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> The aircraft flew at more than 100 mph to an altitude of around 2,500 feet, made a few turns and then landed after 28 minutes This isn't going to disrupt any

> The aircraft flew at more than 100 mph to an altitude of around 2,500 feet, made a few turns and then landed after 28 minutes This isn't going to disrupt any kind of airline traffic. Battery energy density needs to improve by at least an order of magnitude - probably two - before it has any significant aerospace application outside of drones.

WorldMaker 4y ago
Already practical for some applications but needing work to more, even possibly a lot of work, is still a vast difference from "never in the foreseeable future". Regional planes that only travel 30 minutes to an hour and do so cheaper and more efficiently than gas/diesel equivalent planes can still massively disrupt the big passenger airlines. It used to be that the airlines had a wider mixture of 30 minute/1 hour flights on smaller commuter planes to smaller "regional" airports before the economies of scale of jet engines pushed everything bigger (fewer flights below 1 hour in distance; more "hub-and-spokes" centralization; etc). A return of cheap, efficient short 9 or so passenger commuter flights could massively disrupt today's passenger airlines and their logistics, not just tomorrow's. If electric efficiencies also manage to scale to the bigger flights, who knows what will happen, but it is something to watch that there's already practical disruption implications even before scaling it up that big.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  No, it's not practical for any application - at least none besides drones. A 737 has 150-200 seats, this would entail 17 separate 9-seater electric planes - each of which needs its own pilot - to substitute one regional jet. Ticket price would have to be extremely high just to fulfill the labor cost of operating the aircraft, because of this high staff to passenger ratio. There's also no mention of how long it took to recharge these batteries after the 30 minute flight - a plane that needs to sit for several hours to recharge between each 30 minute flight is not going to yield a return on investment.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Most short regional flights use tiny aircraft. ~9 seaters are surprisingly common in the island hopping industry. Labor costs are a non issue because the flights are so short. 2 hours of labor from people making 90k split 9 ways is 10$. And of course scaling up makes aircraft more efficient so you could get a slightly longer range from a 50 or 200 seat variant. The reasonable target with current technology and fuel reserves seems to be about 300 miles, which covers a surprising fraction of all trips.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Most regional airline flights are 50-100 seats. "Tiny" aircraft by airline standards are things like turboprop passenger craft [1]. A single digit number of seats is much more niche than regional flights. It's limited to island hopping and bush flying in remote areas - a much more limited market than regional flights. 2 hours of labor split 9 ways instead of 90 ways increases your labor cost by an order of magnitude. And again, it's unclear if that electric plane could even lift 9 passengers - it's just a plane with 9 seats, there was no mention as to whether or not the mass of passengers in those seats were simulated with a load. Scaling up would make it more efficient, but batteries' limitations prevent larger planes. Hence, why more energy dense fuels are required. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATR_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATR_72
      - WorldMaker 4y ago
        > Most regional airline flights are 50-100 seats. Today because of fuel cost economics. The earlier point remains that if that economics flips and rather than doing 3 hour-ish flights of 50-100 people between modest "hubs" you had more opportunities to do shorter point-to-point (1 hour/30 minutes/less) you light up a lot of possible flight legs that current passenger flight has ignored for decades. (In some cases you light them back up because earlier periods of passenger flight did have less hub-and-spoke/deep centralization and a lot more airports and airfields overall than are in operation today.) I'm not sure it is going to happen, but I wouldn't underestimate the potential there either just because it doesn't look like the status quo. That's kind of the definition of "disruption".

WorldMaker 4y ago

Already practical for some applications but needing work to more, even possibly a lot of work, is still a vast difference from "never in the foreseeable future". Regional planes that only travel 30 minutes to an hour and do so cheaper and more efficiently than gas/diesel equivalent planes can still massively disrupt the big passenger airlines. It used to be that the airlines had a wider mixture of 30 minute/1 hour flights on smaller commuter planes to smaller "regional" airports before the economies of scale of jet engines pushed everything bigger (fewer flights below 1 hour in distance; more "hub-and-spokes" centralization; etc). A return of cheap, efficient short 9 or so passenger commuter flights could massively disrupt today's passenger airlines and their logistics, not just tomorrow's. If electric efficiencies also manage to scale to the bigger flights, who knows what will happen, but it is something to watch that there's already practical disruption implications even before scaling it up that big.

Manuel_D 4y ago
No, it's not practical for any application - at least none besides drones. A 737 has 150-200 seats, this would entail 17 separate 9-seater electric planes - each of which needs its own pilot - to substitute one regional jet. Ticket price would have to be extremely high just to fulfill the labor cost of operating the aircraft, because of this high staff to passenger ratio. There's also no mention of how long it took to recharge these batteries after the 30 minute flight - a plane that needs to sit for several hours to recharge between each 30 minute flight is not going to yield a return on investment.
- Retric 4y ago
  Most short regional flights use tiny aircraft. ~9 seaters are surprisingly common in the island hopping industry. Labor costs are a non issue because the flights are so short. 2 hours of labor from people making 90k split 9 ways is 10$. And of course scaling up makes aircraft more efficient so you could get a slightly longer range from a 50 or 200 seat variant. The reasonable target with current technology and fuel reserves seems to be about 300 miles, which covers a surprising fraction of all trips.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Most regional airline flights are 50-100 seats. "Tiny" aircraft by airline standards are things like turboprop passenger craft [1]. A single digit number of seats is much more niche than regional flights. It's limited to island hopping and bush flying in remote areas - a much more limited market than regional flights. 2 hours of labor split 9 ways instead of 90 ways increases your labor cost by an order of magnitude. And again, it's unclear if that electric plane could even lift 9 passengers - it's just a plane with 9 seats, there was no mention as to whether or not the mass of passengers in those seats were simulated with a load. Scaling up would make it more efficient, but batteries' limitations prevent larger planes. Hence, why more energy dense fuels are required. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATR_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATR_72
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      > Most regional airline flights are 50-100 seats. Today because of fuel cost economics. The earlier point remains that if that economics flips and rather than doing 3 hour-ish flights of 50-100 people between modest "hubs" you had more opportunities to do shorter point-to-point (1 hour/30 minutes/less) you light up a lot of possible flight legs that current passenger flight has ignored for decades. (In some cases you light them back up because earlier periods of passenger flight did have less hub-and-spoke/deep centralization and a lot more airports and airfields overall than are in operation today.) I'm not sure it is going to happen, but I wouldn't underestimate the potential there either just because it doesn't look like the status quo. That's kind of the definition of "disruption".