Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Earth Transportation

Why the Age of Electric Flight is Finally Upon Us (bbc.com) 291

Aerospace firms are joining forces to tackle their industry's growing contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, with electric engines seen as one solution. But will this be enough to offset the growing demand for air travel? From a report: This week's Paris Airshow saw the launch of the world's first commercial all-electric passenger aircraft -- albeit in prototype form. Israeli firm Eviation says the craft -- called Alice -- will carry nine passengers for up to 650 miles (1,040km) at 10,000ft (3,000m) at 276mph (440km/h). It is expected to enter service in 2022. Alice is an unconventional-looking craft: powered by three rear-facing pusher-propellers, one in the tail and two counter-rotating props at the wingtips to counter the effects of drag. It also has a flat lower fuselage to aid lift.

[...] Eviation has already received its first orders. US regional airline Cape Air, which operates a fleet of 90 aircraft, has agreed to buy a "double-digit" number of the aircraft. The firm is using Siemens and magniX to provide the electric motors, and magniX chief executive Roei Ganzarski says that with two billion air tickets sold each year for flights of under 500 miles, the business potential for small electric passenger aircraft is clear. Crucially, electricity is much cheaper than conventional fuel. A small aircraft, like a turbo-prop Cessna Caravan, will use $400 on conventional fuel for a 100-mile flight, says Mr Ganzarski. But with electricity "it'll be between $8-$12, which means much lower costs per flight-hour".

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Why the Age of Electric Flight is Finally Upon Us

Comments Filter:
  • by acoustix ( 123925 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @09:47AM (#58799108)

    Two of the major challenges with battery powered planes: Their landing weight will be the same as their takeoff weight. Typically takeoff weights can be much heavier due to being full with fuel. The landing weights typically need to be lower to not damage the landing gear.

    Also, with liquid fuel planes their range increases as they consume fuel (less weight). Will electric planes be able to travel the same distance keeping the weight the same throughout the entire flight?

    I realize that the article specifically talks about short range flights of less than 500 miles. But I was wondering about the possibility of longer range flights.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @10:13AM (#58799258)

        A Boeing 777 can load 181000 liters of Kerosine

        If I read the article correctly, these airplanes aren't trying to be in the same domain as a 777. I think the better equal they are trying to compare to is the Cessna 208's. I feel that for large commercial craft the idea is to formulate fuel that's easily renewable as opposed to having them go full electric.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by nasor ( 690345 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @11:00AM (#58799602)
            Combustion engines are much less efficient at converting chemical potential energy into kinetic energy than electric motors are at converting electrical potential energy into kinetic energy, so the electric airplane will not need nearly as much potential energy on board as it's combustion equivalent. This is also why a Tesla can go 300+ miles on a 100 kWh charge, while a conventional car could never go so far on 100 kWh worth of gasoline (about 3 gallons).
          • by imgod2u ( 812837 )

            The new V3 Supercharger stations Tesla is making will pump ~250KW per stall * average of 10 or so stalls. So 2.5MW. Multiply that by 10 isn't that out of the question.

            The key is they use battery banks to trickle-charge (likely either recycled from old cars or produced at the gigafactory). So the load can't be maintained. But cars aren't charging 100% of the time and neither are planes.

            • We can't refuel every car and plane simultaneously and continuously either; we don't have pipes running directly from gasoline refineries to all refuelling stations (rater there are storage tanks at the refuelling stations).

              But for some reason whenever we're talking about electric vehicles some jackass pipes up with a scenario where we're recharging every EV on the planet at the same time with no local energy storage.
          • And you're being generous with the 2 hour turnaround time. Everyone's trying to minimize this because planes sitting on the ground are just burning money. It's an extreme but I've just been on a Ryanair flight and when I was getting out of the plane, people were already standing in the corridor to board it. I didn't time it, but it was probably just about 30-40 minutes. An hour in total landing to take off according to the actual actual timing on flightradar.

            Any progress here is great of course and I'm not

          • It doesn't matter how much energy a Cessna 208 can load. What matters is how much energy a new electric plane needs for the flight durations/distances it's targeting. From the article, 100 miles = $8-$12 in electricity. At the prices I pay, this is about 100 kWh. That sounds somewhat reasonable - about 1 mile/kWh, as contrasted to electric cars which get 2-4 miles/kWh.

            So to refuel from a 100 mile flight, they need to replace 100 kWh, which could be done in 40 minutes with a Tesla SuperCharger (150 kW ch

          • by Rei ( 128717 )

            Eviation Alice uses a 900kWh battery pack. 2 hours = 450kW. Tesla Supercharger V3 = 250kW per stall.

            The Cessna 208 has double the range, a higher gross weight, can hold up to 13 passengers in some configs (vs. 9 max), suffers Carnot losses, has induced drag from feeding its engines, a draggier engine config (incl. no wingtip props), and has fixed landing gear.

            For these planes they might be able to design a swappable battery system

            Pointless. Individual cells don't care how much power is being fed into the

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The ones with hybrid engines are looking to compete on longer routes and with more passengers. Say you had a plane that used a hybrid generator system (fossil generator running at maximum efficiency, providing electricity to drive prop motors). It wouldn't be as fast as a jet but it might be a fair bit cheaper to run, and people will trade time for cheaper tickets sometimes.

        • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @12:19PM (#58800128)
          A 777 reaches 80+ passenger miles per gallon [wikipedia.org]. A Cessna 208 [wikipedia.org] (9 passenger, 2 crew, 332 gallons, 1070 nmi range) would be about 40 passenger miles per gallon. Probably somewhat lower since unlike commercial aircraft the specified max range usually isn't at full capacity.

          Also note that the weight of a full load of fuel on a Cessna 208 is roughly equal to the weight of the passengers. On a 777 it's around 5x the weight of the passengers. So the diminishing weight of the fuel throughout the flight has a much larger impact on the 777's performance and range than on the 208's. That makes it much more difficult to replace the former's energy source with batteries than the latter's. On top of this, the energy density [wikipedia.org] of kerosene (roughly 42 MJ/kg) is two orders of magnitude higher than Li-ion batteries (about 0.5 MJ/kg). So even the fact that you're shifting the power generation efficiency loss from the plane to an electric power plant (a roughly 3x or 4x increase in power density) comes nowhere near offsetting the increased weight. Relegating this to short-haul operations (where the weight savings of electric motors instead of engines can offset the greater weight of the batteries).
      • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @10:19AM (#58799294)

        How many nuclear power plants will you need?

        Why not cut out the middleman, electricity, and power the aircraft with nuclear?

        You load up the tanks with water and use the nukes to boil the water which drives the steam turbine propellers.

        Of course, there might be a few folks who would be concerned about having flying Chernobyls over their heads.

      • That's a problem now. This is why all of the electric planes that they're making now are small ones for a dozen people or less.

        Two decades ago even this wasn't really looking possible. We're one generation of battery improvements from scaling up to 777s. No, we can't do that now, but there's no reason to think we won't be able to in the near (decade or two) future. .

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • You can get even more bang for your buck by spreading solar panels around the huge amounts of open land that airports have between and around their runways, JFK has a land area of approximately 20M m^2.

          Ask pilots what they think of landing at airports near water. Reflected sunlight off of the water is a serious pain in the eyes. Now you want every airport everywhere to have that problem? Obviously it's not insurmountable, but it's not completely trivial either.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      It's less of a problem with small crafts, you can land a fully fueled Cessna without a problem. The biggest issue with electric is scale. You are wasting practically 90% of the "fuel" on carrying itself. It's the size of a small turboprop, the cost of a small Boeing but only carries 9 people (and when they first announced these a few years ago their goal was ~15). It can't scale much further without some miraculous battery invention, a hydrogen plane would be more useful but at that point you're talking abo

      • by es330td ( 964170 )
        This is one of the nice things about using an avgas powered plane. You only put enough fuel on board to make your destination plus alternate plus reserve, thereby saving the weight of the unneeded fuel. Less weight = more distance. In a battery powered plane it must carry the equivalent weight penalty of a full fuel load at all times.
    • by es330td ( 964170 )
      Another major challenge is refueling. When I fly a C182 cross country I can land at a midpoint airport to visit the bathroom and get food and the plane can be refueled by the time I am done. I can be back in the air for the second leg of my trip in very short order. I fail to see how this would be possible in an electric airplane unless battery packs will be replaceable modules that can be swapped out.
  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Re:Do the math. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc...famine@@@gmail...com> on Friday June 21, 2019 @10:24AM (#58799320) Journal

      Well, someone did the math and is ordering a couple dozen of the small ones this year. Looks like you didn't do the math. Or you did the math assuming that this year with current technology we'd swap 100% of all planes to electric, keeping the same systems as we have in place for petroleum fueled planes as if that makes any sense. Because if those are the assumptions behind your math, that's dumb.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • which is likely, if it hasn't happened already, there have been major advances in battery storage technologies over the last few years. Duracell is no longer considered "cutting edge battery tech".

        the infrastructure to charge them in any reasonable time isn't going to happen

        Yeah, they said that about electric cars too. Given the length of time planes are generally on the ground, waiting for passengers to get on and off, I'm guessing it's entirely possible.

        You do understand that turn around times for commercial aircraft can be under an hour of time at the gate. Aircraft actually spend as little time at the gate as they can, which is most important during peak travel times, because you cannot make money unless the aircraft is flying people and/or stuff from A to B.

        Charging a battery pack in under an hour will be *required* followed by a very high discharge rate to power the takeoff and climb to cruse altitude. This is a very tall order for today's battery

    • by Brannon ( 221550 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @12:14PM (#58800066)
      Why do people treat fast charging as though it's some sort of unsolvable problem? We've seen EV chargers go from 10 kW to 250 kW (and soon to be >> 1MW) in a span of maybe 10 years. It's just not that hard in the grand scheme of hard problems.

      Similarly, moving a lot of electricity around long distances and storing it locally is also not rocket science--there's quite a bit of prior art on both.
    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      It's not happening. Planes don't magically require less energy to fly.

      Actually, they do.

      1) Fuel-burning engines suffer Carnot losses. Electric motors don't.
      2) You don't have to have (draggy) intake air to drive an electric motor.
      3) The smaller size of electric motors lets you use more of them and position them as you choose - such as for example the drag-reducing wingtip motors on the Eviation Alice.

      Beyond things like this, there's also the simple fact that you're changing the cost-benefit equation. Cuttin

  • Even assuming huge advances in battery technology, with batteries that are 30 times more efficient and "energy-dense" than they are today, it would only be possible to fly an A320 airliner for a fifth of its range with just half of its payload, says Airbus's chief technology officer Grazia Vittadini.

    • an A320 airliner

      Reading the article indicates that they aren't targeting A320 or any comparable craft like that. The specs given puts it in the Cessna 208 or Beechcraft C90 domain. I think it's only fair to compare apples to apples here.

      • The specs given puts it in the Cessna 208 or Beechcraft C90 domain. I think it's only fair to compare apples to apples here.

        So, what fraction of current air travel fits in the Cessna 208 or Beech C90 domain? This looks like a way for already wealthy people to travel, but seems like it'll have no real impact on 99% of air travel...

        • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          Eventually fossil fuels will run out even if they're not restricted beforehand due to climate change, so either we find an alternative to kerosene or commercial civil flight becomes a thing of the past and we go back to cars, trains and boats.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Maybe the airline industry changes, flying more planes with smaller passenger loads. Instead of 1 plane with 200 people, it's 20 planes with 10 people. Maybe it even works somehow, since people can be flown directly and closer to their actual desired destination instead of a major airport merely somewhat close to where they want to go.

          Maybe the shorter ranges require more hops, but people tolerate it better because the smaller planes make the now-frustrating "changing planes" exercise faster and easier th

    • There are hard limits on energy density of batteries governed by physics. 30x is never going to happen.
  • It costs a few bucks to charge, and it doesn't require a lot of expensive maintenance.

    It might take a while for passenger airliners to go electric, but it is the immediate future of light aviation.

    • by mccalli ( 323026 )
      Curious - is it also quiet? Light aircraft can be damned noisy.
    • I have one too, takes an hour to charge and can fly for about 20-30 minutes.

      Sadly I don't think foam RC planes will solve our travel needs anytime soon.

  • Rather than using electricity to power the plane, we could use it to produce [wikipedia.org] the (conventional) fuel from CO2 and H2O.
    • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer@noSPam.earthlink.net> on Friday June 21, 2019 @10:44AM (#58799474)

      Yep, that's where we are going. The US Navy has been working on this for a few years now. They want to use the nuclear reactors in an aircraft carrier to produce fuel for the aircraft it carries. Get that technology mature so the price is competitive with aviation fuel and the airline industry can get the treehuggers off their backs.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @09:59AM (#58799192)

    Taking the concept of flight in all areas including human carrying drones, electric air travel may not be able to take over much traditional air travel as we know it, but will greatly expand the use of air travel across a city area and maybe between small towns.

    Think Alaskan float planes, but without the need for water.

    Going to be really exciting to see drone taxis/shuttles take off.

    Why aren't helicopters doing this already? They are pretty expensive to own, operate, and maintain and mostly the issue is you need a skilled pilot. Drones wipe out a lot of those issues.

    • Why aren't helicopters doing this already? They are pretty expensive to own, operate, and maintain and mostly the issue is you need a skilled pilot. Drones wipe out a lot of those issues.

      Quite a number of companies are working on human-scale electric multicopters. The existing infrastructure, however, is designed for liquid-fueled singlecopters. You'll either need to do a battery swap, or have space for them to sit around on the ground at a charge point. All that stuff has to be designed and debated and funded and permitted and inspected and approved...

    • Why aren't helicopters doing this already? They are pretty expensive to own, operate, and maintain and mostly the issue is you need a skilled pilot. Drones wipe out a lot of those issues.

      No, I'm pretty sure the issue is the noise.

      Getting something to fly in the air means disturbing that air greatly, that creates noise. There's no way around that, at lest none I've seen yet. I believe Elon Musk even said something to this effect in his pitch for underground roadways. To get more people moving between one point to another means moving faster in wider and wider columns, that is unless we start stacking them up. This can mean elevated roads, aircraft, tunnels, or a few other options.

      I remember doing the math once on how we can have our "flying cars". A personal aircraft is not all that complex compared to a modern car. There's not really that much difference in materials, either in quantity or quality. With efficient use of wings and not being in any hurry means the fuel costs aren't all that different either. So the cost isn't going to be an insurmountable problem. It's still going to cost more than a car but not all that much more.

      What we do have is a problem of noise. There's a safety problem too but perhaps that can be mitigated with intelligent application of automation and mechanical design.

      Solve the noise problem and I believe we have something.

  • Demo planes mean nothing. NOTHING. People make prototypes and demos to get investor funding. Most go nowhere. We're still not in "The Age of Electric Vehicles" because we haven't solved the refueling problem (duration, location), battery weight vs. energy, or fiscally sustainable production. We will get there, but we're not sure if it will be via solid state batteries or via hydrogen.

    So if we're still trying to sort out cars (a slight bit simpler and less risky than aircraft), then no, "The Age of Electric

    • We will get there, but we're not sure if it will be via solid state batteries or via hydrogen.

      What? Are you saying that electric planes will use hydrogen fuel cells? That's not happening. Just burn the hydrogen in a jet engine and forget all the extra moving parts and weight they add.

      When it comes to densely storing hydrogen for use as a fuel the best means is to attach those hydrogen atoms to a carbon chain. There's a lot of hydrogen to burn in a tank of kerosene. To close that carbon loop so there's no additional CO2 added to the environment we can synthesize the fuel from CO2 pulled from the

      • What? Are you saying that electric planes will use hydrogen fuel cells? That's not happening. Just burn the hydrogen in a jet engine and forget all the extra moving parts and weight they add.

        Yes, that's great. The only emissions will be heat and water. Even if some fuel goes unburned, that will still effectively be true.

        There's a lot of hydrogen to burn in a tank of kerosene. To close that carbon loop so there's no additional CO2 added to the environment we can synthesize the fuel from CO2 pulled from the air.

        Burning hydrocarbon fuels produces soot [utah.edu], and also releases NOx, SOx, and unburned hydrocarbons [faa.gov]. If we must continue to use jet turbines, we need to address these emissions. The carbon is the most easily solvable part of the problem, now that bio-based jet fuels have been tested.

        • Burning bio-fuels is just another coming environmental disaster. It's fine now while we have a lot of cheap corn to mix as a small fraction of our liquid fuels. We simply cannot produce enough bio-fuels to resolve the CO2 emissions problem and still have enough food to eat.

          Maybe we can solve that soot problem with liquid hydrogen. It's 1/3rd as energy dense by volume as kerosene but 3 times as energy dense by weight. The tanks would have to be larger but perhaps the weight savings would make up for it.

  • by NEDHead ( 1651195 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @10:31AM (#58799376)

    20% off for passengers that plug their laptops & phones in to help fuel the flight

  • Performance, weight, flight time all roll into the equation. The "power" is from stored energy, whereas fuel burns to provide the energy. If the storage versus weight can't be solved, won't do much good. But, if they really want non liquid fuel, gotta start somewhere. The era of the "Tri-Motor", DC2/3 really got passenger aviation going, so, it is reasonable that electric will start off slowly. Perhaps hydrogen fuel cells, will provide the energy without the weight penalty. Or maybe a REALLY long extensi
    • If the planes are smaller, you could give them a tow on launch. That normally uses somewhere near 10% of the fuel load. But then you need either more pilots, or pilotless planes.

  • I see a lot of pictures and a spiffy looking prototype on the *ground*, but is there any flight test data? I see talk of *planned* flight tests.

    No flights, completely new technology and they expect passenger service in 2022? I hope they share whatever they are smoking.

    A lot of companies have concept electric planes, but so far the real actual flying ones have very limited range. Remember that for commercial use under IFR, at least in the US they need the ability to divert to an alternate airport and th

  • That's what we're going to end up with if they want electric jumbo jets -- at least at our current level of mass-producable technology: small nuclear reactors powering aircraft. Which, pardon the poor joke, is an idea that'll never fly. We need better technology, or we need to give up air travel.
  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Friday June 21, 2019 @11:39AM (#58799848)

    "Why the Age of Electric Flight is Finally Upon Us "

    I knew that already last year when an electric drone almost put my eye out.

  • It's common for aircraft to have external pods for fuel. The batteries can just be swapped out at each destination. Battery mass, if situated on the wings, distributes the load thus making the structural requirements less and therefore the aircraft can be built lighter.
  • by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Friday June 21, 2019 @12:22PM (#58800148)
    In China they're building tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail link The 5 longest bridges in the world and 16 of the top 25 are in China as part of this project. They are spending 10's of billions of dollars now in a project that should benefit them for centuries.

    The US is investing their billions in Airplanes and subsidizing failing airlines with a failed businesss model. Yesterday on Reddit I was reading about a great new innovation in air travel, standing seats to pack more people on a plane. 20 years from now the US will have nothing to show for their airplane investment while China will have major nation-spanning infrastructure.

    And these trains travel at 217mph compared to 276mph for the plane in tfs, not a significant difference and most trips should be faster by rail when you don't factor in all the time wasted at the terminal

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

Working...