Norway Tests Tiny Electric Plane, Sees Passenger Flights by 2025 (reuters.com) 153
Norway tested a two-seater electric plane on Monday and predicted a start to passenger flights by 2025 if new aviation technologies match a green shift that has made Norwegians the world's top buyers of electric cars. From a report: Transport Minister Ketil Solvik-Olsen and Dag Falk-Petersen, head of state-run Avinor which runs most of Norway's airports, took a few minutes' flight around Oslo airport in an Alpha Electro G2 plane, built by Pipistrel in Slovenia. "This is ... a first example that we are moving fast forward" toward greener aviation, Solvik-Olsen told Reuters. "We do have to make sure it is safe - people won't fly if they don't trust it." He said plane makers such as Boeing and Airbus were developing electric aircraft and that battery prices were tumbling, making it feasible to reach a government goal of making all domestic flights in Norway electric by 2040.
Cost isn't the big problem. Weight is. (Score:5, Interesting)
He said plane makers such as Boeing and Airbus were developing electric aircraft and that battery prices were tumbling, making it feasible to reach a government goal of making all domestic flights in Norway electric by 2040.
Battery prices aren't the big problem. Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation. Even the best battery tech we have today has a rather poor power to weight ratio. I see no evidence in this article that they have solved that problem since that would require a breakthrough in power density for batteries.
Note that the plane they show has a takeoff weight of 570kg which allows for basically no cargo or passengers. For comparison the EMPTY weight of a Cessna 170 is an almost identical 573kg and it has a takeoff weight of 864-1000kg.
Re:Cost isn't the big problem. Weight is. (Score:5, Funny)
Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation.
Simple. Keep the batteries on the ground and run a cable up to the plane.
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On a flight of less than 500 km, a quarter of the energy is used in the takeoff, so some kind of ground to aircraft power transfer is something you might actually consider for the very start of a flight. Maybe not a cable, but possibly an electric catapult, or supercapacitor "drop tanks".
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On a flight of less than 500 km, a quarter of the energy is used in the takeoff
Do you have a citation for this factoid?
The best I can find by Googling is that the 25% figure is true for "short" flights, where "short" is undefined, thus rendering the statement stupid and meaningless. For a REALLY short flight, 100% of the fuel is used for takeoff.
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I seem to remembver reading it in WorldWatch Institute related to a sub-500 km flight. That's 270 nautical miles, which exceeds the flight distance between any of Norways three largest cities.
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Here is a link to WorldWatch [worldwatch.org]. They only say "short" flight. They later mention "500 km" but don't say if that is what "short" means. They use other weasel words: "as much as" 25%.
Googling around to other sites that mention "25%", it seems they are actually talking about the take-off AND CLIMB to full altitude. I certainly believe that could account for 25% of a short flight's fuel consumption, since it can also account for 25% of the distance covered.
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Mag-rail launch system! :D
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Aluminum alloy wheels on a conductive runway strip.
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I bet that figure actually includes climbing to cruise altitude. Microwave power beaming would also be a death ray...
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To say nothing of the low wing loading, it won't be able to fly in any significant wind. Not that a Cessna 170 flies through hurricanes.
Also they expect passenger service by 25...That gives them 7 years to get something commercially viable done and type approved. I doubt the EU's version of the FAA is that quick.
Also looks like enough room for a gas engine in the nose, isn't one of the points of electric engines that they're smaller and can give improved front visibility? I think this is a conversion,
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I doubt the EU's version of the FAA is that quick.
Norway is not part of the EU
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Norway isn't big enough to have their own commercial aircraft industry.
Where will they fly in/out of? Those are the regulations they will live by.
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"Norway is not part of the EU"
True, but Norway as it turns out currently uses the EU aircraft safety certification agency (EASA) to certify aircraft.
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<VOICE type="Emily Litella">
Oh, that's very different. Never mind!
</VOICE>
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You don't know ANYTHING about aerodynamics do you? It is obvious.
Go back to you 'die in prison' trolling. When you try to be smart, it's just pitiful.
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Who are you trying to convince?
People that know are laughing at your dumb ass.
People that don't?
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It's a prototype, and not the only one. Siemens is developing one (which suffered an unfortunately fatal accident a week or two ago).
Obviously there will need to be improvements in battery technology, just like there were for cars.
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One off-the-wall idea: make the plane's wings and fuselage out of batteries/energy-storing material. The batteries will still be heavy, but then at least you get the rest of the airplane "for free".
(Disclaimer: I have no idea if that is even remotely practical)
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It's not even remotely practical. An airplane's wings and fuselage are made out of a combination of high strength-to-weight materials and clever geometry. Batteries have pretty much zero structural strength, and seriously restrict what sort of geometry you can use.
Understatement (Score:2)
Obviously there will need to be improvements in battery technology, just like there were for cars.
That understates things quite a lot. Batteries will have to have a HUGE increase in power density to make them feasible for commercial aviation. Sure we can make some really light research vehicles but one doesn't have to be an aviation engineer to do the math on how much lighter batteries will have to get to make electric planes feasible for anything practical.
It's worth working on the problem but until batteries become a LOT lighter than they are it's going to be a dead end.
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Batteries will have to have a HUGE increase in power density to make them feasible for commercial aviation.
Can we maybe use the passengers as batteries to power the plane . . . ?
Charge 'em up with a Tesla Coil or a Van der Graaf Generator, as part of the boarding procedure . . . ?
Most humans are very dense . . .
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It's a prototype, and not the only one. Siemens is developing one (which suffered an unfortunately fatal accident a week or two ago).
Obviously there will need to be improvements in battery technology, just like there were for cars.
My back of the envelop calculations say that you need somewhere around two 100x increase in battery energy density to replace dead-dino engines. Further back of envelope says that we need around another 300 years or so of continuous battery improvements at the current rate of improvements to reach that 100x increase in density.
I don't think these engineers thought this through - it doesn't even work as proof of concept because we already know that batteries can provide enough energy to float a plane in th
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Let's look at an actual, working aircraft.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Range of 400km from a 56kWh battery. 2 passengers. Scale up, a small passenger aircraft with 1MWh battery seems quite reasonable. At a modest 300W/kg That's about 3,300kg, not at all excessive for a small passenger aircraft.
Re: Cost isn't the big problem. Weight is. (Score:2)
It may not be excessive but it's certainly not light, either ... and a 400km range is total shit. For that distance you're better off driving or taking the train. Especially since the speed of the plane apparently tops out slower than I can go on the highway.
Such a plane might be able to find some niche market somewhere but it's certainly not going to replace the aircraft in use today.
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Sure, but it's a working prototype that actually flies and covers those kinds of distances. As a proof of concept it shows that the battery to range ratio isn't so far out that we will need "100x" improvements in battery life.
Re: Cost isn't the big problem. Weight is. (Score:2)
For a little hobby plane, sure. But it doesn't scale the way you think it does, and you're missing a lot of stuff that would have to be added to larger aircraft. Anti-icing systems alone would require a massive improvement in battery tech, or a massive increase in weight to supply the needed energy. Add in presurization, climate control, and radar, and you're pretty much back at your "100x improvement" starting point.
Or I guess you can ditch all that, and only fly on sunny days for short distance at unde
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Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation.
So? That means (for the time being) it'll only work for very light planes, and/or short hops. Trips like Amsterdam -> London, which iirc is something like 15 or 20 mins actual flight time. Plenty of short flight routes like that around the world. And of course that's only the beginning as battery technology improves.
That said: personally I think it's a shame we're not seeing more electric ships. For that application, weight is a non-issue. And moving masses through water is a very energy-efficient man
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Most new ships already are diesel-electric with electric motors in azimuth thrust pods.
The problem for "electric" ships is that it takes megawatts of power to move them, I'm guessing even covering the top of a container ship with solar panels wouldn't provide sufficient power to make more than 1-2 knots, if that.
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Sure batteries are heavy, but if you can physically fly an electric plane from point A to point B on batteries, then the only important remaining question is whether it's cost effective.
Norway is a country about the size of Montana, with relatively cheap electricity which is more than 99% from hydropower- and wind-generated, and a domestic carbon emissions trading system. Since short haul flights are particularly carbon intensive per distance traveled, an electric plane would generate a lot of valuable car
Cargo cost is the key metric (Score:2)
Sure batteries are heavy, but if you can physically fly an electric plane from point A to point B on batteries, then the only important remaining question is whether it's cost effective.
It's not whether you can fly a plane. It's how much CARGO that plane can carry between points. Right now batteries are too heavy to permit any meaningful amount of cargo to be carried and therefore they are economically noncompetitive.
Since short haul flights are particularly carbon intensive per distance traveled, an electric plane would generate a lot of valuable carbon credits.
Before you worry about carbon output you need to get the cost per kg of cargo (including human cargo) to rough parity. Right now we can make electric planes that can get themselves aloft but they are useless because they cannot carry any meaningful amount of cargo. Once th
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Well, you seem to agree with my point, which is that it actually *is* cost that matters. If the engineers can get the cost per kg for a flight (including carbon credits) to the same as with aviation fuel, the technology is viable.
I agree it doesn't sound like something that is likely to happen in the near future. But people working on the technology would know better than I.
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Don't forget to include refueling time. That's going to be a major thing preventing commercial aviation going full electric for a while. Even if you need 1/3 the stored electrical energy compared to hydrocarbon due to higher on-ship conversion energy, the "recharge" time of hydrocarbon fuel is orders of magnitude faster than electrical recharging.
Take something like a small CRJ200 commuter jet, with a fuel capacity of just about 6500kg of jet fuel. At about 12 kW-hr/kg, that's (rounding) 78,00 kW-hr store
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Yes, that certainly poses a logistical problem, but there are solutions for that in the pipeline, largely driven by road EV adoption. For example some are now claiming that supercapacitors will surpass Li-ion batteries for weight energy density within the decade; they already surpass battery technology for power density.
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Physically flying a plane from A to B is the first step. People have been doing that for years.
Then there is the question of margins can it fly from A to B with enough redundancy and energy reserves to satisfy the safety authorities for commerical flights?
Then there is the question of payload, can it fly from A to B while carrying the required payload?
Then there is the question of speed, can it meet the time requirements?
Then there is the question of weather, can it fly from A to B in most weather condition
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If they're contemplating commercial flights in seven years, they must believe the answer to all these questions is "yes" -- for the routes they have in mind.
For example Oslo and Bergen are the largest cities in Norway. Because of the rugged topography it takes (according to Google) seven hours to drive or take the train between them, even though they are only 160 nautical miles apart. That's like flying from LA to Fresno, except the road distance for that trip is only half of Oslo-Bergen.
I think they can p
Re: Cost isn't the big problem. Weight is. (Score:2)
If they're contemplating commercial flights in 7 years, they're out of their minds. Norway isn't exactly known for it's sunny skies and temperate climates. These planes might be able to transport a few people with minimal luggage a short distance on a warm day ... but as soon as you add de-icing requirements into the mix you've now cut your range to half or less of the original distance.
It seriously makes no sense at all. Given the range and speed limitations of these aircraft they would be far better of
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One kg of jet fuel contains 42.8 MJ of energy. To match that, you would need 23 kg of LiS. If a jet normally carries 5 tons of fuel, now it needs to carry 115 tons of bat
Re: Cost isn't the big problem. Weight is. (Score:2)
It's an even bigger issue for landing weight. Most aircraft can be much heavier on takeoff than on landing, which isn't an issue because they burn weight in flight. In emergency situations they can dump fuel in order to reduce weight. With batteries your takeoff and landing weight is the same, so now you have an even lower takeoff weigh than you normally would.
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A rough calculation from different direction is that a modern airliner's engines produce something like 200 megawatts of power, You would need the equivalent of several thousand Tesla car battery packs to fly a few hours.
Even if you make that work, there would be no room for payload and the cost would be prohibitive.
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Never mind that battery powered vehicles aren't green. The mining process for lithium is incredibly carbon intense, then there's the toxic waste, and the fact that it isn't economical to recycle the batteries. Welcome to the world of snake oil.
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Your information is about 10 years out of date.
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On top of that, the electric motor should allow the aircraft to take off more quickly, climb faster and b
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oh the humanity
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I'd up this as 'Funny' if I had anymod points ;-)
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Battery recharge rate is a problem too.
Cars spend most of their time at a small fraction of their max power in flat areas, and benefit from regenerative braking in hilly areas. They often spend long times parked.
None of that is true for a commercial aircraft. The article is just virtue signaling. The actual makers of the aircraft seem to be developing a tech demonstrator for private aircraft,
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Solar might have some problems at Tromso (69N) in Winter as the sun doesn't rise above the horizon around the Winter Solstice. In fact it probably won't work all that well anywhere in Norway in December. Maybe they can ask the passengers to pedal.
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(Assuming a breakthrough in cell weight)
I think you might find that the cells are fine. The packaging sucks, though.
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Cargo cost per distance traveled (Score:3)
LI-Ion/LI Polymer batteries don't have quite the power/weight of conventional fuel, but it's perfectly acceptable for low-performance airplanes even now.
Not if you plan to carry any cargo they are not. And since cargo cost per unit distance traveled is by far the most important metric for their success we aren't anywhere close to commercial viability right now. Current battery tech is just too heavy for economic viability right now and that doesn't look likely to change in the near future. Battery power density will have to increase substantially.
The issues are more economic - the initial cost, the cost of time on the ground charnging, and safety - like the tendency to burst into flames for no adequately-explained reason.
While those are all important things to consider, THE primary metric that matters is cost per distance travel
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Power density won't improve much. It's not hard to check each combination of elements, caculate the energy stored per electron moved between them, and divide by the atomic or molecular weight of the substance. At best a small factor (2x? 3x?) improvement is possible over what we have now, like Li-Ion.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/201... [ucsd.edu]
Physics is a harsh mistress (Score:2)
Power density won't improve much.
Yeah that's kind of my point. We have a pretty good idea what sort of power density is theoretically possible with the chemistries we are working with and the possible improvement simply isn't big enough. There could always be some sort of unexpected breakthrough but we can't depend on that. I think we'll see some progress and it wouldn't shock me to see electrification of some aspects of commercial aircraft but I don't think we are going to see a commercially viable electric aircraft with significant ca
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LI-Ion/LI Polymer batteries don't have quite the power/weight of conventional fuel,
Not by a long shot [wikipedia.org]. Jet fuel is around 42.8 MJ/kg, and LiPo batteries are around 1.8 MJ/kg. So you need around 24 kg of LiPo batteries to equal the energy in a kilogram of jet fuel. LiIon is even worse, with 0.875 MJ/kg, meaning you need about 50 kg of LiIon to equal a kg of jet fuel.
Petroleum products are insanely energy-dense things, and they allow for extremely quick recovery of all that energy. Most nuclear, and things like diesel, allow for more energy (orders of magnitude in terms of nuclear) den
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Re: Cost isn't the big problem. Weight is. (Score:2)
You forget a couple of things. First, while jet fuel is energy dense, jet engines are horribly inefficient compared to an electric propeller. Second, this is supposed to be the kind of an aircraft that used to have piston engines (relatively small, slow flying, low altitude) and as we know from cars, piston engines are replaceable with electric engines and even if it results in heavier cars, the bottom line is still sound.
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Jet fuel is around 42.8 MJ/kg, and LiPo batteries are around 1.8 MJ/kg.
So in mechanical terms, it's about 17 MJ/kg anf 1.6 MJ/kg post-engine, respectively?
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Will Be No Match For Our (Score:2, Funny)
SPACE FORCE
Trump will save us from illegal bad hombres with the wall, illegal Norwayers in their electric planes, and MOST IMPORTANTLY those evil BUGS from Klendathu.
Trump 2020
Make space great again!
Norway is Hydropower giant (Score:2)
Because of this, if electric planes become relevant, Norway could insert itself as a major air traffic hub for other European travel. Electric planes would route through Norway to refuel less expensively.
Re:Norway is Hydropower giant (Score:4, Informative)
> In Norway, electricity is way cheaper than jet fuel. Because of this, if electric planes become relevant, Norway could insert itself as a major air traffic hub for other European travel.
First of all, have you looked at how much of a detour that'd be for most of Europe? Also I think you can flip that one around. We have a lot of hydro power because of very challenging geography with tall mountains, deep fjords, narrow valleys that produce floods in spring, tons of snow and avalanches in winter, landslides in autumn and in summer it's construction work everywhere to fix the damage. So Norwegians often go by plane on relatively short hops where most other countries would have trains, which would be superior anywhere it's reasonably flat. And we're willing to massively subsidize EVs over ICEs, we're more like the perfect trial balloon/research project. Like if electric planes can't be made to work here, even with all the crutches we'll give them they won't work anywhere.
And it's highly unlikely this will lead to some sort of quick revolution, we've invested tons of money in electric cars since the 1990s [wikipedia.org] that went bankrupt four times because the technology was not mature enough, they get tax breaks, free toll roads, free parking, free HOV lanes etc. and with all that we're up to 25% EVs, 30% hybrids and it's still ongoing. If we cut the subsidies sales would flop back to the noise floor. Like maybe Norway can make electric planes kinda work with generous subsidies but the rest of the world won't care. And as the oil dries up and demographics change towards 2050 I think we'll lose the taste for hideously expensive eco-boondoggles too. But so far we have the money for this...
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Re: Norway is Hydropower giant (Score:2)
That's ridiculously expensive. Jet fuel is around $2.11 per gallon right now, which is above average. A year ago of was $1.40.
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Better than...... (Score:2)
“This is a start ... but we have to make jet fuel a lot more expensive,”
Artificially competitive.
Battery weight is still the problem.
Zillions of tiny planes flying around (Score:3)
What could possibly go wrong with widespread deployment of that?
The US has around 1.1 - 1.3 fatal accidents per 100K miles for general aviation. For comparison, motor vehicles have about 1.2 deaths per MILLION miles.
General aviation includes larger planes like bizjets, basically everything except airliners & freightliners, so you can be sure the accident rates is much higher for tiny planes, e.g. several tens of thousands of miles per death. Even if automated control reduced the accident rate some, that's still crazy high.
I think I'll just stick to cliff diving.
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no you're getting your stats all mixed up. that's per 100,00 hours
flying "general aviation" is MUCH safer than driving somewhere
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I stand corrected that general aviation death rate is 1 per 100K hours. I also got the traffic death rate 100x too high. It is actually roughly 1 death per 100M miles.
However, this article [livescience.com] conveniently converts the traffic death rate into hours and still ends up with general aviation deaths 19x higher than traffic per hour. Ant that's very generously assuming that average traffic speed is 50 mph. Again, general aviation includes bizjets, etc, so the accident rate for tiny planes is surely higher than that.
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no that article makes it 19 times riskier when talking of miles
slicing per hour comes up with one-sixth the accident rate of cars.
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I don't see how you're reading that article to come up with that, so I'll put some simple numbers on the table:
Something like a Cessna 182 cruises around 160mph, so 100K hours/fatality x 160 mph = 16M miles/fatality, ~6x worse than auto traffic's 100M.
Or, converting auto traffic miles into hours: 100M miles per fatality / 50 mph = 2M hours per fatality, 20x better than general aviation's 100K.
It's pointless to debate whether the 6x or 20x figure is the most applicable, but either way: flying small planes i
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The US has around 1.1 - 1.3 fatal accidents per 100K miles for general aviation. For comparison, motor vehicles have about 1.2 deaths per MILLION miles.
Where are you getting your numbers? For the last full decade with complete numbers [washingtonpost.com]:
Passenger deaths per 1 billion passenger miles 2000 - 2009:
Car - 7.28
Ferry - 3.17
Train - 0.43
Bus - 0.11
Plane - 0.07
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See the above reply chain for corrected numbers.
Remember that the accident rates typically quoted for airplanes is actually for commercial jets, which are indeed spectacularly safe. General aviation (i.e. small planes) is orders of magnitude more dangerous. To wit. zero people in the US died in commercial jets last year vs. something like 400 in little planes, despite the jets' obviously much, much higher passenger mileage.
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Small aircraft in't the big win (Score:2)
Re:Small aircraft in't the big win (Score:4, Interesting)
Errrm, no. Let me introduce you to coffin corner,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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Clearly the design would have to be a delta wing or swing wing and would have to rapidly accelerate well beyond the speed of sound quickly and maintain that at exteremely high altitudes. Something along the lines of the SR-71 and Concord but much faster.
No conceivable battery technology could be practical for this application. We'll have to wait for lightweight fusion reactors powering atmospheric pla
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So, assuming there is some powerful light weight source of electricity on the order of 200 megawatts how could this possibly work? (That's a science fiction device right now and would have to b
Great solution for fairly narrow problem (Score:2)
HEAT (Score:2)
An electric airplane has very little spare energy to run A/C or heating, and very little payload to allow installation of decent insulation. So of your mooted markets none really work.
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This actually has almost nothing to do with Norway. The plane was designed, built, and initially tested in Slovenia.
Alpha Electro [pipistrel.si]
The only connection to Norway is that a journalist happened to show up while it was being flown there.
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I'll believe they're serious (and not just screwing the peons) when the military - and trucking - has to follow suit.
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It's a problem, but one that is manageable.
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>- ZERO practical advantage
One major advantage is that electric aircraft can fly at far higher altitudes where jet engines don't work and where the wind drag is greatly reduced.
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The financial cost of a thing is usually a pretty good measure of how much resources were used in its construction... Like for example: if you compare a wooden rowboat to a 200-foot luxury yacht. The one that costs more, costs more because it uses a lot more resources.
It is even a usually good predictor of how much resources will be used because of its construction, even if the item doesn't cons
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"EV's with subsidies" is not a good thing for the environment. If EV's were more efficient overall than the cars already in use, they wouldn't need subsidies to appeal more to consumer opinion.
I agree with most of your post, but if the subsidies were there to make up for the lack of a tax on the externalities of using gasoline, then it would make sense. Could it be done better as a tax? Yes. But it's not that big of a difference.
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"If EV's were more efficient overall than the cars already in use" - they are
"they wouldn't need subsidies to appeal more to consumer opinion." - its new tech, all new stuff like this gets subsidies to help it into the market to such a point that the manufacturing costs come down - shame they didn't stop subsidising