that significantly changes the simplified calculation people do on density. There are many other ideas. The problem is a lot of investment and engineering is needed and to get a passenger plane threw the regulatory process, specially something as new as E-Plane is a gigantic project. In the future battery tech will get significantly better in the next 10 years and rethinking the plane from the ground up with that technology in mind will do the trick and beat hydrogen.
- Robotbeat 5y agoYeah, it is possible to do long haul (5000km or more) electric aircraft. Difficult, but possible. 500 miles wouldn’t even be a big challenge. And “number of passengers” doesn’t even appear on the Breguet Range Equation (modified for electric flight).
- nickik 5y agoOne thing that matters that people don't consider is that with EV, the operating cost will be lower, so it might actually make sense to switch to somewhat smaller planes flying more different routes. I think a 30 person plane that can cover the most common routes in populated regions would beat any jet fueled airline in terms of cost.