Electric Aircraft - The Thread

it does indeed, yet the tools we have to work with are also much more advanced.  the limit of what they could do was build it and try while we have computers.  honestly, it seems like it may not be possible to make a comparison.  i would have to say they had it way harder back then than we do now, even accounting for the complexity of the problems, just by the tools and materials they had to use.

3 hours ago, sfzombie13 said:

it does indeed, yet the tools we have to work with are also much more advanced.  the limit of what they could do was build it and try while we have computers.  honestly, it seems like it may not be possible to make a comparison.  i would have to say they had it way harder back then than we do now, even accounting for the complexity of the problems, just by the tools and materials they had to use.

I disagree. Engineering and technology are like a gold mine. If there is a gold vein, you can extract gold with simple tools. You'll be faster with power tools than with a mattock and a shovel, but in both cases you can get lots of gold in short time. That's what happened 100+ years ago. But if the mine runs dry you need to dig much more to get a tiny bit of gold out of it, if at all, even with the best possible tools. That's where we are now.

Aviation started at a vein, and slowly but surely the mine is running dry. It ain't magic, there are limits to what can be done, and the closer you get to the limit the more difficult it gets to push the envelope. You can't make gold out of nothing.

But if you are an optimist you can always hope for finding a new vein that would help to push things faster. Or maybe there is still enough gold to be found, spread in some cubic kilometres of useless rock. Maybe there is a new battery technology about to be discovered, or maybe we can refine sufficiently the existing technologies to make the electric aircraft a practical reality.  But maybe not, and that'd be it, the electric airplane would never be mainstream.

that sounds like a poor analogy, but i have to digest it a little.  on the surface, we are talking about two different things, so we can't really compare them at all.  the things they had to work out to fly with pencil and paper are much greater than working out powerplants with computers and all of the knowledge we have accumulated on electricity since then.  that would be akin to learning how to make an airplane fly when you already know all about aerodynamics, something which very much did not happen, as they learned aerodynamics the hard way as they went.

17 hours ago, sfzombie13 said:

the things they had to work out to fly with pencil and paper are much greater than working out powerplants with computers and all of the knowledge we have accumulated on electricity since then.  that would be akin to learning how to make an airplane fly when you already know all about aerodynamics, something which very much did not happen, as they learned aerodynamics the hard way as they went.

I think we are going to disagree on this. Basic aerodynamics are pretty easy stuff and you don't need much to move from 0 to a level that allows you to go fast and far. Optimizing it to the point it is now is a completely different story of course, but creating airfoils and testing them, and simply go by trial and error (and a bit of intuition) is not complicated. You can work out 70% of the stuff like that.

The problem now is not about electricity. Electricity and electric powertrains are not the complicated part in having mainstream electric airplanes. The challenge is in the chemistry of the batteries. And that can't be worked out with pencil and intuition IMO.

The analogy pretends to reflect simply that you can't make stuff out of nothing. Hoping that a given technology can evolve limitless is very naïve IMO.

2 hours ago, Deimian said:

The analogy pretends to reflect simply that you can't make stuff out of nothing. Hoping that a given technology can evolve limitless is very naïve IMO.

Chemistry is a tough mistress. The rules are hard and fast. The solutions even when they are found can be complicated and expensive.

i'll concede that point.  agree to disagree it is.  like it matters anyway.  enjoy.

AeroMarine is developing an interesting electric airplane. Here’s a video about it.

Harbor Air just flew their electric Beaver from Vancouver International Airport to Victoria International Airport. It only needed 24 minutes to fly from the South Fork of the Fraser River to Pat Bay. I have taken off from Pat Bay Airport dozens of times when I did tandems for Victoria Skydivers. 24 minutes is a typical route for Harbor Air and is the longest flight that their electric Beaver has flown to date.

I saw that Harbor Air story - $6 of electricity per 20 minutes looks promising. I haven’t found any recent news about the eCaravan. It seems to me that a converted eCaravan with enough batteries in the cabin to provide a 15 minute flight could allow 9 skydivers to climb to 13k and exit. The batteries could be stored in the cabin to make bench seating. With regen on descent and fast charging only to 80%, it could make two flights per hour possible. 

11 hours ago, BMAC615 said:

I saw that Harbor Air story - $6 of electricity per 20 minutes looks promising. I haven’t found any recent news about the eCaravan. It seems to me that a converted eCaravan with enough batteries in the cabin to provide a 15 minute flight could allow 9 skydivers to climb to 13k and exit. The batteries could be stored in the cabin to make bench seating. With regen on descent and fast charging only to 80%, it could make two flights per hour possible. 

Also consider that it might be easier to replace batteries if they are storing in under-belly baggage panniers ... with external doors.

On 9/15/2022 at 12:01 PM, riggerrob said:

Also consider that it might be easier to replace batteries if they are storing in under-belly baggage panniers ... with external doors.

I’ve been giving thought to the idea of a battery swap system similar to the Tesla Battery Swap System demonstrated nine years ago. An eCaravan with belly storage and the ability to do battery swap in under five minutes could potentially make two flights per hour a reality with charging an extra battery while the plane is in flight.

The use of ammonia as a carrier of hydrogen fuel for fuel cells is really interesting.  The old ways of making ammonia might get a radical upgrade, along with new ways of getting fuel cells to use it more efficiently. 

Just found this video from Tecnam & Rolls Royce that has an animation of how they are working on battery swap technology

There are a lot of companies betting on hydrogen as the future eFuel for aviation. In the near-term, it will outperform batteries in energy density. Some argue hydrogen makes sense for air transportation because the number of required fuel stations is relatively low compared to consumer ground transport.

Megawatt Motor for Aviation

Here’s a video with a pretty good summary of electric aviation accomplishments in 2023.