>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
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.