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27 mins endurance (?) for $5 of power. Not bad. I rent a 172 and have been paying a $5/h fuel surcharge for the past few months due war in Iran - but at UK avga
by dbuxton 2mo ago
27 mins endurance (?) for $5 of power. Not bad. I rent a 172 and have been paying a $5/h fuel surcharge for the past few months due war in Iran - but at UK avgas prices 27 mins in my plane would be $55ish. Haven’t looked into the details but kind of crazy impact on economics of aviation if this size plane (10x 172 MTOW) can actually do useful short haul
- tensor 2mo agoI assume being electric that the maintenance costs will also be much lower. How much do you spend annually on engine maintenance?
- dbuxton 2mo agoWell I just rent so no idea. Not sure they will end up lower as presumably it will all need to be conducted by a FAA double-starred technician who is not just vibe coding it
- why_at 2mo agoI want this to work but this isn't enough to get anywhere. Aren't you supposed to have 30 minutes extra fuel minimum just as a safety margin?
- Tuna-Fish 2mo agoIt has a diesel generator onboard, which provides the reserve.
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoI’m thinking they got this wrong by an order of magnitude. The region they did this flight in charges ~$.25/kw. So they would have had to do the entire flight with 20kw/h or an average of 40kw of output. That’s 60hp, or about a third what your Cesnna uses on climbout. Even if you give them a very low price of $.10/kw then they are flying with less than the Cessna on climbout. Hell, a Cessna in level flight uses ~80 kw. In other words, they are claiming that they can fly this thing on a VW beetle engine, or the PR guy got the number wrong.
- klaff 2mo agoYeah, fully charging my EV (0-100%) at home on night-time discounted electricity of $0.07/kWh would cost me $6, so even allowing for really cheap electricity this doesn't feel right. A Dornier 328 (roughly similar in size) has two 1625 kW engines. Heart stated they "delivered more than one megawatt of power" during the flight, so maybe comparable to one of the Dornier's engines at 60% power? Even the DC-3 could take off with one engine but 60% seems iffy. At 1000 kW and $0.10/kWh (being very generous I think), the plane would be using $100/h (at 1000 kW level) or $1.67/minute. You'd blow past $5 in 3 minutes. I don't like that they don't share the basic numbers. It's as if they don't want folks doing the math.
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoThe funny thing is that it’s still going to be a fraction of the cost of jet A1 if they had the math right. The Dornier is burning around 300 gallons per hour, at current US fuel prices that’s more than $1k/hour.