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".
[...] 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".
Correct me if I'm wrong but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Correct me if I'm wrong but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Correct me if I'm wrong but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Exactly right, the same as we do with gasoline (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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
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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.
Pointless. Individual cells don't care how much power is being fed into the
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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.
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong but... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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The nuclear reactors for a nuclear powered bomber are on display, in Idaho, in the parking lot of ERB-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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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. .
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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.
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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
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Tesla Semi will supercharge at 1MW (Score:2)
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Over your house.
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Re: How can there be no change in mass? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: How can there be no change in mass? (Score:5, Interesting)
Possible solution - jettison the battery when spent. It could be done in a controlled manner and recovered once it lands on the ground.
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Explain how there is no change in mass, despite energy being dissipated and no new energy being inputted.
here [wikipedia.org].
Re:How can there be no change in mass? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually a discharging battery is losing mass. E=mcË2 still applies. However it is so minuscle you need a big battery to measure it.
Someone failed their physics class (Score:3)
" So the mass decreases as energy is transferred into the surrounding environment."
Did you just make that up or did you read some einstein, not understand and just rearrange some words to try and sound smart? A teeny tiny amount of mass is lost via E=MC^2 -> m = E/C^2 but it seems you don't understand how fossil fuels work. At all.
Re:How can there be no change in mass? (Score:4, Informative)
Explain how there is no change in mass, despite energy being dissipated and no new energy being inputted.
There is a change in mass: If the batteries can store 12 MWh of energy, Einstein says that energy has a mass of about 0.5 milligrams. After dissipating that energy, the plane will be that much lighter at the end of the flight.
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The battery is just a conduit of energy. It is not a generator of energy. Laws of thermodynamics are abided.
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If the electricity was generated by solar, then the mass was lost on the sun.
Yes.
If the electricity in the battery was created by burning coal, then the mass was lost when the coal burned.
No. Before coal is burned, it is a mass made up of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulfur and other trace elements. Combined with oxygen these elements are rearranged into other molecules like CO2, H2O, SO2, etc. No mass is "lost", it is transformed and energy is released in the reorganization process.
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Explain how there is no change in mass
I can't do that because it's not true. A charged battery is in fact heavier than a depleted one, however E = mC^2 is such a large number that the mass, or more precisely, momentum difference is miniscule.
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That's not really an issue on small planes like this. On a Boeing 747 it might well be an issue, but the number of modern aircraft that can't land at takeoff weight but have to dump fuel in the event of an emergency is very small I believe. Mostly a thing of the past
It's a function of takeoff length verses landing roll out at a given weight and it applies to EVERY aircraft know to man. This is a function of landing weight, landing speed and runway distance and the braking system's ability to dissipate the necessary energy. Sure, it's not much of a concern to a Cessna 150, where the landing distance I can achieve using short field techniques is much less than the takeoff roll at any aircraft weight, but it doesn't take much increase in size before the mass * Speed (sq
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Re:Do the math. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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".
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
We've heard that before, about electric cars. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
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"of your battery capacity swapable for an already charged version"
Nice idea, but its not yet even practical for cars, never mind a craft that has to pass far more stringent tests and simply can't afford to have sparks from damaged connector cables or plugs, or fuselage damage from misloaded batteries.
Not with today's batteries (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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
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a friend of mine has an electric airplane (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:a friend of mine has an electric airplane (Score:4, Informative)
Curious - is it also quiet? Light aircraft can be damned noisy.
It's definitely quieter. I looked it up so I could play back the video, he doesn't have it next to an unmodified craft or anything but you basically just get a little whine with your prop noise instead of a lot of exhaust noise. It's apparently an "E-Gull", which seems to be a Thunder Gull [wikipedia.org] powered by Zero motorcycles equipment. (I know jack about aviation, and only a little bit about Zero Motorcycles; I've known a couple people who work[ed] there.)
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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.
Artificial Photosynthesis (Score:3)
Re:Artificial Photosynthesis (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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They don't need to be naval nuclear reactors, a common civilian nuclear reactor will produce the heat and electricity required. It doesn't have to be at the airport any more than an oil refinery needs to be at the airport. Just truck it in.
Do you think bio-fuels for airplanes would have to be from corn planted along the runways?
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It will by itself greatly expand air travel (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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...
Re:It will by itself greatly expand air travel (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The Year of Desktop Linux is Closer (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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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
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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.
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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.
Plane Ticket Discount (Score:4, Funny)
20% off for passengers that plug their laptops & phones in to help fuel the flight
LOL, no, not yet (Score:2)
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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.
Flight tests / real performance (Score:2)
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
Nuclear-powered planes (Score:2)
I Know (Score:3)
"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.
Charging need not be an issue (Score:2)
Meanwhile in China... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
costs seem wrong (Score:2, Informative)
While take-offs do burn more fuel, a few hour flight in a 4 passenger cessna is about 15 miles per gallon, or 26 gallons to go 400 miles. at $5 a gallon thats $133.
So it seems like the stated costs are not right.
Re:costs seem wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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First off, what passenger electric aircraft are you even referring to? Secondly, sounds pretty quiet to me. [youtube.com]
With such a low passenger count
Size is just a matter of scaling up - e.g. battery pack staying as the same fraction of the total mass, with a larger total mass. Indeed, the physics generally gets kinder to you the more you scale up (larger planes tend to have higher L/D ratios, and
Re:costs seem wrong (Score:4, Funny)
You heard it here first: battery advancements have suddenly and unexpectedly ceased. Mark this day on your calendar: 21 July is "End Of All Battery Improvements Day"!
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Sounds like bullshit to me
Can't blame the manufacturer for jumping on the "carbon evil" gravy train!
But the real long-term answer, the way aerospace companies actually end the problem, is to move power generation to space. Orbital solar power generation can already be done at a reasonable price at Falcon 9 launch costs. This isn't SciFi any more. And launch costs will keep falling.
Orbital solar doesn't have the various issues of terrestrial solar: clouds, latitude, etc. And it's much more efficient, because the atmosphere is muc
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I've long been an orbital power skeptic, and even at Falcon 9 prices I'm dubious. But with Starship at a couple hundred thousand dollars per launch in order to launch 100 tonnes? That actually looks practical in exchange for the benefits. If SpaceX can hit its low-turnaround-cost targets, that is.
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Solar though still gives the same airplane solution: electric battery power. Doesn't matter where you get your electricity from, your vehicles still use it the same way. That's the real beauty of electric - it lets us change our power sources independently from our power consumption. It'll take 20+ years to get many of the cars made today off the roads - a gas burner bought new today will still be burning gas until the day it's final owner decides it's no longer worth repairing. But if that car is elect
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Orbital solar doesn't have the various issues of terrestrial solar: clouds, latitude, etc. And it's much more efficient, because the atmosphere is much more transparent to microwaves than visible light. Simple solar thermal generation in space, with the transmission losses, comes out way ahead of the best terrestrial PV panels.
Do you want global warming? Because this is how you get global warming. You take energy from sunlight that would have missed the planet and aim it at the planet.
Earth's base temperature is solar insolation minus radiance. Humans have already been messing with the second term. Now you want to mess with the first term too? What could possibly go wrong...
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Do you want global warming? Because this is how you get global warming. You take energy from sunlight that would have missed the planet and aim it at the planet.
Human energy use is still trivial compared to the amount of sunlight that hits Earth.
* Total human power generation: ~18 TW
* Total solar power that hits the Earth's atmosphere: ~170,000 TW
We're a long way yet from being a Kardashev Type I civilization.
Using Engergy Makes Heat (Score:3)
This line of reasoning can be applied to almost any source/use of energy.
Burn oil or coal and you get more heat. Make electricity and use it to do anything, like turn a propeller in air, and, eventually, most of the energy ends up as heat. There are also aspects like: solar panels (hopefully) reflect less light than the ground would if it wasn'
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the taxes that Leftists will inevitably be successful in imposing
So vote them out. Starting 2020. Don't stay home. Go out and vote. Vote out every single tosspot that has the potential to harm and ruin this country.
As for rail travel, we used to have it, before Amtrak, but honestly the small jet killed all of that. Dc9 / MD80 was the nail that shut the rail coffin in the US.
Could rail make a comeback? The car and airplane lobbies wont' let it happen.
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The ones dumb enough to think that voting will make a difference are the ones who shouldn't be allowed to...
Oh, you mean like both sides are slime. OK, I understand.
Then I leave you with the three boxes of democracy:
1. Soap. Kinda like we do here.
2. Ballot. What will happen next year.
3. Ammo: When 3 and 2 no longer work.
Is this what you want? Option 3? According to you, the system doesn't work, both sides are out to ruin us.. so.. again, I ask you: Are you advocating for option 3?
No? Then what do you suggest? I'm eager to read what master plan you have in your head to fix this. Tell us. Please.
Why even travel these days? (Score:2)
The real question to ask is, why even travel these days?
Tourism is a lost cause. It's stupidly expensive, and it's awful once you're there. Take an American visiting Paris, London, Berlin or Rome. They will sit on a plane for at least 7 hours, and often much longer, just to get there. When they get there, they'll be constantly accosted by Africans, Middle Easterners, and assorted other third worlders trying to hawk useless trinkets, assuming a mugging doesn't take place. Any tourist attraction will feature
Re:Why even travel these days? (Score:4, Funny)
You are completely correct, ugly americans should stay home. Non-ugly americans (not you) should travel as they please.
Re: Nope (Score:2)
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Good plan. [google.is]
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You mean, basically any airplane.
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But you're fine with getting in an airplane carrying THOUSANDS OF POUNDS OF FOSSIL FUEL?
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If some enterprising company could establish rail routs at half the cost of a plane ticket, I'd be perfectly happy to relax in the observation car for a few days to travel from coast to coast
WTF "if" ? Nobody's stopping you from doing this right now: https://www.amtrakvacations.co... [amtrakvacations.com]
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A sleeper car for "a few days" will ALWAYS be more expensive than a comparable airplane ride.
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The only possible explanation I can see is the hope of getting to take advantage of the native population somehow, such as paying cheap prostitutes to do all kinds of humiliating thing to satisfy one's sick urges. Or maybe they have some naive idea that the exotic, hot females of the destination location all love the "big white pig-man" and want to "sucky-sucky long time, five dorrar"? I'm leaning toward that being the real explanation for this seemingly pointless exercise.
This is some of the funniest shit I've read on /. in a while.
Bravo and mod points!
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The OP might've been projecting a bit with the prostitution fantasies.
I was just in Jordan last week (flying with Ryanair as I mentioned in another post). Return tickets were like $60. Once you land, nobody forces you to do any of the touristy shit (though Petra is in fact great and you should go). Catch a local bus to the city and chill with some locals eating hummus and drinking tea. Stay in an airbnb or a hostel instead of Marriott and see how people live or meet other travellers.
Take a bus to Aqaba and
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Fuel costs are a moderate expense, but the critical thing about fuel costs are that they are one of the few things airlines can still reduce to make more profit. They've squeezed seats as close as they can before they make us stand, automated and cut staffing as much as they can, stopped serving food, etc.
Fuel costs have been pushing the new engine designs, and pushed some wing designs as well. One of the big selling points of the new Boeing and Airbus jets are the fuel savings. Rest assured they are alrea
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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"
While I'm sure that lowering the fuel cost would help financially, I wonder what percentage of the expense it actually is. Fuel and oil are less than 40% of the cost of owning a private single engine aircraft that is flown 100 hours per year. But I doubt it's near that much for a commercial plane. A commercial airline has to pay the pilot and flight attendants, as well as mechanics. They also have to pay baggage handlers, cleanup crews, customer service and ticketing agents. There's also business insurance, advertising, IT infrastructure and IT staff. Plus property for offices and office supplies, etc. Then there's upkeep on the interior. Most people will treat their own private plane a bit better than a customer of a commercial airline.
A lot of those are fixed costs. Due to union contracts, local labor laws, etc, you can only pay employees so much (or rather so little). Routine maintenance costs, lease/ownership payments are fairly fixed as well, or at least known and planned for in advance. Right now the main cost savings center for large airlines is fuel. This is everything from limiting groundtime (a plane only makes money in the air), focusing on using ground power/air over an APU(which burns fuel), and making schedules/aircraft a
Re: (Score:2)
While I'm sure that lowering the fuel cost would help financially, I wonder what percentage of the expense it actually is. Fuel and oil are less than 40% of the cost of owning a private single engine aircraft that is flown 100 hours per year.
And much of the remainder is maintenance, and some of the most expensive maintenance is to the engine. The electric motor only has bearings plus one moving part, and only the bearings are wear items.
But I doubt it's near that much for a commercial plane.
I asked Google "what percentage of an airline's budget goes to fuel" and it told me "Fuel costs are a significant but highly variable expense for airlines worldwide [statista.com], constituting 23.5 percent of total expenditure in 2018". So it's not that much, or even particularly near that much, but it's still pretty close. A
Not so (Score:2)
You can only stowaway on cargo planes.
A number of people are found frozen to death in the undercarriage of commercial aircraft, not impossible to stow away on at all. Just harder to survive...