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 don't have to worry about torque on the ground. In the air near stall speed more torque is not necessarily your friend.

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.

A lot of aviation mistakes can be resolved with more power, which electrics could supply more quickly.

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