The seaplane area in Vancouver stinks during the summer. I am very much looking forward to electrification eliminating that strong diesel smell. If there's enough planes transiting you can even see the haze (dozens of seaplanes use that terminal).
They don't run on diesel, but I think the kind of aviation fuel small planes use is pretty nasty. I've also heard it is still leaded, not sure if that's the case here or not.
Many of the boats nearby in the marina do use diesel, for some of the large ones, maybe even the high sulfur bunker crude which is nasty stuff.
I worked on a seaplane dock as a teen. Radial engines use AvGas which is high octane gasoline. Turbine engines use Jet A which is a kerosene blend fuel.
Most de Havilland Beavers in my area are still radial engines due to the nostalgia that sells to tourists. Most companies have converted their de Havilland Otters to a turbine engine. I have seen turbine Beavers from other areas. You can visually identify the engine by the shape of the plane nose. A radial engine plane has a big, round, blunt nose and sounds like an idling drag racer with a deep glug glug glug noise. A turbine engine plane has a pointy nose and sounds like the high pitch whine of a jet engine.
I am sure that is a consideration. The performance of a turbine Beaver is also not as much of an improvement as a converted Otter.
Margins on transportation flights are thin. Margins on flightseeing are not. The company I worked for chartered a Beaver between $600-$700 an hour and a turbine Otter at double that. Seats for 45-minute flightseeing (through a national monument) were priced at $185-$250. 6 pax in an Beaver and 10 in an Otter.
There are no avia piston engines left above 500-600HP today, and 1000+hp are completely unheard off.
This is why a lot of radial engine powered planes that are many decades old have no options for new engines if there are no turbine conversion available.
I had a professor in school that hated turbines. You press a button, it whines, and with a small puff it starts.
A radial looks, sounds, smells dangerous, like it's going to fly apart at any second, and that's awesome. Every so often some old warbirds fly over my neighbourhood and it's such a treat to hear those big radials thundering away. They should prescribe that sound as antidepressants.
This happened here last liberation remembrance day. Four planes in formation, it was like the voice of God, incredible what a sound. I didn't realize what it was at first so it scared the willies out of me and then I saw the silhouettes and immediately knew what was up. You just can't describe the sound of those engines 300 meters up right over your office.
Originally there was supposed to a 4 engined Lancaster as well but it wasn't deemed airworthy so that got postponed, even so, it was mighty impressive.
I used to live in Ontario near where the only airworthy Lancaster lives. It's based out of Hamilton, and the Lanc is powered by inclines rather than radials but still an awesome sound. I got to ride in it once, it was a lifetime experience.
Jet fuel (which powers the turbine engines that Harbour Air uses) is actually quite similar to Diesel. Some turbines have diesel listed as an approved emergency fuel, particularly military aircraft.
You might be thinking of avgas which has lead in it, but turbine engines don't burn avgas.
> Don't a lot of older small craft—such as seaplanes—have radial engines?
Sure, lots of older aircraft (and lots of modern small aircraft) run on avgas or diesel, whether radial or inline. But Harbour Air's fleet is almost all turbines. I think they have just a single non-turbine aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_DHC-2_Beav...
>Viking DHC-2T Turbo Beaver
>Remanufactured Beavers by Viking Air, upgraded with a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-34 680 hp (507 kW) turboprop engine.
Piston engines (running leaded high-octane fuel) in general are common in small aircraft. Radials do exist, but most, I think, are inline engines (usually opposed).
Nonsense. There are hundreds of DC-3s still flying with 1200hp Twin Wasp radials. Service life of aviation engines is essentially infinite - they just keep rebuilding ‘em.
The Russian ASH-62 is still in production, and depending on spec can produce as much as 1100hp.
No, it isn't. The "new" 62 are just old stock, or made from old stock parts, or rebuilt frankenstein engines with some new parts, or are Dongan HS-5 restamped as original 62 to pass the type test.
I used to be an aviation fan in my childhood. Tried to build a motoglider, but the process stalled before I moved out of the country.
MOST seaplanes have piston engines that use 100LL AvGas, which is a gasoline with lead in it (the LL stands for "low lead" as opposed to "unleaded" in car gas). The lead keeps airplane engines, especially older ones from knocking.
These planes are DHC-2 DeHaviland Beavers, which traditionally do have radial engines that would require leaded gas. So there is some significance to the rumors.
BUT... Harbour Air (the airline featured in this article) is a large seaplane airline that have converted all their Beavers to Turbo-Beavers, so they use Turbo-prop engines, which is essentially a jet engine with a propeller on the shaft instead of a fan (turbo-fan is what most commercial jetliners use, these are essentially the same type of engine but using a propeller to convert engine revolutions into propulsion as opposed to a fan). So in this case, Harbour Air's beavers actually use Jetfuel which does NOT have lead in it.
I'm not familiar with the specific model of seaplane referenced here, but 100LL avgas is commonly used in small planes (and the LL stands for low-lead)
100 low-lead is a common aviation fuel. Most small aircraft use it. Piston engines generally use that, while jets of course use jet fuel. There are piston engine that run on jet fuel (often diesel), but they are rare and just starting to come out.
I don't know about sea planes though. My guess is they use lead because that is the best educated guess.
edit: others are claiming that these planes are mostly turboprops which would then use lead free jet fuel.
I'm unaware of ANY certified piston aircraft that don't use leaded fuel by default.
Most fuel farms at airports sell 100 octane leaded fuel by default. It is normally the odd exception that sells unleaded fuel.
The piston engine seaplanes will be using leaded fuel (as will any piston powered small plane with the exception of a few homebuilts and trainers). The turbine ones use regular Jet A.
The only one I can think of would be the Rotax 912, which is certified to run on mogas ("motor gas" / unleaded). But as you said, that's more for light sport and trainers.
Yeah, most general aviation planes do. Has a lot to do with infrastructure and certification requirements. You have to modify, then re-certify the engine. Most manufacturers don't want to do that unless there's a clear benefit.
Most people would prefer to use standard automotive gasoline. You can see people in the experimental/sports aircraft category rejoicing when they can find a "MoGas" pump.
Most internal combustion (that is, non-turboprop or turbojet) aircraft use 100LL (100 octane low-lead) fuel. Here, up to 0.56g/L of lead content is used as an octane booster/anti-knocking agent.
Many attempts have been made to remove lead from Avgas but it's fairly difficult since the substitute needs to work with the vast majority of current engines and it needs to be easy to produce and distribute in large quantities around the country. Given the much smaller demand for 100LL (primarily used in general aviation) compared to Jet-A used for turbojet aircraft there hasn't been a big push.
Fuel for small engine (reciprocating engine) planes does indeed usually still contain lead.
> Unlike motor gasoline, which has been formulated since the 1970s to allow the use of platinum-content catalytic converters for pollution reduction, the most commonly used grades of avgas still contain tetraethyllead (TEL), a toxic substance used to prevent engine knocking (detonation). There are ongoing experiments aimed at eventually reducing or eliminating the use of TEL in aviation gasoline.
Kind of interesting, but ethanol has SUPER high octane and could be used for avgas (although as we know with e85 cars, soft goods may need to be changed out). But using a mix of ethanol and gasoline can cause problems with water absorption and phase separation especially in cold conditions.
The water absorption and phase separation problems are particularly bad with airplanes because airplanes operate in very cold conditions when they go up to higher altitudes. I think that these problems also would apply to pure ethanol.
The other kicker with ethanol is that its energy density is significantly lower, so it would significantly negatively impact the range/payload of every small airplane.
30% is huge for an aircraft. Not only do you need more fuel for each trip, you need extra fuel to handle carrying around the extra fuel. (not necessarily intuitive starting out but aircraft deal with amplification factors, energy added ounce of fuel will require a greater than unity number of additional ounces of fuel for equivalent performance)
Comparison to electric flight is a bad comparison as until very recently electric flight was basically considered to be impossible with present technology.
Electric flight in the history of flight has never been “impossible.” Anyone who told you it was impossible didn’t have the capacity/desire to think in terms of fundamentals beyond existing rules of thumb. (“Existing technology” is a nice weasel term, but we’ve had electric flight of various types demonstrated decades ago.)
30% is not high. It might convince you to do some drag reduction on your aircraft to compensate. Most small general aviation aircraft are terribly aerodynamically inefficient even compared to state of the art aircraft 50 years ago. 30% is barely relevant for the short intracity trips in this article.
I know there will still be prop noise galore but this is great. I lived in Coal Harbour across from their water runways for years. It was my every-morning wakeup call whether I needed it or not.
Aside: If you are in the Vancouver area, I recommend taking one of these flights, internal combustion or not. To/from Victoria, for example. The views are just stunning, especially over the Gulf Islands -- better than any high elevation or large plane window seat can give you. As a longtime resident, it's still goosebump gorgeous.
Amusingly the prices of the seaplane (if you get the super-saver version) ends up being $180 for two vs. $107 for two people (or 110 vs. 90 for one)[1] which is a pretty depressing highlight of just how overpriced BC Ferries is (possibly due to running such large vessels).
1. Both of these assume you're boarding the ferry with a vehicle which I think is a fair assumption given how insanely inconvenient the ferry terminal is.
My understanding is that the mainland to Vancouver Island routes are quite profitable, but almost every other BC Ferries route posts a loss annually.
BC Ferries is mandated to provide the loss-making routes for provincial accessibility reasons (and they get a ~$200 million annual government subsidy to do so).
The routes to the island are probably priced the way they are partially to cover the other losses, but also I think because the demand allows it. Those ferries during non-COVID times, although quite large, are often filled close to capacity; anything lower would certainly stimulate travel and lead to overcapacity.
I've started using Harbour Air for my trips over to Vancouver Island quite frequently over the past few years. At one point I did the calculation and taking the floatplane ends up saving me 3-4 hours of travel time, all for about an additional cost of $70 (versus taking the bus out to the ferry and being a walk on), even less if I consider that my trips are frequently Friday evenings and I end up having to grab dinner on the way or on the ferry.
It was fine when they were allowing people to stay in their vehicles on the lower car deck and when it was nice enough to just go sit on the sun deck. But I was officially done with the ferries when I went over in October, the number of people on the ferry coupled with the idiots over at Transport Canada making people leave their cars meant it was far to crowded for me to feel safe.
The terminal being incredibly convenient makes the flight even more justified. I'd much rather take the Canada Line and then walk for a few minutes than having to line up early for a standing room only bus that goes out to the ferry terminal.
A seaplane flight over the west coast of Vancouver Island from bases in Tofino or Gold River is a wonderful and affordable flight-seeing excursion as well (around $500/hour total for 3 passengers).
Projects like these are neat, but I don't understand where the money for them comes from. At least electric cars had a use case that was achievable from the start (driving around locally) and are now usable for pretty much any kind of driving people want to do (maybe cross-country road trips are still challenging).
But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. The batteries take up a lot of weight and weigh the same at the start of the flight as at the end, and while I'm sure battery technology will continue to improve, the weight issue is going to be a problem for a long time. Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money.
Edit: I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come.
>But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. The batteries take up a lot of weight and weigh the same at the start of the flight as at the end, and while I'm sure battery technology will continue to improve, the weight issue is going to be a problem for a long time. Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money.
It makes sense for short flights. The vast majority of costs associated with aviation are in maintenance, with the majority of those costs coming from engine overhauls. This means you have a high fixed cost of operation per flight hour regardless of distance traveled/passengers carried. Electric motors will reduce that cost by orders of magnitude and make these small flights economically feasible.
> I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come.
The key is that you don't need the same performance of a piston engine aircraft. Batteries are just good enough now for these types of short flights to be possible. And with the maintenance savings, you come out ahead. Electric motors will also be vastly safer and more reliable than single engine piston aircraft, leading to insurance savings.
> The vast majority of costs associated with aviation are in maintenance, with the majority of those costs coming from engine overhauls.
This is it right here; the CEO of Harbor Air is on record as saying that this is exactly where they expect the biggest costs savings (millions of dollars per year based on their flight numbers) to come from:
——-
There would be savings on fuel costs, of course, carbon taxes, and the carbon offsets that Harbour Air buys. But the real savings would be in maintenance. With electric motors, there's next to no maintenance required, whereas with turboprop engines have significant maintenance and rebuild requirements.
"You have a motor with a notional life of 10,000 hours – and that's probably being pessimistic – because it's so simple," McDougall said. "We're looking at, in rough numbers, the same 10,000 hours in a conventional turbine will cost a couple million bucks in maintenance, rebuilds and all the rest of it, whereas 10,000 hours in an electric motor should cost us virtually nothing."
I don’t think the data bears out that there’s a vast safety opportunity for electric motors.
From the 2018 Nall report (the most recent I could readily find on my phone), mechanical failure is sub 20% of accidents and sub 7% of fatal accidents.
Pilots are around 75% of the primary link in the accident reports.
Yes, although there may be gains there too. Electric motors can provide high torque more quickly than piston engines, and of course much more quickly than turbines. Maybe this will result in faster stall recoveries, and with new uses of motors flight envelopes might get more stable as well.
You're right, I know at least one pilot that's crashed due to torque steer. Electrics should have less torque steer due to a great deal less rotating mass, so there's that.
Pilots are written down as the Primary cause, but the secondary cause can frequently involve the pilot operating the engine badly.
For example: a pilot forgets to turn on the carb heat on descent, leading to loss of engine power, and crash short of the runway. Primary cause is pilot error.
The engine on a small plane is failure prone, and easy to make mistakes on. The Beavers in question are operating on an engine design from the 1930s (Pratt and Whitney Wasp 985). The major compnonents on those engines likely haven't (and can't for bureaucratic reasons) changed since the 50s. On a plane like the Beaver, a majority of the gauges are devoted to the engine. If you get a chance to fly on one of these, you'll notice that a majority of what the pilot does pre-takeoff is engine checks.
Making the engine simpler is making it easier to fly the plane, and eliminates another source of pilot error.
But presumably the maintenance requirements to carry passengers aren't discretionary - if the rules say gas engines must be rebuilt every 2500 operating hours at a cost of $10,000 whereas electric planes don't, there's a cost saving regardless of how many accidents are due to pilot error.
$10K is low by about a factor of 5-10 for piston aircraft engine overhauls, by the time the job is entirely done.
Here's a factory reseller of a common engine type: http://www.airpowerinc.com/productcart/pc/engines.asp?search... Note that that's the uninstalled overhauled/new engine. Add freight, 75-150 hours of labor, and some accessory overhauls to get to the all-in number.
On a single engine plane. The engine costs are MASSIVE. For planes like those a rebuild costs $50k, and the time between rebuilds is 1200 hrs.
That doesn't include the amount of maintenance that goes into it between rebuilds either. I would imagine that $10-$20/hr would be a reasonable estimate for those engines
The float plane operators in the lower mainland doing quick hops from Vancouver to Victoria or Whistler don't really have a lot of concern for money, I don't think. Their passengers aren't especially price-sensitive and there's more demand than supply a lot of the time. And the motor manufacturer is funded by a Singaporean private investor.
It's a gamble that people will care about environmental concerns more than price. In Vancouver that's a decent bet.
I don't believe this is correct. These aren't like chartered jets.
I've taken seaplane flights around the Northwest and the folks on the flights tend to be middle-class vacationers and business commuters, much like you'd see on any other commercial flight.
Can confirm. Had to get between Seattle and Vancouver quickly for business one day, and took a seaplane from South Lake Union to Coal Harbour. Took care of things in town, then took a leisurely Amtrak back to Seattle Union Station.
While the pax may not be sensitive to price, the providers still want to drive down their costs.
Probably plenty of people in BC that would loooooove the combo of quick transport and looking down on those carbon-burning ferry/bus riders going to the islands/Whistler.
Could likely sell tickets for more.
Taking a gas plane and buying offsets sounds as unfun at parties as someone saying they bought a Corolla and offsets. Technical correctness matters less than image.
The provider here is the one developing the plane though - harbour air isn't building a plane to sell to other operators, they're the one operating the flights. If they really want to drive costs down, they must have decided this is a good way to do it.
But yeah, I think they're mostly selling the image here. Being able to fly to Whistler in half the time of driving and tell the people you're meeting there that you took the greener method is worth a lot to some people (and that's a good thing)
Entirely possible the airline is getting paid to trial the tech.
Not sure where else in the world people would even pay more for such short hops because it’s electric.
I’m sure Whistler city council is looking for a way to ban carbon av emissions on their landing lake. Probably can’t because feds, but they would if they could.
> Not sure where else in the world people would even pay more
This doesn't match what the company is saying - they are looking at it as a way to reduce running costs, not increase ticket prices. As far as the benefits on emissions side, I suspect it has little to do with marketing "green" to ticket buyers, and more to do with mollifying groups pressuring the harbor authorities to reduce allowed # of flights.
> mollifying groups pressuring the harbor authorities to reduce allowed # of flights.
I doubt they’ll be any happier if the flights were “green”, but they may have shot themselves in the foot if pollution was their core complaint.
But I’ve seen how these things go. Toronto Island airport wanted to expand to operate turbojets. Somehow complaints about noise helped kill the project, even though turboprops are basically turbojets with a wharbling propellor.
The noise studies showed that the loudest things were loud cars and motorcycles at the waterfront...
I've flown Harbour Air before and the flight from Vancouver to Victoria is just 30mins. Electricity isn't too expensive in BC and also generated cleanly. Perfect testing ground for the viability of electric planes.
Very noisy. I've flown on them a couple times from Nanaimo. They pass out earplugs to every passenger, and you need them. I think the electric ones will be much quieter.
From the article: "...Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable."
While batteries may not be viable for longer commercial flights, these short hops make sense.
With the Canadian/US land border closed, but 5m (minute or meter) flights over the border being kosher, the sweet spot right now is temporarily massive.
Looking at their website, Harbour has actually cancelled their usual Vancouver/Seattle flights due to Covid - they don't seem to be running cross border at all right now.
But when? The snowbird business would have died off a month ago. It probably was a good business for them, and something that popped up in areas that didn’t already have short-haul flights. Maybe they still do them as charters for those that don’t want to sit with rando pax.
Appears to have been at least initially cancelled back in March, initially until the end of April - https://www.vicnews.com/news/harbour-air-cancels-all-seattle.... I haven't seen any announcement of them resuming between now and then, but nothing that rules it out.
I'm sure there are folks on HN who could tell us from public flight records.
The "5 meter" comment has me wondering -- what's the shortest flight that's legally considered a flight?
Is it the moment your gear is no longer touching the ground? The moment your wings leave ground-effect? (Is the ekranoplan technically a plane or a boat?) The moment you cross the property-line of the departing airport? (And how would that work for bush planes?)
Electric planes where used have already shown to be significantly cheaper to operate. Even if you need more overall energy, as electricity is cheaper then fuel, that is not necessary a problem.
Also, I think people really need to think about this some more and not just look at first order effects.
ery reductionist analysis.
- Electric engines are far more efficient.
- Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio.
- Lighter engines mean less structural load
- Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel
- Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery
- Electric engines have efficiency that stays the same, not optimized for one altitude
- Electric engines can go higher and use less air resistant
To achieve all of this you need to completely re-engineer planes and that is very expensive and batteries are only just getting close to the required power. The necessary investment to completely redesign plans to take advantage of these has not been made.
If you look at Alice plain for example, they have taken advantage of some of these things I mention. They were able to get away with thin wings. However they still don't exploit many of these things as they are just an integration company. Their plane carries the battery like cargo, rather then having the battery be structural.
Actually they're doing this not for environmental reasons but for financial reasons. There's been articles written about it, including interviews with the executives of the company itself talking about why they're making the switch, which you can find on Google if so inclined. It's cheaper to operate these electric seaplanes to the point where it's worth the capital investment for the company.
Actually ‘fuel’ cost wise an electric plane is significantly cheaper. Avgas is also significantly more expensive in canada than the usa due to taxes. The 30m short hop propeller flying here is actually the sweet spot for electric craft and I estimate they will spend about 10x less in energy costs alone.
Most of Harbour Air’s non-electric fleet are Jet-A burning turbines. Only the Beaver is possibly avgas fueled. (There are also turbine conversions of the Beaver.)
I wonder if the rating would be electric only after a while... I would imagine that the various authorities would create a different license, like for seaplanes and IFR. It would make some sense as mis-managing the fuel-air mixture on a small piston plane can lead to catastrophic failure. (frozen carb for ex)
> It makes sense to me that moving from electric to piston would require an endorsement.
For a long time, it will be the reverse; the default will be a requirement to be able to fly a conventional-engined airplane, with electric propulsion being an endorsement (probably devoted primarily to battery & power management)
Perhaps either way should require an endorsement. Gasoline is hard to fly... tank switching, carb heat, warm-up requirements, power output limitations, mixture at takeoff, mixture at altitude, thermal management in power reduction, weight of fuel in load calculations. In some models even CG due to fuel load. The list goes on and on. Electric ought to be much simpler to fly.
> It would make some sense as mis-managing the fuel-air mixture on a small piston plane can lead to catastrophic failure. (frozen carb for ex)
Carb freezing doesn't occur as a result of mixture mismanagement, but rather by failure to apply carburetor heat when flying in conditions conducive to carb icing.
Mismanaging the mixture is far less likely to have any acute effects. Descending with a lean[er] mixture may cause issues at lower altitudes where the mixture would be too lean, but it would be unusual for that to lead to an engine stoppage.
Further - a pilot inexperienced in mixture management would likely not lean the mixture at all and just fly full-rich which again, wouldn't likely lead to any acute failures, just higher fuel consumption and longer-term issues with the engine.
The main advantage of electric planes is that VTOL capability is much easier with electric motors. You can have twelve cheap electric motors on the plane instead of one combustion motor. With that comes great maneuverability.
The second advantage is that they are fairly quiet.
Together, this is great for short "taxi" flights across natural barriers (fjords, mountain ranges), even at night and without need for actual airstrips at either end of the journey.
Try to land such thing in a crosswind without lateral control authority.
That's hard even with just 10kg quadcopters, and a "flying car" will be completely unlandable without extra rotor mechanisation, negating electric power advantages.
If the wind is any much changing, you will wobble the aircraft to pieces, and even if you try to, you will still not get enough control authority to land safely in such conditions.
You don't get anywhere near the amount of control authority, and its speed if it depends on rotating the whole body of the aircraft weighting many tons.
Hmm, at least, it's way easier to put extra rotors where you want them to be, since you don't need a gearbox + transmission from the main engine, and can just put a secondary, smaller electric engine.
Crosswind is really less of an issue near the ground, so you could first lower your altitude and precisely adjust later.
You are right about that, I concede you the point.
That said, I was mainly thinking of wind speed as you said (IIRC ~ haven't flown in a long time, and only ultralight: as you approach ground, you need to compensate for crosswind, but near the ground you need to stop compensating), but was also picturing the possibility of creating structures to break wind. Isn't it done sometimes for helicopters? Hangars surrounding helipads?
> I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come.
Let's have the folks who are actually doing this because they think they can make it economically viable determine whether that's true or not eh?
> But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes.
This just isn't obviously true in all cases. Here we are talking about a successful small private airline that doesn't seem to be run by idiots, so it's pretty easy to make the jump to "huh, I'm probably missing something here". After all, it's not like they've committed to converting their fleet, just a pilot project to prove it out. Seems sensible.
It's a defeatist attitude. Experiments have to start somewhere, right? People wrote the same kinds of comments about digital cameras. Fifteen years later it is difficult to buy anything else. So, let the engineers work on the problems.
> Antweiler says Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable.
You may be right and this will lose money (I haven't done the math and don't know enough specifics), but you also need to figure in maintenance and fuel costs which are much lower with electric planes. The trick is picking the correct use case and short flights to an island are probably the first target for these aircraft.
I don't know a lot about batteries -- it is obvious that weight doesn't change as the charge is depleted, but is there any (even theoretical) reason to think that batteries can be made much lighter? E.g. any research into very lightweight battery technologies? Maybe supercapacitors could be lightweight?
The plane needs most power on takeoff. This partly mitigates the fact that batteries weight the same on takeoff and landing.
You could probably use altitude to recover part of the energy expended by using the propeller to regenerate energy (like in braking), especially useful for emergency power.
It's pretty obvious that the future of aviation is either hydrogen or some kind of synfuel. I'm amazed that people are still even thinking of batteries here. It's like people are still trying to push floppy disc drives or something.
> Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money.
Yeah the best option is to just sit around and wait until better technology appears out of thin air. Much easier than wasting all that money and time on R&D.
Harbour Air flights are mostly about 35 minutes long, so are essentially the equivalent use case to early electric cars (and I mean early as in 90s and 2000s, not the much earlier attempts).
There is regular flights between the mainland and the island, and a more environmentally friendly option would get traction in the market even with a price premium.
Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio.
- Lighter engines on the wing mean lighter overall plane structure
- Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel
- Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery
You can also do far more with differential thrust and potentially remove the planes tail. Actually you could do that even with normal planes as Chief Scientist at NASA H. Bowers has discovered.
Look at the next generation Tesla battery pack. The batteries are literally what is holding together the car and the resulting weight is not much larger then the structure you would have needed without the battery.
We are not there yet, it takes a complex vertically integrated approach to build such a plane, but it is not impossible. Just like with EV you need to re-engineer and rethink every aspect of the plane.
Your range might still not be as good, but hell of a lot better then 5% and also far, far cheaper to operate.
>Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio.
Aerospace engineer here. This is not accurate, unless you are perhaps discussing cars. But for aircraft the torque supplied by the motor is not nearly so critical.
First of all propeller thrust is a function of airspeed, and it falls off significantly as you accelerate, irrespective of whether your powertrain is electric or hydrocarbon. This is a direct consequence of physics that can't really be avoided and it's why we usually talk about propeller aircraft as being "power producers" rather than "thrust producers". Propeller horsepower is much easier to reason about, and more relevant to the performance of the aircraft, than torque.
I'm not aware of any electric-powered turbojets/turbofans beyond the prototype phase but they would theoretically have better static thrust properties by virtue of not being props rather than any particular property of electric motors.
Just to be clear for my understand, would this not only be true during optimal cruise? Outside of optimal operation, specially during the start, this would actually be an advantage of electric motors?
I was looking into the potential of electric turbofans.
>Outside of optimal operation, specially during the start, this would actually be an advantage of electric motors?
When you say "this" do you mean "having more low-end torque than a gasoline motor"?
In theory, you could tune your prop governor to take a bigger "bite" of the air at low airspeed and thus perhaps get better acceleration and a shorter takeoff roll. But aircraft performance is very rarely limited by the torque output of the engine itself. Usually the driveshafts and gearboxes are the limiting factors in power/torque transmission.
FYI, the Vancouver company here operates the flights and owns the aircraft. But the electric propulsion bits comes from a company in Washington state in the US (and before that they were located in Australia). The article mentions "Seattle area", which is true but a bit imprecise/misleading. MagniX is located in Redmond, and they're moving their headquarters and manufacturing further North, to Everett, where Boeing's big factories are located (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/elect...). MagniX is also selling their electric propulsion products to other airlines (see https://www.geekwire.com/2020/magnix-universal-hydrogen-team...).
To be fair, it's not like you can tell Redmond isn't just more Seattle on a map. Same for Everett: everything from Lakewood to Everett is just "Seattle" to everyone except for the folks that live/work there.
also worth mentioning, that I think the reason why MagnaX is in its location is proximity to Kenmore Air, which is one of the most experienced and high-volume aircraft workshops that has a specialty niche business in retrofits, repairs and upgrades of Beavers, Turbo Beavers, Otters and Twin Otters.
As a Seattle resident in a common float plane flight path, the piston engines can be quite loud. You can hear them inside with windows/doors closed and moderate household noises (like a shower or washing machine).
Do electric planes make any difference in terms of noise? When an electric vehicle is in motion most of the noise I can tell are from the tires.
A electric powered propeller plane would most likely still have most of its noise generated by the propeller, not the internal combustion engine. I presume the same is with jets.
High torque at lower RPMs is still an untapped potential of electrification for aviation. Having more options for placement of propeller (behind the rudder, for example, where a larger and slower propeller could be placed) is huge. NASA is also experimenting with many small propellers placed ahead of the wings which can result in higher efficiency at cruise, but unfortunately doing their most work when the plane is flying slowest (just before landing). We'll see! But many exciting possibilities.
- No noise when idling and more fine grained control over power. You can't tell apart a plane that is idling from one that is completely off with electric. Some turbo props on the other hand provide so much thrust when idling that you need to be on the brakes or it will start moving to quickly during taxiing. So, that amounts to a lot less noise for electrical planes while the plane is on the airport (i.e. where noise matters the most).
- Not all propellers are made the same. They are generally matched to torque and rpm that can be provided by the engine. With an electric engine you'd have a wider range of both as the engine torque and rpm are more easily controlled. That means you can optimize for performance, noise, or both more easily.
- Generally propellers get noisy when their tips break the speed of sound. Bigger propellers mean this happens at lower RPM. Smaller propellers can spin faster without having their tips breaking the sound barrier. Electrical engines can be small and light; meaning that you can choose to have a lot of smaller, less noisy ones instead of the big noisy ones. Also, because they can deliver more torque, you can increase the number of blades on the propeller to deliver more thrust and power at lower rpm (at the cost of more drag).
- The frequency of the noise matters too. High pitched noise doesn't carry very far. Low pitched noise can be heard miles away. Like the noise of tonnes of kerosine being burned when a big jet takes off. Not a thing with electric. Big combustion engines can be similarly noisy. It's part of what makes them sound so exciting.
You are right they won't be whisper silent but they will be a lot more silent overall, and noisy far less often (only when they need to; basically during take off).
I only see benefits given that electric powertrain is much more reliable, and quieter than piston engines, and that engines have much higher chance to stall on takeoff.
Aero engines are exceptionally reliable and don't "stall". However, electric does have advantages; less costly to maintain (theoretically; this still needs to be actually proven) and the pilots will like the high torque available at lower RPMs. This can allow designs with slower propellers that in turn will lower prop noise.
I think you're misinterpreting reports of stall-related incidents as being an engine stall, but the most common accidents are related to 'aerodynamic stall'. Engine stalls are virtually unheard-of.
“And by far the most common reason piston engines quit is because they don’t receive fuel, either due to fuel starvation (the airplane has fuel but it doesn’t make it to the engine) or fuel exhaustion (the airplane truly ran out of it). These two causes account for over one-third of engine failure accidents”
One must think about seagulls and how they effortlessly stay airborne for hours. Every single feather has nerve endings and muscles for optimal aerodynamical performance.
Also Neal Stephenson describes how a wingwoman departs from a space station in orbit and lands on terra firma and goes back only utilizing air currents. Totally believable me thinks.
> Also Neal Stephenson describes how a wingwoman departs from a space station in orbit and lands on terra firma and goes back only utilizing air currents
Be amazed: The orbit station is a "giant space wheel", whose central mass is in orbit, but has rotating pods synchronized with earths rotation, some 100 km below. There are some issues with centrifugal forces (which Neal also describes), but otherwise all the wingwoman has to do is to reach the altitude and speed of this pod. The energy needed to move this person from the pod to the central station comes from the sol and is quite miniscule.
Sailplanes effectively do this. The new high performance sailplane Nixus actually uses fly-by-wire to do microadjustments to optimize aerodynamic performance analogous to what you said, although skilled pilots can do similar. https://www.flyingmag.com/nixus-fly-by-wire-glider-takes-fli...
Future long distance electric aircraft will resemble sailplanes.
> The problem with lithium batteries is they are heavy... McDougall says battery technology is advancing quickly and he expects them to be even lighter and more powerful, as his project gets closer to flying commercially.
> Antweiler says Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable.
Not these ones, though. They're certainly going to reduce emissions in the local area, but their solution inherently cannot scale up. Their planes are tiny, and their flights are super short. It's basically as different from regular commercial flights as you can get, while still working with airplanes.
But not a "major" impact. The vastly bigger problem where Harbour Air operates is "real" flights (because it's the YVR area) and cargo shipping (because it's also the port of Vancouver).
And for this area specifically, it'd be nice if we stopped having a giant, uncovered piles of sulphur pellets, full of sulphur powder from being dumped in piles, literally getting dispersed every second there's even the faintest amount of wind. Which, given that it's the pacific north west, is "every second of every day".
Unfortunately we don't really have the battery technology for this to work for long range flights, like the commercial flights that make up the bulk of air traffic carbon emissions.
I expect the best near-term solution is just to find a way to synthesize jet fuel (or something that works equivalently) on a large scale from something other than fossil fuels. I don't know what the state-of-the-art is in synthetic fuels.
Another option would be to find a way to transfer electricity to a moving aircraft so it could recharge in the air, but I have difficulty imagining how that could be made to work (microwaves? high-power lasers and solar panels? wires held aloft by zeppelins?), especially within the constraints of modern technology.
I've been seeing these news articles popup every few weeks. Some new startup is flying with an electric motor and batteries. It always leaves me wondering, why are so many of these GA retrofits going with batteries instead of a hydrogen power plant? Is it just "simplicity" or are they betting that batteries are going to shed substantial weight in the coming years?
Procuring hydrogen, hydrogen fuel cells, or hydrogen storage is a bit of an unsolved problem. The infrastructure is simply not there. Also I don't think there are aviation rated fuel cells available yet. And storing lots of hydrogen under high pressure is also a bit of a weight issue for planes given it requires extreme pressures and heavy duty tanks. Also, there's the cost of fuel. Hydrogen is not cheap. Electricity is.
And that's before you consider the infrastructure. A battery can be plugged in anywhere you can get electricity. Which is pretty much everywhere. Hydrogen requires (currently) non existent supply chains, transport, storage, pumping, etc. infrastructure.
There are some decent batteries on the market and better ones are on the way. Also, there's a difference between shoving a tonne of battery into an existing plane and using e.g. structural batteries to strengthen the fuselage of a purposely designed plane. So, yes, you should expect some improvements in range with the coming few years as technology, designs, and thinking evolves. I think 2-3X range improvement is basically a given in the next 15 years or so. Current electric planes actually flying use technology that was certified years ago (it's a slow process) that are hardly state of the art at this point.
