2 ms·

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 - eac

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".
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      > 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 And my point is that this isn't going to be remotely possible without order-of-magnitude improvements in battery technology. The economics of a 9 seater aircraft flying 30 minutes in what a car can cover in an hour is just terrible. Remember, that plane was flying slowly and didn't even climb over 2,500 feet. With no passenger load either, probably. The amount of energy it'd take to carry a load with passengers in a 30 to 1 hour flight at normal cruising speed is vastly greater than what is capable with batteries. The existing lithium ion batteries are already approaching or exceeding 50%. Just like how there's only so much energy you can get out of a kilogram of gasoline, there's only so much energy you can store in a kilogram of a lithium battery (different chemistries like LiFePo have different thermodynamic limits, but they all have a hard physical limit). A battery powered plane would have to have a different battery chemistry, the thermodynamics of the best battery chemistry we know of is too constrained. "Pick a new chemistry" is way easier said than done. Why haven't we just picked a new combustible fuel chemistry that doesn't emit greenhouse gases? And in a sense, you're right that battery powered planes are the future: hydrogen is that new battery chemistry. The energy density by mass and volume of compressed or liquid H2 is much greater than lithium batteries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3AEnergy_density.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3...
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Darth Vader voice: Your lack of vision is disturbing. Why would a plane need a pilot at all? Make it fully autonomous and be done with it. Teslarize all the things! Harr! :-)

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".
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > 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 And my point is that this isn't going to be remotely possible without order-of-magnitude improvements in battery technology. The economics of a 9 seater aircraft flying 30 minutes in what a car can cover in an hour is just terrible. Remember, that plane was flying slowly and didn't even climb over 2,500 feet. With no passenger load either, probably. The amount of energy it'd take to carry a load with passengers in a 30 to 1 hour flight at normal cruising speed is vastly greater than what is capable with batteries. The existing lithium ion batteries are already approaching or exceeding 50%. Just like how there's only so much energy you can get out of a kilogram of gasoline, there's only so much energy you can store in a kilogram of a lithium battery (different chemistries like LiFePo have different thermodynamic limits, but they all have a hard physical limit). A battery powered plane would have to have a different battery chemistry, the thermodynamics of the best battery chemistry we know of is too constrained. "Pick a new chemistry" is way easier said than done. Why haven't we just picked a new combustible fuel chemistry that doesn't emit greenhouse gases? And in a sense, you're right that battery powered planes are the future: hydrogen is that new battery chemistry. The energy density by mass and volume of compressed or liquid H2 is much greater than lithium batteries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3AEnergy_density.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3...

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago

Darth Vader voice: Your lack of vision is disturbing. Why would a plane need a pilot at all? Make it fully autonomous and be done with it. Teslarize all the things! Harr! :-)