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In addition to other comments here about increased weight and complexity... There's an area where it makes sense, and it's being trialed in few places. Namely
by p_l 4y ago
In addition to other comments here about increased weight and complexity...
There's an area where it makes sense, and it's being trialed in few places. Namely electric propulsion for taxiing.
You see, Taxiing on jet engines is very, very, very inefficient - you stay pretty much in worst fuel economy all the time to the point that taxiing burns more fuel than few hundred kilometers of cruise on the heaviest airliners. In fact optimizing taxiing is important enough that landings are calculated to ensure you have shorter distance and can reuse kinetic energy from landing, and depending on plane it might be norm to shut off all engines except one during taxi.
So there's experimentation with either adding electric drivetrain to main gear or having remote-controlled pulling car or quick-detachable (and also remote controlled) drive blocks that could attach to main gear. This way the plane would only start the engines just before going onto its designated runway.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoThis all just furthers my idea that if I’m ever a time traveler, I’ll try and convince the past to make airplanes that all have aircraft carrier sling shot systems… for fun.
- stavros 4y agoTaxiing is the process of getting the plane to the slingshot.
- simonsarris 4y agoYeah, you'd need to convince the past that "tugboats but for aircraft" is a good thing to standardize.
- dwighttk 4y agoI am not an expert This doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. If taxiing is so inefficient, why not use the pushback carts to push/pull the planes into position? I’ve been to many more airports that make the plane taxi for quite a distance, like 20 minutes (not just sitting and waiting, but moving) to get to the gate than ones that “ensure you have shorter distance and can reuse kinetic energy from landing”
- p_l 4y agoThat's essentially what the prototype projects are doing, except optimized for taxiing vs. "just" pushback or maintenance moves - normal pushback truck is not exactly prepared to handle high traffic taxiing, partially due to how communication between aircraft and pushback is handled. So those projects investigate a solution that is optimized for the whole taxi trip at full traffic at the airport, including electric solutions to avoid currently heavy diesel pushback trucks.
- urthor 4y agoIs then issue the turbines themselves, or the jet fuel engine? I was wondering why they don't do what Prius did andnhabe a gas motor charge batteries.