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> With electrification, aviation can become so cheap… Fuel is not the dominant cost in general aviation. Electrification alone won’t make it cheap.

• ramesh31 4y ago
  >Fuel is not the dominant cost in general aviation. Electrification alone won’t make it cheap. It's not about fuel efficiency. In fact, any electric aircraft with current battery tech is always going to be less efficient than a jet, because jets burn oxygen from the air. It's about maintenance. The fixed hourly cost of aviation is almost entirely based on the cost of maintenance. And a fleet of electric aircraft will be orders of magnitude cheaper to maintain than turboprops and jets. That can unlock whole new business models of small scale commercial aviation that aren't possible today.
  • nradov 4y ago
    When you say "orders of magnitude cheaper" you can't possibly mean even 10×. There is more to aircraft maintenance than just engine repairs and overhauls. Electric aircraft will still require similar amounts of maintenance on the airframe, control surfaces, avionics, and interior. And some of the powered lift designs have literally dozens of separate motors and rotors, each of which require periodic manual inspection.