Non-shitty source: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2025/june/05/first-passengers-board-new-electric-aircraft
(No offense op)
Ah, AOPA. I wonder if they spent more or less on printing and postage on the junkmail they still sometimes sent me than they ever got from me in membership fees.
They don’t hold a candle to the EAA though. Holey cheese grater.
110km = 68 miles (or about one hour of car travel on many US interstate highways)
Something something Americans will do anything but travel by train for short distances.
Edit: apparently y’all are unfamiliar with the meme, and as such taking my comment at 100% sincerity instead of the intended 38%. Also I’m an American myself, so the only intended disrespect was of the self-depreciating variety.
I haven’t read this article yet, but I did recently read about electric planes. There are a shockingly large percentage of flights in the US (and probably the world) that are that short. Not a percentage of passengers, but percentage of flights. Lots of islands that don’t have a routine ferry service, or small rural communities in places like Alaska that may be separated from the road system by a mountain range.
Those small communities couldn’t support constant rail (or ferry) service, so small planes are actually the most economical way to serve them. Even places like Hawaii could use electric planes to good effect.
The first I read about them was for flights to Nantucket Island, which absolutely gets ferry service, but it’s also where a lot of rich people have homes, and they are going to fly. https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/cape-air-to-buy-electric-planes
You ever tried to travel by train here? Long or short distance. The rail infrastructure isn’t there
There’s plenty of places where an electric shorter range plane makes sense. Alaska and Australia come to mind immediately.
Well it did say it was a milestone flight, as well as 68 miles not necessarily meaning on a straight road you could drive 70mph on.
There are a lot of good arguments for rail or other means of transportation, but the travel volume vs the infrastructure required are vastly different in the US than in many parts of Europe/Asia. Think ‘lots of medium distance low volume routes’ that aren’t economically feasible since there are existing routes. If you went through the effort of building a train route, you would have to charge so much per person to make it pay for itself that no one could afford it and they would take other methods.
I’m Europe, there seem to be enough ‘short, high volume routes’ that are economically feasible that considering adding other legs to them make sense, or they just already work.
medium distance low volume route
You say that like its a constant
have you seen the state of their rail system? Americans might be dumb but they’re not fucking stupid.
If this was 1903 they’d bitch that the Wright Brothers could have just walked to the other end of Kitty Hawk.
Fox News is not the source I expected from this sort of article…
“Woke commie company out to make us all gay with electric plane!”
Better?
Alex?
Soon, when they spray chemtrails on you, to make the friggin’ frogs gay, you won’t even hear them coming!
The frogs turning gay story is actually mostly real. Atrazine is a herbicide widely used in America and a few other countries but banned in the EU. It has polluted a ton of soil and ground water. It’s an endocrine disruptor and turns frog intersex or hermaphroditic. It also has effects on humans. The way it passed the EPA is through a whole bunch of lobbying and “we let the company investigate themselves and they said it was fine”.
Fuck we have arrived into the world of “Ahh, I miss the intellectual integrity of Alex Jones.”
Why? It’s probably just an ad.
Havent read the article yet, but I recall reading that with modern battery architecture electric planes were physically impossible. Is this plane not using lithium ion, or was I mistaken? It wasnt an issue of the tech not being ready yet, moreso that lithium ion simply could not achieve an energy density to weight ratio that was needed.
Edit: the article does not say.
Second edit: how far off are we from either not having power storage or only minimal power storage and then we just beam energy to the plane?
It’s absolutely not impossible. Airplanes are more efficient than drones, and efficiency grows with scale. Drones fly. Of course an airplane can do the same.
The problem is one of speed and range. The best form of propulsion we have for electric airplanes is the propeller, which has a lower top speed potential than a turbofan. The energy density of batteries is also lower.
Realistically, an electric airplane will have reduced range and speed compared to a modern jet.
Havent read the article yet, but I recall reading that with modern battery architecture electric planes were physically impossible.
Something something bumblebees.
My dad was an apiarist, bee keeper, and educator.
One of may favourite bee anatomy facts is that the spots on their hind legs that collects pollen…is called Pollen Pants. Love it. Fucking amazing.
Another issue is batteries don’t change (significantly) in mass during flight. Most airliners have greater takeoff weight than landing weight, because after flying a jet for a few hours you’re going to burn many tons of fuel. Batteries don’t do that, so you’d have to have an airplane capable of landing at it’s MTOW.
Also planes tend to increase their cruising altitude as weight decreases, it’s more efficient due to the lower air resistance. Electric motors would be more efficient across a wider range of conditions than turbo fans though.
That’s all moot though, because you must don’t have the energy density for long haul flights in batteries. They’re trying to make air taxis happen again. They were talking up air taxis before 9/11, and they never really happened. And back then they were talking about using existing aircraft driven by conventional gasoline or jet fuel. Now we’re talking about new airframes with battery electric power.
I think it is more specifically electric planes as large as commercial airline passenger planes are impossible. It has a lot to do with battery mass to energy content ratio. Kerosine is about 46.4 MJ (megajoules) per kilogram. Lithium-air batteries, for example, only have about 6.12 MJ/kg.
So, that means you need 7 times as much battery (in mass) to have the same energy content of kerosine fuel. Naively, we can maybe say that means electric planes only have 1/6 of the range of an equivalent kerosine plane.[^]
Interestingly, lithium-air batteries theoretically have the largest possible energy density for any battery at 40.1 MJ/kg.
^ The calculations are really basic and probably only slightly reflect reality (since there are many other important factors. For example, Hydrogen has a lot more energy per kilogram than kerosine, but because it is much less dense, it has much less energy per m^3 than kerosine. This has made hydrogen gas very impractical for either internal-combustion engines, or planes), but I think it gives an idea of what the problem is.
There are a lot of other factors. For example, electric motors with propellers are far more efficient than turbofans
A propeller driven airplane will also be substantially slower than a turbofan one, allowing for unswept wings and better aerodynamic efficiency
In reality, battery powered passenger planes aren’t impossible but they will definitely have a shorter range and slower speed. They are realistically only suited for regional routes.
Perfect is the enemy of good. There are so many people at least here in Europe that fly easy-jet/ryanair 1h to 2h flights, these could all still work with propeller planes. But frankly I’m just wondering why I can’t get subsidized trains that would be actually affordable. Right now it remains cheaper to drive all alone in my car than get an Eurostar ticket unless I planned it months in advance (spoilers: I can’t plan months in advance most of the time with my work).
This would be perfect for Norway. Oslo-Trondheim and Oslo-Bergen is consistently among the most trafficked air routes in Europe and the train ride is 7-8 hours. I love trains and use them whenever I can and even though I believe we should get better train infrastructure between the largest cities I also concede the fact that beyond those it’s just not practical with trains all the way up north or out to the small coast communities.
Electric planes with a few hundred kilometers reach would suite our domestic travel juuust fine. I might even have started my European interrail trip with a short flight to Oslo or Copenhagen if electric planes where doable and reasonable (in terms of both cost and emissions).
Assuming $8 for energy, let’s say $0.12/kWh you’re looking at 64kWH. That’s like 1kWh/mi, which is pretty fucking bad. There’s no way they’re scaling this up, because the battery has to weigh at least 1 Ton. So to double the distance you’d need to initially add double the battery, but that’s equivalent of adding 8 fat fucking Americanos to the payload, there by reducing the distance you can travel.
Meanwhile a Cessna Jet gets like 27/mi per gallon. So 2.5 gallons of fuel gets the same travel distance, and that only weighs like 20lbs.
Also, haven’t looked lately, but last I remembered, jet fuel was like $11/gal.
Where do you pay .12/KWH?
Ontario, Canada, iirc the average 24hr rate on time of day use is 12¢/kWh…in CA cents.
Charge at night and I think you can get to a little under 9¢
Lmao, I pay $0.0608 sept-June and $0.12 the other months.
Fucking Idaho.
Right? I pay more than three times that at 0.38€/kWh or 0.45$/kWh. Must be somewhere with tons of hydro.
Ontario is mostly nuclear with some hydro and lastly some fossil sprinkled in. But I suspect a lot also comes from 100% hydro Quebec.
It’s a problem of range. Jet planes have the advantage that they get lighter as the flight goes on, so for shorter flights, the battery issue is not as big of a problem. It’s not a physical impossibility to achieve flight with lithium ion, it’s a question of how far.
4 people, 70 miles in 35 minutes. Vertical takeoffs in the works. $8 in fuel costs. Are we finally getting close the what the Jetson’s envisioned 60 years ago?
They envisioned travelling on the Autobahn?
Those were Kraftwerk
The journey to JFK airport lasted 45 minutes and included a pilot and four people, including Matt Koscal, President of Republic Airways, and Rob Wiesenthal, CEO of Blade Air Mobility.
It would be great if the article mentioned how it worked. Is this just Lithium Ion again? Or is it some new material e.g the whole airplane is made of a meta-material that turns the entire frame into a battery?
It’s real goofy-lookin’.
I can’t imagine it’s a lift-versus-speed thing. Like how human-powered aircraft have the longest and skinniest wings possible.
Was it shaped that way just to do the quadcopter thing, which they’ve apparently not used here? I feel like you could just extend the nose so the wings are in the middle, and have a plane that’s still plane-shaped.
Reminds me a lot of a Cessna Mixmaster. No front propeller, and the horizontal tail attaches to the engine cowling rather than crossing behind the propeller.
My instinct would be to go full Rutan, build a canard. If we’re going with a single engine pusher. No need for the tail booms, everything produces lift, the main problem is flaps really aren’t a thing with canards, you land them clean. But, if you’re going to bolt VTOL to it somehow, who cares?
There’s a thin line between “that looks kind of silly” and “it worked in Kerbal Space Program.”
I mean, my vision is basically an electric Velocity.
Does say that vertical takeoff is part of the plan. Probably worth an awkward looking plane if the goal is to eliminate the need for infrastructure like modern airports.
