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Elon Musk has talked about making electric planes, so I don't think they are entirely nuts. Thinking out loud, you might build it with minimal fuel on board at
by danielweber 13y ago
Elon Musk has talked about making electric planes, so I don't think they are entirely nuts.
Thinking out loud, you might build it with minimal fuel on board at all, doing a sled launch[1] or having it run its own engines off of external power for launch. Then require beamed power throughout the flight, with the provision that the plane can still land if all ground stations fail to provide power. But the plane starts and ends with less weight than a normal plane does because it's not carrying fuel, so it just might be feasible.
Then again, you can also manufacture hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 given energy input.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_sled_launch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_sled_launch
- dredmorbius 13y agoThey exist. Do you have any references in which Musk details his plans other than "that would be cool"? Because I'm not finding anything. All of the electric airplane work I've seen is either highly experimental (e.g., solar-powered aircraft), effectively powered gliders, or some very small and not-particularly-capable 1-2 person craft. I mean, it's cool that humans won't have to give up the skies entirely, but we've also got perfectly viable aircraft with no engines whatsoever, for which a ground-tow launch is a present reality. If you're looking at a credible commercial passenger or freight aviation model, this ain't it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft Fuel synthesis is something I've discussed elsewhere in this thread. I actually think the US Naval Research Lab's concept of using seawater as both an H2 and CO2 source is inspired -- there's about 140x the CO2 by volume than in air.