Note: not being negative, I just want to ensure I understand correctly since the title might imply something else.
Update: confirmed, it does use aviation fuel.
> "The airplane will also include a reserve-hybrid configuration, consisting of two turbo generators powered by sustainable aviation fuel. The reserve-hybrid system is installed to secure reserve energy requirements without cannibalizing battery range, and it can also be used during cruise on longer flights to complement the electrical power provided by the batteries."
Hybrid after the first 125 miles, total range 500 miles. Their problem is diversions - an incident at the destination airport may mean an passenger aircraft may need to land at an airport which could be a couple hundred miles away. The hybrid powerplant throws the fuel efficiency numbers off so goal is not to run it unless needed, but they could not get certification without it.
misterderpie 17 hours ago [-]
For anyone looking for the reference, it's stated at 10:16 [0]
Honestly, I'd feel better knowing it has a reserve system in case there's any issues, even if the batteries have more than enough power, beats having it and never using it, than needing it and suffering as a result.
golem14 6 hours ago [-]
The real benefit really seems to be that the electric motors have a much smaller failure rates than mechanical ones running near their top rpm. The hybrid motor can run at a much optimized RPM, so the idea is that this will improve the overall safety margin of the overall design. I could be wrong, but that's what the video said.
dist-epoch 5 hours ago [-]
One would assume that all combustion engines used in aviation run at an optimized RPM?
FredFS456 3 hours ago [-]
At cruise, yes. However during takeoff and go around they run at higher RPM to develop more thrust. Using batteries for takeoff and only using fuel for cruise or backup power is smart.
Tade0 2 hours ago [-]
RPM is one thing, but the other is that engines run more efficiently at altitude due to the temperatures being much lower there.
IrishTechie 9 hours ago [-]
Do current aircraft have a backup in-case their fuel tanks run dry?
ben-schaaf 9 hours ago [-]
There's reserve tanks or more generally reserve fuel for emergencies. Other than that there's no propulsion backup for when the fuel runs out, instead redundancy comes from multiple independent fuel tanks.
SideburnsOfDoom 7 hours ago [-]
> redundancy comes from multiple independent fuel tanks.
And in larger aircraft, multiple independent engines. See for instance ETOPS
From the pictures, I see that this new aircraft has 4 engines. So it should be adequately resilient to single engine failure.
mmanfrin 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, they also have ramjet turbines which generate electricity from the movement of the plane on a backup circuit.
dmitrygr 9 hours ago [-]
Current aircraft have * MULTIPLE HOURS* of fuel tanks. Compared to dozens of minutes of battery that this thing has.
tonyarkles 8 hours ago [-]
Typical reserve requirement is 30 min for a turbine aircraft (45 for piston). Given the 125 mile battery-only range and the probability that it flies at at least 200 kts (230 mph), it’s pretty unlikely to hit even a 30 min reserve on only batteries. I like the design, I think they get the problem and have a decent solution for it
Kaliboy 3 hours ago [-]
The most common flight on my island is to the island about 50 miles away from us.
We pay about $120 for the privilege, which takes 20 minutes of flying.
So I think even in this case the reserve capacity is "needed" (for the reserve requierement), but I can see them realistically being able to fly between the islands purely on electric power.
dmitrygr 3 hours ago [-]
> and have a decent solution for it
Unless we ignore the additional maintenance cost of having to completely different proportion systems to maintain (and it is worse than a twin engine plane, because the propulsion systems are different, so you have to stock up on more different kinds of parts and possibly have different kinds of mechanics on staff to understand them)
3 hours ago [-]
werdnapk 14 hours ago [-]
So what do regular aircraft do when they run out of fuel? They require a forced landing. Aircraft fly with a buffer of fuel though to avoid such situations, so why can't an electric aircraft fly with a similar buffer on it's range? ie. Always fly less than the current charged range of the aircraft.
Toutouxc 10 hours ago [-]
> Aircraft fly with a buffer of fuel though to avoid such situations, so why can't an electric aircraft fly with a similar buffer on it's range?
Because the required buffer is HUGE and we’re at a point where electric planes barely have enough energy for the actual route. So they’re doing the sensible thing here, flying the actual route electrically and falling back to combustion if the plane needs to divert.
tonyarkles 8 hours ago [-]
To that point, the battery capacity they’ve got, rough envelope math, is maybe 10 minutes beyond reserve. They’d likely need at least double, probably triple battery capacity to fly useful routes all-electric with enough reserve stored in batteries. The turbines are a great move.
10 hours ago [-]
MobiusHorizons 14 hours ago [-]
Regular aircraft are required to have enough fuel to be able to divert to the alternate airfield in their flight plan plus all the margins for taxiing and waiting for a landing clearance. If a plane is low on fuel they can declare an emergency and get priority over other traffic, but that obviously is disruptive and should not happen on well planned flights unless something pretty significant happens after takeoff.
phire 12 hours ago [-]
> and should not happen on well planned flights
You make it sound like it is acceptable for a badly planned flight to have a fuel emergency. It is not.
If there is a fuel emergency (or the plane lands with less than 30min of fuel) there will be an incident investigation that treats the situation as serious as if the plane had crashed. If the investigation discovers it was nothing more than bad planning, (at minimum) the planning procedures will be changed to ensure it never happens again.
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
Badly planned flights should not happen. Pilots who don't carefully plan their flights end up dead quickly. Lack of fuel is one of the easier to handle things that can go wrong from bad flight planning.
marcosdumay 14 hours ago [-]
Regular aircraft fly with enough fuel to change into at least one other airport in an emergency (ideally two).
That aircraft would need a very large battery to do that, and it's way more efficient to have some burnable fuel there that you'll never actually use.
jmward01 12 hours ago [-]
Lots of down votes on this but it is a legitimate question. The goal is likely to have the majority of flight off of batteries. That being said, the total weight of the emergency fuel plus generators is likely far less than the weight of the extra batteries they would haul around for the safety margin they need. So they end up lighter and more capable AND don't need to burn fuel. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't start the generators during critical phases so they may end up using some fuel for a flight, but not much. Total guess on that though.
phire 12 hours ago [-]
> That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't start the generators during critical phases
I somewhat doubt that. Part of the advantage of the design is that the generators don't need to be sized as big enough to power take off, climb and a potential go-around on landing. They only need to be sized as big enough for cruising.
So powering them up during critical phases wouldn't help with safety. If anything, normal operating procedures might actually require shutting them down during critical phases.
What this does mean is that the batteries need to be reasonably full when it comes into land, possibly as high as 50%. And most go arounds will require immediately powering up the generators, so it probably needs to be fuelled for all but the shortest flights.
luma 14 hours ago [-]
Simply put, batteries are heavy.
gblargg 6 hours ago [-]
Something like 1/30 the energy density of liquid fuel. Plus unlike fuel, a discharged battery weighs virtually the same as a charged one.
dyauspitr 12 hours ago [-]
Unless they have a whole new airport and flying experience, I don’t think a lot of people are going to fly just 125 miles. That’s less than two hours of driving. It would be 2 hours of just airport shenanigans much less the flight itself.
PaulRobinson 2 hours ago [-]
Not much airport shenanigans in the small island hopping nations and the fjords this is aimed at. 125 miles in 2 hours is assuming flat, straight, high-speed, low-traffic roads. Sure, people might not use these to fly SFO → LAX or back, but they likely will use them to go ABZ → LSI, and the "check-in and security shenanigans" are, errr, quite relaxed, compared to what you might be used to at JFK...
There's a ton of small routes that just aren't getting much service now because of operating costs - the founder speaks to that in the video - that this could serve.
A slightly larger aircraft able to do ~300 miles on battery and then say 1,000 in hybrid mode, might resurrect the economically unviable but relatively fast LHR/LGW flights down to NQY. The six hour drive is pretty, but... yeah...
cuu508 3 hours ago [-]
> 125 miles. That’s less than two hours of driving.
Assuming you have a straight road in that direction with a speed limit that allows an average speed of more than 100km/h.
Kaliboy 3 hours ago [-]
I live in the Caribbean. For island-hopping airlines this would be a godsent.
But I doubt we have the capital to buy them new.
speed_spread 3 hours ago [-]
Just in saved maintenance they'd probably pay for themselves within a few years.
zxexz 9 hours ago [-]
Depending on the cost, and availability, 125 miles gets you within easy public transit range of NYC from Boston.
Now, of course, most of the hassle of getting to NYC from Boston is transit to and from the airport. And of course, transit from JFK, Laguardia, etc into the city.
There are at least 5 capable airports/airstrips closer to me than Logan or T.F. Green. Only one of them, Worcester, offers NYC flights. Worcester is almost an hour from me on average, and a bit more expensive. It’s an hour from takeoff to landing (I’ve arrived 10 minutes before takeoff, at the PARKING LOT many times without it being an issue).
If they can get this in and out of even smaller airports, like in Stow, MA, which is beyond capable, it will be a gamechanger.
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
Too bad Amtrak can't run good service. This is a perfect area for high speed trains, but instead the service is too slow and not frequent enough.
Toutouxc 10 hours ago [-]
> 125 miles … That’s less than two hours of driving.
I don’t know where you live or what you drive, but I just punched in a destination 200 km away as the crow flies, the Alps are in the way and I’m looking at five hours of driving.
Also, water.
Thlom 10 hours ago [-]
Rookie numbers. As the crow flies it's 250km between me and my old town. Used to drive back and forth a lot back in the days and it takes everything from 8 hours to 10 hours depending on the route you take and whether you hit the ferries on schedule or not. Plus 30 minutes for resting and eating. Flying takes 50 minutes in a propeller airplane + travel to and from airports and airport shenanigans (not too bad at these small airports). If you take the morning flight you'll be in town by the time people start showing up for work. If you drive you'll be in town by the time people start leaving work.
shuwix 7 hours ago [-]
That's nothing. I was crossing Himalaya's by crawling at even slower speed.
Dayuuum, ... you're smart.
Toutouxc 6 hours ago [-]
I am, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that 125 miles as the crow flies is “less than 2 hours of driving” between like 6 specific pairs of destinations in the whole world.
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
125 miles as the crow flies is less than three hours (two hours is a little tight) of driving for most trips of that distance people make!
People tend to have friends and family they want to visit regularly. So they try plan their life around not moving too far from where they grew up. That means people won't even look at a move of 125 miles away if there is not good transportation back. In turn if the high speed route between the two destinations they won't move there and in turn won't be making those trips.
Note that I said route above, not highways. Trains, boats, airplanes, cars, or anything else you can imagine works. The method of travel doesn't matter at all. What matters is how long it takes, and that you would use it for the trip.
Half an hour door to door (by whatever travel means) means you can have dinner after work with those friends once in a while. 1 hour means you can visit every weekend, but you lose those dinner mid week dinners. 2-3 hours means you visit for every minor holiday, but it isn't every weekend. At 4-6 hours every visit is an overnight. At 8+ hours this is a week long trip.
The above ranges are guidelines, not rules, they get fudged and overlapped all the time depending on various details. If the trip is 5 hours by train you might still do it as a day trip since you can plan to nap on the train. Even if you have to drive 6 hours each way: you might attend a funeral and return all in one day.
Toutouxc 7 minutes ago [-]
I live in Czechia, in Europe, a first-world country with dense population and a very normal road network. I am now on vacation, and I’m exactly 205 km as the crow flies from where my parents live. If I wanted to drive to them right now, it would be a 309 km trip estimated to take 3.5 hours or, avoiding highways, a 252 km trip, over 4 hours.
I don’t care about the rest of your post, I just want you to understand that a completely straight highway through some corn fields isn’t how the rest of the planet drives.
shuwix 22 minutes ago [-]
Slumdog millionaires are pissed that some people live in countries where there are highways.
keiferski 9 hours ago [-]
Could be useful for hub and spoke type systems, where you fly from a smaller city to the main hub, and catch a connection from there.
Even then there are lots of flights in Europe that are between cities less than 1 hour apart.
This idea generally makes more sense in Europe than the US, I think.
rrr_oh_man 8 hours ago [-]
Their first customers were from the Nordics, if you watched the video
theodric 6 hours ago [-]
Electric propulsion would eliminate the local environmental impact of emissions justification for the short-haul flight bans that are floated and/or implemented [1] from time to time in Europe. It makes sense to spray less jet/avgas exhaust when possible. Of course, if the ban reasons include noise abatement or evil conspiratorial machinations, they're still on the table ;)
Perhaps, but almost all of those shorter trips are routes that should have fast train service anyway.
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
> Unless they have a whole new airport and flying experience, I don’t think a lot of people are going to fly just 125 miles.
There are a lot of "island hopper" and bushpilot mini airlines in the world. The current world record is a route in Scotland that, on good days, takes less than a minute of flight time [1].
It is much much easier to supply such islands with electricity (there almost always is a power grid tied to whatever the nearest mainland is) than to continuously haul fuel around.
And in Croatia... that is easy enough distance to cover Rijeka-Zadar for example, which is about three hours worth of car or bus drive.
SFO to sac and Monterey, lax to (SD, Santa Barbara, etc) could be good for those “I live in a 50k person town and need to get to a hub” flights.
Of course those -should- be easy on trains too…
tomjessessky 10 hours ago [-]
There are a fair number of connecting flights that this is a good fit for. For example, I fly out of Madison, WI regularly and almost always connect through Chicago, which I believe is right around the 125 mile mark.
zxexz 9 hours ago [-]
Used to regularly take the shortish flight from Boston to Chicago, and then a bus >3x as long to Madison to see family, because the puddlejumper was too expensive or not even running.
neals 9 hours ago [-]
Without noise, over time, travel will change.
lawrenceduk 7 hours ago [-]
There will still be some noise. But yes, it’ll be less noisy.
petesergeant 9 hours ago [-]
Mandalay to Bagan, Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido, Chiang Mai to Pai… shitty mountain and hill roads can make short plane distances take forever
11 hours ago [-]
mapt 5 hours ago [-]
According to the founder, he can make the economics of short trips (1-2hr) work with all-battery.
He cannot make them work if he has to store enough battery to fly around for an additional hour or two searching for an airport to divert to in an emergency, which is an FAA requirement.
So he has the heavy battery bank for regular trips costing almost nothing per flight-hour, and the expensive fueled backup system for emergencies.
mikepurvis 4 hours ago [-]
Seems like an extremely practical way to handle that requirement without hauling around a ton of extra battery capacity that will rarely get used.
class3shock 14 hours ago [-]
The X1, which is what flew, is all electric. The ES-30, their proposed product, is hybrid.
Gravityloss 5 hours ago [-]
But on this flight it did not have a combustion engine, I assume it was fully electric and if so, the title is 100% correct.
yndoendo 17 hours ago [-]
With limited information form their web site, both. Being able to run pure electric while switching to fossil fuel. [0]
The way modern hybrids can charge from an outlet, I classify them as EV-Hybrid, and only use gas if need be vs older ones that only charge through the gas engine, Hybrid.
Turbines are extremely reliable and well-understood in aviation propulsion
MobiusHorizons 14 hours ago [-]
This! Anything unproven makes the flight certification process longer. They already have to get their electric side certified, might as well make the backup generator as easily certified as possible.
tuatoru 13 hours ago [-]
Good point. Only have one new tech at a time.
Generation II then.
bitwize 15 hours ago [-]
My father, a mechanical engineer, was a tireless advocate of the hypocycloid crankshaft mechanism. In the 90s, hybrid vehicles with a hypocycloid-based generator feeding the batteries that make the electric motors go was the application he was going for, especially since hypocycloids function best at constant RPM.
strictnein 15 hours ago [-]
I say this with all sincerity, I love this sentence:
"My father, a mechanical engineer, was a tireless advocate of the hypocycloid crankshaft mechanism."
For some reason just reading that brought a smile to my face.
bombcar 15 hours ago [-]
From mechanical engineers I’ve met it almost seems a requirement that they have something they tireless advocate for.
moab9 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I bet he was.
dyauspitr 13 hours ago [-]
It uses aviation fuel only after the electric battery is empty. And uses the fuel to run generators, the motors are all electric.
_heimdall 12 hours ago [-]
Its hard to call that the largest electric aircraft IMO. It's electric until it can't, then its not.
disillusioned 10 hours ago [-]
Well, technically, it's always electric. Sometimes the source of that electricity is from the battery system, and sometimes it's from an onboard generator.
class3shock 12 hours ago [-]
Doing some math. Regional jets get somewhere around 45.9 seat miles per gallon (1). So 30 seats, going 125 miles would take around 80 gallons of jet fuel. This is likely low because all the jets listed are bigger and likely flying longer flights that are more efficient but just go with it.
Jet fuel has a specific energy of 12 kwh/kg and a density of 6.7 lb/gal (2). So 80 gallons of jet fuel is 536 lb, or 243 kg, and contains 2,916 kwh of energy. Jet engines are not very efficient, so lets say only 30% of this energy actually ends up being used. So 875 kwh.
Lets say we are using batteries that are 300 wh/kg (0.3 kwh/kg), which seems on the high side of what electric cars are using now (and that there are no efficiency loses in the electric motors or elsewhere).
Now maybe I messed up my unit conversions but I think that means to carry the same energy onboard you would need 6,428 lbs of batteries. And you are still going to carry atleast 1,600 lbs of fuel on top of that. And you have the weight of both electric and conventional engines.
I could see this reducing costs like they say but when many big costs are fixed (pilot, hangar, etc.) will this actually make sense? Will airlines fly something that has thousands of pounds less payload than a competitor but lower running costs? I don't know but it will be interesting to see.
Energy density alone is a misleading metric, because what matters is how much energy actually gets delivered to the drive mechanism. It's actually not that hard to beat gasoline, because despite its excellent energy density, gasoline engines are only 30% efficient. First and foremost a gasoline engine is a machine for producing heat and noise, and only incidentally for producing forward motion.
athrowaway3z 3 hours ago [-]
The economics to do what planes do today make no sense; but i think that's making the analysis the wrong way around.
There are opportunities for which airplanes have never made economic sense because they have big fixed costs like pilot, hangar, fuel-infra, engine(-maintenance). So will small short haul (?pilot-less) rechargeable planes have enough allure to beat out alternatives where planes were never considered before?
probably not at any major scale in a future where it competes with other autonomous transport, but that's me guessing at numbers. There will be enough of a market to build these things for niche constraints (eg the fuel-infra if small modular reactors become widespread).
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
The big problem with autonomous airplanes is they still require airports. I don't have a runway in my backyard, and I can't build one because someone else has a house there. My closest runway is about 20 minutes away, and then once I get to the far airport it is another 20 minutes to get where I'm going. This is why commute by airplane will always be a niche only a few people can do. In turn this means airplanes will never scale to be as cheap as cars are (a new Cesna stationair HD MSRP is over $700k - I submit that if they were building 40 per hour like many SUVs are built the cost would be around $70k)
Even a farmer is unlikely to be willing to give up that much space from their farmer operation. I do know farmers who have their own private runways, but they love flying and so are willing to give up some income to have a runway. They are giving up thousands of dollars in gross income to have that runway.
I happen to have a backyard that is big enough for a helicopter (I think - I never measured but I think I'm at the minimums the FAA requires), but I have an oversized yard. There are a lot more places for a helicopter. Most local parks have enough space, but I think communities would object to regular use. (if used only a couple times a month no problem, but more that and the noise and need to clear everyone else out will make it an objection)
walrus01 12 hours ago [-]
If they can get the range to within what, for example, an Alaska Airlines/Horizon Q400 flies from Seattle for regional flights (with reserve for diversion airport), that may be sufficient for some purposes.
In terms of operating cost, not just cost of fuel, but if the electric engines can be much less costly in terms of periodic maintenance and overhaul. Maintenance and overhaul costs on turboprop and small jet turbine engines are not cheap.
kvemkon 5 hours ago [-]
> Lets say we are using batteries that are 300 wh/kg (0.3 kwh/kg)
Also consider that an empty battery weighs the same as a charged one. Whereas empty fuel tanks don't.
I wonder how annoying this is for the engineers to stay within landing weight limits (MLW)
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
My guess (I'm not an engineer) is landing weight limits are more then because the airplane will never have more than that anyway. They need a little better suspension in case of a hard landing, and different training for the aircraft (which you need anyway) to account for it handling differently, but otherwise it is still an airplane. Maybe bigger spoilers or some other part as well to better bleed off speed.
They need to account for it of course, but it seems more like account for it, not difficult. Any engineer in this space able to comment?
542354234235 1 hours ago [-]
Landing weight limits are less than takeoff limits because of the extreme stress it puts on the landing gear. This is why planes that have an issue right after takeoff often need to dump tens of thousands of gallons of fuel before they can land.
>Aircraft have two main types of weight limits: the maximum takeoff weight is composed of dry operating weight (DOW) plus payload (passengers and cargo), collectively the zero fuel weight (ZFW), plus the trip fuel, contingency, alternate, final reserve and the block fuel (taxi fuel), and the maximum structural landing weight, with the maximum structural landing weight almost always being the lower of the two. This allows an aircraft on a normal, routine flight to take off at a higher weight, consume fuel en route, and arrive at a lower weight. [0]
As a rule of thumb, when you find yourself looking at an existing internal combustion vehicle and converting fossil fuel energies and efficiencies using battery gravimetric densities, you’re almost always at the “garbage in” stage of GIGO.
This plane isn’t a 737, it isn’t even a jet, it doesn’t run the motors the same way, the flight profiles are all different.
llukas 8 hours ago [-]
Check jet engine weight and include in the calculation. One weights 2200-3700 lbs according to same source that quotes 45.9 seat miles per gallon. Vs 125 pounds for electric engine.
tonyarkles 8 hours ago [-]
I’d guess comparable for a 30-seat regional, you’d probably want to compare with a PT6, especially since this aircraft is prop driven. That’s only about 250lb dry.
llukas 7 hours ago [-]
It seems you're right. Would nice to see breakdown for this plane how it actually maps to real world prototype.
ddlsmurf 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, it doesn't even make sense to make electric trucks, let alone airplanes. Or they'd be mostly battery.
bluGill 1 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of trucks that never go very far in a day. Many of them are used for "last mile" delivery. They start at a warehouse, get loaded, then go make a few deliveries and head back for the next load. While fast charging is needed, they don't go very far and thus don't need extreme range.
It is a valid question though: how do we get more of the long distant freight onto trains. Followed closely by how to we get existing freight trains to move to all electric instead of diesel electric (I've been told railroads have studied this: if diesel gets to $8/gallon it is cost effective - but I can't find any references to cite and so you should take this "Fact" with some salt)
ddlsmurf 37 minutes ago [-]
yes i conceded that use case a bit bellow, it mostly makes sense in dense urban areas, where access to the grid is easy, and not emitting polution is at a premium. But even then it's a very difficult case to make before eg: electrifying buses, or more generally, decarbonising your electricity supply. If this made sense, musk tried to sell it a decade ago, it just doesn't. A lot of the value is that the majority don't understand the tradeoffs and complication, and just think electric = more green, and it makes for great PR specially abroad.
bluGill 13 minutes ago [-]
There are for sure higher priorities than trucks used as trucks.
ragebol 9 hours ago [-]
I read new truck sales in China are about 30% electric and climbing. Apparently it does make sense for them
ddlsmurf 8 hours ago [-]
What China does hardly indicates economic sense, and you can be sure you won't hear about the down sides or failures. They already very agressively hide car lithium fires but they're very frequent. Economics over there are mostly investment driven with a large dose of ideology and vanity, not demand driven. You can see it everywhere including the massive amounts of empty housings for example
ragebol 5 hours ago [-]
Being dependent on (cheap) oil can make economic sense as well. Unless you get cut off all of a sudden. Depending on local energy might make more sense in the long term. also for factor other than the economy.
D_Alex 7 hours ago [-]
>They already very agressively hide car lithium fires
But you found out... how?
ddlsmurf 5 hours ago [-]
They regularly pop up on the usual guanxi, douyin/weibo etc. They stay up for a few hours usually.
7 hours ago [-]
dmichulke 7 hours ago [-]
This ignores the fact that there are also things that China does better or equal than Western companies. Like robots, solar panels, electric cars (?), AI models, electronics.
They must be good at something, otherwise China wouldn't be where it is.
So flat out dismissing anything from China is not enough of an argument.
Mind you, I'm not saying you're generally wrong, just your "generally" is wrong. ;-)
ddlsmurf 7 hours ago [-]
I'd dispute they do any of those better, they stole the IP, then used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition. Besides electric cars and solar, it's very debatable wether those will actually be ecological in the end. For ex. they are still opening massive amounts of fossil based electric plants, so the truck that is half battery is actually running on coal anyway. It would take an incredible re-work of the electric grids to accomodate actually transitioning away from thermal cars, including some solution for seasonal storage. If you're impressed by their robots, I don't know what you're looking at, they seem to be ridiculous, not even at the tech level that boston dynamics had decades ago. Finally keep in mind that electric cars are fantastic spying devices, for collecting data, and if you're nefarious, imagine hacking into them. That's why teslas are banned near anything governmental in China. So there is a huge strategic advantage to cornering that market, but not really to save the planet. The AIs are all distilled, USA still leads by far there, and they too are strategic weapons
PaulRobinson 2 hours ago [-]
You're making a lot of assertions without citations here.
If I look at a BYD at my local dealership, and compare it to a comparable spec German car (I live in the UK, so tariffs are not the thing shifting the needle here), I can see where the cost savings are and the trade-offs.
I don't think they're artificially more affordable. I just think they're more affordable.
Using public funds to invest in capital expenditure is - outside of the US - considered a wise use of public funds. If the result is a more competitive industry, whether that's ship building (South Korea), steel production (recent UK nationalisation efforts), military hardware (United States), or medical research, physics, chemistry, computing (look at the history of all the G7 there), and so on, and so on... irrelevant.
China has decided to spend it on complex manufacturing that they've been the supply chain for to Western manufacturers for the last 30 years. That's not controversial - it's been obvious this is where they were heading for some time.
ddlsmurf 9 minutes ago [-]
First off, I admit I have no idea what the EU and US car manufacturers are doing, their positions for the past decade don't make any sense to me in the electric market. Actually smells like hubris and inertia more than anything to be honest.
I'm not being super academic with citations, but the CCP investments in BYD, to the point it makes no sense to exist without aren't exactly hard to find secrets.
You're not comparing comparable things, in the UK, there is a great deal of expectations of what an employee has as rights for instance. There are extremely rigorous safety regulations that are very onerous. We can debate wether those are justified but it's a very complex topic you're brushing off. Their innovation seems mostly on small iterative gadgets, but look more closely into what they tolerate as self driving and the death it causes, and be sure you want that in the UK for profit margins.
I'm really not against neither subsidies nor artificially inflating one's strategic advantage at all to develop a market and corner the competition. I never said China is wrong to do what it's doing. What I am saying is that its dangerous for us outside of China to buy into it now. Beyond the security implications of chinese robots with sensors everywhere roaming about cities the CCP considers their ennemies, there's just the dependency risk, there's the "how much do you trust the people who fed paint to their babies to handle super dense explosives that cant be put out by water in dense cities", and the basic question, maybe its better to have the lightest car possible, not the most gadgetty with drones and ipads.
So the basic point above "China has more electric trucks therefore it makes economic sense" is helped by none of this
cpt_sobel 4 hours ago [-]
> they stole the IP, then used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets
If you steal my IP and you make a better - or at least comparative but cheaper - product, that's on me for not innovating further.
ddlsmurf 3 hours ago [-]
It's trivial to compete if you don't have R&D costs, and don't care about stuff like your employees, regulations or safety, or even sales since you can just use government money (this is not without consequence either). And it's not only about free market stuff, why do you think they're so excited for all countries to use their 5g products for example ? Don't think this is benign.
notahacker 3 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Chinese policy, but you should probably reread your arguments and check for coherence.
Chinese EV trucks make no economic sense even though they're 30% of China's fleet but also they're only investing all that as a trojan horse even though they use them almost exclusively domestically, plus the old "Asians don't innovate they just copy" canard even though there wasn't much Western IP on electric trucks to copy in the first place and China's battery technology is somehow not Alibaba knockoffs but more performant than Western equivalents (whilst state sponsored Chinese industries remain generations behind in stuff that's actually strategically critical for them to clone via industrial espionage like semiconductors and jet engines)
ragebol 5 hours ago [-]
> used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition
If you replace 'public' with 'VC', isn't that the exact same as the US does in Silicon Valley?
ddlsmurf 3 hours ago [-]
if VCs didn't care about making their money back, but instead had very different interests, then somewhat
ncruces 7 hours ago [-]
Due to Iran, they're cutting oil/fuel imports 30% YoY, and consumption by the transportation sector by 5~10%.
ddlsmurf 5 hours ago [-]
And opened about 80GW of coal last year alone. That's the only advantage to electric trucks, they can run on coal too, even though you can only carry half the capacity whilst moving the same total weight, it still can make sense, just not economic and certainly not ecological. They sure love people writing articles about it though, and how green and solar they are.
ZeroGravitas 4 hours ago [-]
Running trucks on a 50% coal grid like in China makes both economic and environmental sense.
It makes more of both as the Chinese grid gets cleaner.
ddlsmurf 3 hours ago [-]
neither of those are true, if they were, remember when tesla wanted to sell trucks like 10 years ago ? if you use electric trucks, half the mass you pay to move around is useless. Also the grid isn't "half coal", the truck doesn't wait for the sun to come out to charge. Which is another cost to transporters: the hours of downtime to recharge. They only make very limited sense in very last mile scenarios in dense cities. Also coal is way worse to burn than petrol, and in China's case, it's mostly bituminous, one of the worst coals in terms of pollution.
ZeroGravitas 3 hours ago [-]
Solar is only about 13% of China's power. They have hydro, wind, nuclear and gas too as well as coal.
Their off peak prices have generally been overnight, ideal for truck charging, though they have started having them around noon too like many other nations with growing solar share. Great for a mid shift top-up.
Coal is worse to burn than gasoline, but a car engine throws 80 percent of that away so you have to burn more compared with an efficient EV.
This has all been debated to death for over a decade, MIT has interactive tools to calculate figures, there's really no excuse for not knowing this about a subject you are so passionate about.
QuantumNoodle 18 hours ago [-]
These kind of startup excite me. More so than the "next killer app" or "look what we shoved AI into."
Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes and attack Europe's short flight market (which is already cheap). Now we need bigger planes or more frequent planes and the next startup to solve the energy needs.
infotainment 17 hours ago [-]
> Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes
I'm not sure how building an electric aircraft would help with this. Are people going to suddenly switch to commuting by plane?
Fixing America's commute problem is primarily an urban planning one (ie, putting all the homes nowhere near anything) and not an insufficient-electric-aircraft one.
alkonaut 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's the daily work commute being solved. More weekly meeting in Cleveland for someone who works in Chicago. Which today is a 5h one way drive and a hotel stay.
Waterluvian 17 hours ago [-]
Could you imagine the (rather justified?) NIMBYism for all the airports required for commuter flight? If rail can’t be done, flight definitely won’t fly.
_carbyau_ 15 hours ago [-]
Curious, would electric flight be significantly quieter such that airport noise is significantly less of an issue?
Or is the noise from turbulence through the air or something? I honestly would think they'd be minimising turbulence anyway for energy efficiency.
Toutouxc 10 hours ago [-]
Somewhat quieter, but not by much. We’re talking about prop planes here, where the prop is the noisy part.
marcosdumay 14 hours ago [-]
Most of it is due to turbulence. But that doesn't mean that a different engine can't make the plane have a completely different noise profile.
LastTrain 16 hours ago [-]
Rejecting stupid ideas that are a net bad for the community isn’t NIMBYism
Waterluvian 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah… Fair point! I’ve always perceived NIMBY as “we want the benefits but we want someone else to deal with the geographic price.” I bet we could find people who legitimately want commuter airports but just not near their house… wait… how would that even work?!
Spooky23 16 hours ago [-]
Stupid in those that lack imagination.
I happened to be in Plattsburgh the day of this flight, on my way to a fishing trip on the lake. They used that facility for the long former SAC base runway, but I think it’s also appropriate given the nature of the NY North country that an ultra low operating cost aircraft would see flight there.
The death of most industry really hurt these regions, which are largely cut off from the prosperity of the normal economy. The ability to affordably link places like Plattsburgh or Watertown NY to the broader world. That region in particular prospered with rail links driven by iron and timber.
90 minute flights to places like NYC metro or Boston Metro would be transformative, and may even create new airline operating models.
MobiusHorizons 13 hours ago [-]
I think you could make a case for that, especially when landing in water. Quite a few dense urban areas people might need to get to have water nearby suitable for landing seaplanes. I think you would end up creating communities further from the urban areas dedicated to this mode of transport. It’s definitely not a simple or guaranteed idea, but it is actually feasible politically and technically.
33MHz-i486 10 hours ago [-]
seaplanes aren’t more broadly used because they don’t have a good safety profile.
notyourav 16 hours ago [-]
Not enough population density with single family homes. And if given a choice between living in a condo + better urban planning versus suburban housing, well. And then there is NY.
kmeisthax 15 hours ago [-]
You can fix the density problem, at least on one end, with park-and-ride lots; every successful commuter / regional[3] rail service puts parking next to the suburban train stations. You just need a dense corridor for people to go to.
For people commuting from suburb to suburb you put bus connections at the train station. Buses are lower capacity but cheaper to purchase and operate so you can run a bunch of them in low density[0] for improved coverage. If demand is really bad[1] you create a "microtransit zone" - i.e. offer shuttle taxi service to the rider's final destination.
What I'm describing is basically how UTA's FrontRunner commuter rail service works; but it's not materially different from, say, the NY MTA's LIRR or MNR besides the larger scale of the NY systems and the fact that New York is weirdly bad at buses. For various reasons America has actually done decently well at retaining the commuter rail systems that worked and rebuilding the ones that got scrapped. This is primarily because these systems tend to be small-scale enough that state & local governments can fund them with their own money and the meager amount of FTA funds available.
The comment you replied to confused "rail commute" with "commuter rail"; but the grandparent was specifically talking about intercity travel. Here is where America is actually malincompetent[2] at building anything. Our primary intercity rail operator, Amtrak, was built as a last-ditch service preservation measure as railroads were bleeding money on passenger traffic. It doesn't own most of the rail it operates on, and that rail has been actively getting worse as Class I railroads have been destroying their own infrastructure (especially Union Pacific). The two-and-a-half attempts at building high-speed services in the US have all been various flavors of bad:
1. The most successful, the Acela, works primarily because Amtrak owns most of the corridor. Even then, it barely gets up to speed because "high speed[4]" (80+ mph) trains have to be grade-separated in the US, which is expensive, and the Acela was sold on the promise of incremental upgrades that haven't really panned out
2. BrightLine partnered with a freight railroad that wanted to get back into the passenger market, and it's actually operating at "higher speed[4]", but it's also bleeding money. They have a second route planned from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, but it's a project they bought out because it was... also bleeding money.
3. California wanted to build their own Acela, with blackjack and hookers, and wound up massively overselling it to voters. At least in terms of how much it would cost and how quickly it could be built. They bet the farm on FTA funds that got impounded the moment Trump retook office. I have no idea if this will ever happen.
You'll notice I never mentioned population density, and that's because it doesn't matter for intercity travel at all. The vast majority of flyers get a taxi to the airport and a rental car at their destination, and it still works out anyway. The only difference to those kinds of travelers between a train and a plane is time and whether or not they have to take their shoes off before boarding the vehicle.
[0] Or, if you're New York, you run way too many of them through medium and high density areas that really SHOULD have a subway but don't anyway build QueensLink and NO WAY WITH QUEENSWAY
[1] From a customer perspective, anything less frequent than an every 30 minutes bus probably could be served better with on-demand taxis.
[2] Malicious? Incompetent? Why not both!
[3] I am going to use "commuter rail" to refer to both commuter and regional rail systems as they are roughly the same scale. The difference comes down to scheduling patterns: commuter rail is scheduled around 9-to-5 rush hour traffic while regional rail is built to be more broadly useful.
[4] Strictly speaking, "high speed rail" means 125mph or higher and anything less is conventional speed. Rail just was already pretty fast even before Japan decided to make really fast trains.
waterTanuki 15 hours ago [-]
It's clearly marketed for remote communities with little to no connecting infrastructure. Think Alaskan wilderness or Hawaiian island hopping. This isn't for getting from LA to Denver for skiing.
mgerdts 13 hours ago [-]
But it may be for getting from Denver to Breckenridge or Winter Park. A flight to bypass Berthoud Pass in the winter seems quite attractive.
More likely, this replaces the turboprop or commuter jet from Colorado Springs to Denver to catch the connecting fright to any other major airport.
enquirewithin 11 hours ago [-]
An aircraft like this can be used two or three times a day, while spending the rest of the time charging.
A piston or turbine powered aircraft can run all day.
Toutouxc 10 hours ago [-]
Even Ryanair turnarounds take like 30 minutes. A bit more than that and you can charge the plane comfortably. Fueling bigger planes is quite the ceremony.
torginus 17 hours ago [-]
Btw, I kind of changed my opinion on AI. Finally, everybody can build an app, so we no longer have to pretend the people who built one and made it big are some sort tech pioneers pushing humanity forward.
Likewise, if you're a nerd, you can spend your free time building stuff you thought you would never get around to.
Yes, AI as marketed is a bit of a snakeoil, but much more real and meaningful than crypto and social media. And math nerds finally can get a high paying job that's not about peddling ads or figuring out how to make a hedge fund even richer.
khriss 13 hours ago [-]
Good for you.
danlugo92 16 hours ago [-]
Rare soulful HN comment
thrance 2 hours ago [-]
Realistically, you can't replace the entire global fleet on any reasonable timescale. And when climate change starts being such a problem that even politicians can't ignore it anymore, I think we'll have much bigger fish to fry than building electric planes. Flying is a luxury, after all.
Now, I think this is very neat, but I doubt we'll ever set foot on an electric plane this century.
brnt 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think 30 pax airplanes are competing with 500 pax high speed trains.
125 mile range is also far from being suitable for all <2 hr flights. I don't think there are many sub 125 mile connections either.
Love to see this work out. 100 pax and 500 mile (electricity) range minimum is where I see it having a (good!) chance for mainstream.
kmeisthax 16 hours ago [-]
USA's lacking rail commutes come down to the fact that America's leaders made the deliberate decision to destroy its own rail network and force people onto planes. The electric range of this aircraft is 125 miles[0], which is at the low end of the range where conventional intercity rail is time-competitive with the plane. A bullet train would absolutely smoke this.
tl;dr I have a few qualms with this app[1].
Now, this thing might take off (pun intended) anyway, for one simple reason: a theoretically faster train does not compete with it if it doesn't exist. The midwest and west are chock full of towns whose rail connections were either abandoned or never existed in the first place, but have regional airports. This thing would be perfect to service feeder flights from hub airports to regionals or as a charter plane.
That being said I wouldn't expect this to revolutionize air travel. You're still going to be packed into a sardine can and made to pay extra for the privilege of bringing a reasonable amount of toiletries with you. And all the long-haul flights are still going to be using fossil fuels because the energy density of batteries sucks. But still, I'd rather have this than 10 million AI companies.
[0] 500 miles for hybrid operation on SAF, because the FAA would not certify a plane with such a small range
> USA's lacking rail commutes come down to the fact that America's leaders made the deliberate decision to destroy its own rail network and force people onto planes
This is utterly 100% false!
The US made the decision to focus rail roads on freight. You never think about freight because you never use it for anything personal, but it is still there. The US beats any place in Europe for Freight and few countries even come close to US for freight rail.
There was a decision made to get rid of passenger rail. However most of those destroyed routes are routes that nobody sane would put passenger rail on today even in high rail mode share countries. There are only a small number of routes should return - for most of the lost routes a bus is better. That isn't to say passenger rail is bad. However the routes we had were bad.
QuantumNoodle 15 hours ago [-]
I'm rooting for electric planes not because I prefer them over rail but bc I share your disappointment and pessimism about American railway. I much rather take a train but when Amtrak NYC<->DC costs as more than a plane, leaves from the same destination, and takes hours longer then flying becomes preferable. There are many route similar to this. Only legup that Amtrak has is frequency. If planes become cheaper hopefully airlines will afford more of them and offer more frequent flights. I dream of a constant stream of aircraft flying between destinations. But never underestimate greed, airlines will probably reap the cut costs and charge customer the same as before :/
idiotsecant 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure the Midwest is the intended target, here. I think it's more suited to small, frequent trips like island hopping or trips to remote settlements.
mgerdts 13 hours ago [-]
It seems like a great option to get between MSN, MKE, or RFD and ORD. Maybe even an interesting connector between MDW and ORD.
The key thing question is whether smaller more frequent flights eat up too much runway time to be economical.
thelastgallon 44 minutes ago [-]
With this range, a lot of flights in countries/regions with a lot of islands can be electrified: Philippines, Indonesia, Hawaii, Carribean, Scandinavian countries.
Also, most countries are not that large. If we ignore the top 10 largest by area, possibly most of the domestic flights can be served.
thelastgallon 57 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if Aluminium–air battery can be used for flying. They are not rechargeable, but with zero cost of energy during daytime, a supply chain can be built.
Realistically, how long would it take this company to comply with all the relevant regulations (even just the local ones) before it can fly with human passengers? I imagine new safety guidelines would need to be written for wherever this aircraft is permitted to fly.
merek 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe I missed it but they didn't delve much into the TAM.
"Half of all flights in the world are under 2 hours." Then they give examples of Fjord-town hopping in Norway, or Island hopping in Hawaii, which seem very niche.
Will they be able to compete in any of the busiest routes? Could it take me Melbourne-Sydney in 1 - 2 hours for < $100? I'd sacrifice some time and $ for an eco-friendly option, but obviously there's a limit.
I didn't get that far in the video but from where I live (NYC) two hours gets you to a lot of very common travel destinations:
Boston, Massachusetts (1h)
Washington, D.C. (1h)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (45m)
Baltimore, Maryland (1h)
Toronto, Ontario (1h 45m)
Montreal, Quebec (1h 30m)
Cleveland, Ohio (1h 45m)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1h 15m)
Buffalo, New York (1h 10m)
Providence, Rhode Island (45m)
Portland, Maine (1h 10m)
Bermuda (1h 50m)
Nantucket, Massachusetts (1h 15m)
Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (1h 25m)
Ottawa, Ontario (1h 30m)
Quebec City, Quebec (1h 45m)
Rochester, New York (1h 5m)
Syracuse, New York (1h)
Manchester, New Hampshire (1h)
Bangor, Maine (1h 25m)
Burlington, Vermont (1h 10m)
Richmond, Virginia (1h 10m)
Norfolk, Virginia (1h 15m)
Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina (1h 25m)
Charlotte, North Carolina (1h 45m)
Greensboro, North Carolina (1h 30m)
Charleston, South Carolina (2h)
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (1h 45m)
Savannah, Georgia (2h)
If it gets a little better than current 2 hour flight time then Detroit Chicago and Atlanta are in range - very significant.
rossriley 32 minutes ago [-]
The busiest flight corridor in the world is Singapore to Kuala Lumpur which is only 45 minutes.
gpm 13 hours ago [-]
Batteries are rapidly improving (on many metrics, but the relevant one here is increasing in energy density).
The range is apparently 125 miles electric, and 500 miles as a hybrid. That's not enough for Melbourne Sydney. Give it a couple doubling-times though (5 years total?) and it will be.
Meanwhile aircraft take forever to develop and there should be enough of a market in shorter hall flights to occupy a scaling company in the meantime anyways.
mjcarden 11 hours ago [-]
Canberra - Sydney is one of the busiest routes in Australia with Dash 8 and ATR turboprops on high rotation every day. I could see a small electric aircraft working pretty well there, modulo charging times.
defrost 11 hours ago [-]
> modulo charging times.
There's already an Australian electric trucking company trailing plug n'replace heavy battery packs (with a forklift).
That allows for fast turnover times while used batteries recharge at terminals.
ActorNightly 13 hours ago [-]
Batteries aren't rapidly improving. Every single battery that has proposed higher energy density also has downsides in max discharge current. We may get at best like 10% improvement over what it is today.
enquirewithin 11 hours ago [-]
It’s taken thirty years for lithium batteries to double in energy density, and the rate of increase has tapered off recently.
aidenn0 10 hours ago [-]
That's max discharge current per cell though. You are going to have a lot of cells in a plane like this.
ActorNightly 13 hours ago [-]
Electric planes can in theory get longer flights, provided they change the flight profile - you spend a lot of energy going up to higher altitude, and the essentially glide down.
enquirewithin 11 hours ago [-]
The energy used to achieve altitude is then saved in the descent stage. So that’s not an issue for aircraft, regardless of how they’re powered. This is why every flight you’ve ever been on climbs to cruise altitude as fast as possible.
High altitude where the air is less dense is better for speed due to less drag. This is also power source agnostic.
feb 3 days ago [-]
Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electricity to get it off the ground.
solfox 17 hours ago [-]
Would be interested to see this compared to the costs to take off a comparable small jet fuel aircraft.
dghlsakjg 17 hours ago [-]
Nit: When they did the actual flight I did the math on the $5 worth of power claim, and it just doesn’t pencil out even at the lowest power rates in North America. Just to illustrate: at $.05 per kWh (which is less than half the price of electricity where they flew), you get 100kwh for $5. 100kw is what it takes to takeoff a 1200 pound Cessna. Probably about 75kw for an efficient cruise in that same plane.
Still an incredible feat, but no idea where the $5 comes from. Maybe that’s just the power they use to get from the threshold of the runway to wheels up.
jacquesm 15 hours ago [-]
You can't convert between kWh and kW. 100 kWh = 6 MW for one minute... so there is plenty of power if the flight is short enough. They said the plane has 4 Tesla's worth of battery power, let's assume they are 80KWh packs then that's 320kWh that they could use for a short flight. That's a fair amount of juice, they definitely won't be flying long in a 25 ton aircraft without starting up the auxiliary motor but I have no doubt it will be able to get off the ground on $5 worth of electricity.
To be fair though it is more likely to be 50 kWh just for the take-off, so that's probably where their $5 figure came from (at $0.10 / kWh). For comparison: a single gallon of Jet-A = ~150MJ. 320 kWh = 320,000 W for one hour so 3600 * 320,000 = 1150MJ, or about 40 gallons and I suspect that these electric motors are quite efficient.
So it does pencil out, I think. Or maybe my pencil is broken and no doubt HN will correct my math.
kvemkon 5 hours ago [-]
> more likely to be 50 kWh just for the take-off
1.6 MW power [1]. Would be 2 minutes for take-off realistic?
The specific claim from the company is that the entire 27 min flight was done with $5 worth of power using an all electric power system with a power output exceeding one megawatt.
I still think it is an amazing achievement. I just don’t see how they were able to get it done on $5 worth of power, or they just quoted the wrong price.
Toutouxc 9 hours ago [-]
I still don’t see what the problem is. The entire flight was likely just a few patterns and your earlier figure of 100 kWh (let’s assume they get their electricity for cheap) is already a serious amount of energy. It takes 100 kWh of energy to lift a 10.4ton object by about 3.2 km, so we’re obviously in the same ballpark for the maiden flight, and the rest is just drag. For drag, I’ll approximate the plane fuselage as two EVs that I drive. A 737 has a lower drag coefficient than my car, but a plane also has wings, so let’s say that evens out. Out of that 100 kWh, we probably only needed like a half for pure altitude, so we have 50 kWh for drag. An EV can sustain 200 km/h with about 60 kW of power, so let’s say 120 kW for the plane, and the flight was less than half an hour. Also, the plane got to convert all the potential energy back to kinetic energy on descent, so that was “free”.
Again, I believe that the napkin math checks out.
dghlsakjg 2 hours ago [-]
The 100kwh number was based on a rate of electricity that is 1/6th the average cost of electricity in the area they did the flight. Even the absolute cheapest rate in that region is 4x the price I used. The price I quoted was a little less than the cheapest published electrical rate in North America, which isn’t in the United States.
So you can barely make it work if you price electricity at a rate that doesn’t exist in the country they did it, using an amount of power that much, much smaller planes usually require to stay aloft (A Cesnna 172, which will struggle with 4 adults, uses 145hp/115kw for takeoff and climbout at a much lower speed). A plane of comparable size and capacity uses 1500-2000 hp turbine engines. That lines up with their own megawatt plus claim.
Regular rates in the area they operate in get them less than 25kwh. They would have had to negotiated a hell if a discount to have pulled it off. And even so, it would be a deceptive claim. It’s like claiming that you doubled the cost efficiency of a 737 (by getting a sponsorship from Shell).
Toutouxc 18 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, but you’re still weirdly switching from power (kilowatts) to energy (kilowatt hours). The electric plane could easily pull 1.5 megawatts for two minutes (on takeoff) and consume 50 kWh of energy, then spend the next 45 kWh cruising around and descend on the rest. (Or similar numbers, of course.)
echoangle 3 hours ago [-]
> A 737 has a lower drag coefficient than my car
Drag coefficient is about the shape and needs to be multiplied by area to get drag. Your car is a lot smaller when viewed from the front than a 737.
And there's no way a plane flying at the speed it does has the same drag losses as two EVs.
Toutouxc 3 hours ago [-]
That’s why I approximated the fuselage as two EVS (the frontal area) and I only looked up the drag coefficient of a 737 because it’s a well-known narrow-body airliner.
I don’t know what speeds they flew, but AFAIK most maiden flights are very tame. My point stands, low hundreds of kilowatthours of energy seems like the right ballpark.
projektfu 17 hours ago [-]
The takeoff roll is only a minute or so to lift-off, so it's possible. But also somewhat meaningless, as an airplane can take off for free in high-enough headwinds.
hmokiguess 17 hours ago [-]
"hybrid system (electric + conventional turbo prop)" there's your answer
datadrivenangel 15 hours ago [-]
so for an hour flight it costs $5?
simgt 8 hours ago [-]
As he's explaining the battery-electric propulsion isn't the hard part, he's even selling their software at 10:40. I guess the point here is to be bought by an existing aerospace corporation to kick start a new electric division? Nothing they do here Airbus can't do with better engineering rigour, but it'd be instantly sabotaged by their corporate rats.
mmcconnell1618 19 hours ago [-]
Interesting decision to build the whole aircraft instead of the propulsion system only. I wonder what the decision process was between retrofit of existing turboprop frame vs. build from the ground up? I would expect the level of effort and certification to be much higher building from scratch even though you get complete control.
imoverclocked 18 hours ago [-]
Aircraft design is very intricate. Change the CG, break the whole system.
Fuel is often placed in wings because adding/burning fuel from your center of lift means your CG doesn't significantly change through a flight and you spend less on pumping fuel within the aircraft. With batteries, you are looking at a constant mass from the beginning of the flight to the end... so you can place it anywhere. Electric motors are orders of magnitude lighter than jet engines. Also, you don't need to pump electrons against gravity so placing all of that weight lower has handling/performance advantages.
By using an airframe shape that is well known, they are reducing risk and appealing to existing pilots. By building it from the ground-up, they are taking advantage of differences between the tech.
eg: all of that weight in the fuselage instead of the wings means that rolling is going to be much more nimble. Yaw might be affected as well, depending on the placement/moment of the batteries.
MBCook 19 hours ago [-]
It may be too hard to do a good retrofit. If you basically have to tear the entire plane apart and rebuild and recertify it to put batteries in the right places, maybe the costs aren’t worth it for potential customers.
I know many planes use their wings as fuel tanks but given the weight of batteries maybe that doesn’t work.
I agree it’s interesting. Not a small undertaking.
7952 18 hours ago [-]
Generally all the weight of the fusaage has to go through the wings anyway so it is structurally more efficient to put weight on the wings in the first place.
11 hours ago [-]
Barbing 18 hours ago [-]
And they do that with fuel?! Neat!
dghlsakjg 17 hours ago [-]
Yup.
On a 737 they can put about 8k pounds per wing.
Even little planes like Cessnas have wing tanks.
Barbing 15 hours ago [-]
Wow wow!
Might see planes just a smidge differently now :)
brucehoult 14 hours ago [-]
In sailplanes we add up to around 200 litres of water to wing tanks in single-seat gliders (empty weight typically around 280kg) to improve the high speed performance (typically up to 270 km/h these days) and ability to fly comfortably in turbulence.
It's surprising what you can fly formation with, even without an engine [1] :-)
[1] this particular glider does have a small engine for takeoff, but maximum speed with the engine extended is 180 km/h and here they are flying at 280 km/h.
Barbing 12 hours ago [-]
What a rabbithole this is now :D
That glider next to the world's fastest aircraft (in 1953) dressed up for a fight, how about that.
And they can water the grass...
-
So several thousand $ to get trained and certified and finally be ready to get towed and soar...
but just a few hundred (California) to try for half an hour behind a pro in the cockpit--oh yeah!
...omg they let you fly the thing for another couple bucks!!!
brucehoult 9 hours ago [-]
If it's a pro then they'll be sitting in the back seat so you're in the front seat the same as you will be when you fly solo.
Here's a video of me taking a student for their first lesson:
Also from Stefan's channel, some fun here in New Zealand ... this flight passes just a couple of km from the Lord of the Rings "Weathertop" site (Google maps knows it).
I think an interesting aspect is that on normal aircraft fuel tanks have to be near the center of lift to maintain weight and balance as fuel is burned off. When using batteries, this is not really a concern, and I would think might lead to some more interesting designs. To be sure, if there is space in the wing, awesome - the batteries can now also be used as ballast though too if required.
rbanffy 17 hours ago [-]
Wings can also be excellent for heat rejection - in-wing batteries have a lot of surface per unit of volume and are constantly exposed to low temperatures.
Which may result in them being too cold and you needing to spend power heating them, so someone needs to do the math on that.
huurtehoog 18 hours ago [-]
Probably because they intend to sell aircraft, not electric motors.
cpach 9 hours ago [-]
There are probably multiple reasons for doing so. I imagine some reasons are business risk, freedom to innovate, freedom to take a holistic perspective and improving the possibilites for raising capital.
If you build only the propulsion system you would be 100% dependent of existing aircraft companies, which are heavily invested in jet engines. It would probably be much harder to innovate and make good design choices in such a setting.
lbriner 19 hours ago [-]
Judging by the seats, perhaps making it as light as possible. Existing airframes are relatively light but let's be honest, they aren't trying to save 500g here and there when they have massive jet engines to get everything airborne.
lefra 18 hours ago [-]
I discussed with people working on aircraft components, and my understanding is that weight is a constant obsession for them. Propose a new system to Airbus/Boeing, and the first question they'll ask is "how much does it weight?"
Every kg saved is a kg more of freight that can be transported (or a little less fuel used to keep the plane in the air); save 500g for each seat of a 200-seat plane, and you can put one more paying passenger in the cabin.
notahacker 18 hours ago [-]
Agreed. But for related reasons, aircraft aren't really designed for either the structural robustness or balance to deal with big heavy batteries, which is what motivated the clean sheet design.
Anyone knows the details why Heart left Sweden? I applied for a job with them a few years ago but never heard back so I am quite curious.
They seemed to have a lot of former Embraer engineers from Brazil, I wonder if they brought them over to the US.
petcat 5 hours ago [-]
> In comments to Sweden's government regarding the EU Net Zero Industry Act, Heart wrote that:
“The regulatory framework and access to financing is very attractive in the US.”
> Heart warned that Europe needed to respond to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act if it wanted:
“to retain technology companies like Heart within the EU”
2 years later:
> "We are deeply grateful to our team in Sweden for being part of this chapter of Heart’s journey, and for all the support we have received in Sweden," said Anders Forslund. "However, as our customers, partners, and investors are increasingly based in the U.S, we see greater opportunity in focusing our resources here. By consolidating our operations in Los Angeles, we can accelerate development, strengthen collaboration, and better position Heart Aerospace for the future."
Looks like a combination of regulatory and business/operations made USA more attractive.
I wonder if the parts of the IRA they were betting on remained in place when Trump gutted it.
Grid Battery seemed to mostly survive but not sure if there's as much crossover there as with EVs.
jmward01 12 hours ago [-]
'The first clean sheet airliner to be flown in any category. electric or not, in the US in the last 18 years'
This is the statement that matters and why I think electric is a huge deal. We can't get new designs into the air. It costs too much and takes too long. Electric has the potential to bring the design cycle back to something reasonable. Electric engines, and the supporting systems around them, are just so much simpler so there is so much less to certify. Once we really start designing for electric, and iterating on those designs, I think we will start seeing massive gains very rapidly.
jcims 12 hours ago [-]
First time I saw an electric plane with the cowling off was something like this:
The 737-Max is only not a clean-sheet only because the selling point is pilots don't need to retrain, which is a competitive advantage when selling to airlines.
walrus01 12 hours ago [-]
The interesting part to me is that a lot of current electric aircraft development seems to be waiting for battery technology to catch up. They're far ahead in terms of the motors, propeller, electric propulsion control system. The limitation is the battery capacity.
Companies like Joby, Archer and others also seem to be taking the huge gamble that battery density in Watt-hours per kilogram will SIGNIFICANTLY increase in the next 5-10 years (before they run out of money/investors) making the range of their aircraft much greater, and more viable for commercial operation.
kronodeus 15 hours ago [-]
Practical challenges aside, I'll gladly file this under "things my physicist dad said would never happen" and call it a win.
bitwize 15 hours ago [-]
Mech eng dad here. He guessed something like this would probably happen, but wasn't betting on it happening so soon.
simonmales 4 hours ago [-]
The default question in my mind is jettison batteries in case of an emergency?
mgaunard 8 hours ago [-]
I mostly fly flights that are less than 2 hours (I'm in Europe).
Unfortunately as the crow flies that seems to be closer to 800 miles than 125.
I'm in London and the airport itself is already 60 miles away.
aidenn0 10 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised by the struts supporting the wing; that saves weight (probably important here), but at the cost of drag. Wikipedia suggests a rule of thumb of 200mph being the break-even point for struts vs cantilever, and I would guess this plane is supposed to cruise faster than that. However, I didn't see the cruise speed listed anywhere; does someone know what they are targeting?
On another note, other than the struts, the design is reminiscent of the DHC Dash-7, a STOL airliner from the '60s that also used slower propellers (with gearing instead of an electric motor, of course) to reduce noise. That plane wasn't particularly fast either (240kts max speed).
kirrent 10 hours ago [-]
That sounds like the breakeven if you're holding wing geometry constant and want to compare cantilever weight cost to bracing drag cost. The real advantage is in allowing for thinner and higher aspect ratio wings like in the Boeing X-66 which was designed to fly considerably faster than 200mph and make fuel savings.
I guess an additional advantage in this design is that the weight of the batteries is in the fuselage rather than the wing, so additional strengthening of some type may be necessary in either scenario.
aidenn0 10 hours ago [-]
I'm terrible at estimating aspect ratios, but the plane in the video doesn't seem to be particularly high aspect ratio. Since they will be presumably holding less fuel, they could certainly be thinner though.
While poking around their website to try and find good still images from a top-down angle of their demonstrator, I did notice that there is no bracing in the concept images of the ES-30, for whatever that is worth.
dingaling 10 hours ago [-]
The Shorts 360, very similar to this aircraft in size, weight and structural design with a strut-braced wing, cruised at 216kt ( 249mph ) for 400nm with 36 pax, three crew and fuel for 50nm diversion and 45 min hold.
alkonaut 8 hours ago [-]
Is the aircraft built in LA but then test flown in Plattsburgh, NY? It seems like a long way to transport a prototype on the ground for a test?
detourdog 17 hours ago [-]
I was just at Newport Technology preview where they demoed a ground effects aircraft drone. This was a scaled model and the final drone aircraft is designed for 12 passengers. All electric.
I don’t see how a purely electric aircraft could ever beat synthetic jet fuel made with electricity.
If this is a hybrid, I am curious where they are stealing energy from.
Tepix 8 hours ago [-]
Well, what’s the efficiency of synthetic jet fuel production?
Is it still competitive?
Can we realistically get lots of it, like ever?
brohee 1 hours ago [-]
Efficiency is not that that important in an era of negative price electricity.
Synfuel made just from air and electricity is doable (both water and carbon dioxyde can be extracted from the atmosphere). And with 10% of what's spend on IA we'd be way out of the lab...
Thankfully there are military budgets (synfuel makes sense on a nuclear carrier)
idiotsecant 15 hours ago [-]
It beats it by mostly not using the turbines. The turbines are there for long range diversions which should happen rarely enough to not really matter in terms of carbon release.
kooi 3 days ago [-]
From the video:
Range: 125 miles all electric
500 miles with hybrid system (electric + conventional turbo prop)
yoavm 19 hours ago [-]
In the video he explains that the goal of the hybrid system is mainly to be used when for some unexpected reason the airplane cannot land at its original destination.
Gibbon1 18 hours ago [-]
There are maybe some advantages to a hybrid system.
The higher reliability of electric.
Losing an turbine engine doesn't mean asymmetrical thrust. Plane still flies normally.
Losing an engine on takeoff you still have full power.
Electric motors spin up faster than turbines. Which means faster throttle response. Which you need when hit with a wind shear on landing.
Take off and landing under electric power means much less noise.
Efficiency, you can increase the number of props or fans to get a much higher bypass ratio. Worth noting the plane in the video has four props.
newsclues 18 hours ago [-]
I’ve been tinkering with the idea of a hybrid system where the ICE system is its own bolt on component to an electric aircraft that is used for takeoff and altitude before it detaches and returns to the airfield before the aircraft cruiser on electric power.
Could even have a rocket launch version for cargo
coredog64 18 hours ago [-]
Separating in flight is a very tricky problem that requires massive amounts of testing and can go very wrong.
newsclues 16 hours ago [-]
They had fuel drop tanks made of paper in WW2.
Cool drones can test and validate the solution without risking a pilot!
gonzalohm 16 hours ago [-]
You can use some kind of catapult for that
detourdog 15 hours ago [-]
I once saw gliders being launched from a v-8 engine that was mounted on the back of a truck
rotringlvr 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ajross 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 19 hours ago [-]
Can you please not be snarky in HN comments and not post shallow dismissals of other people's work? Both of these are in the site guidelines, as you must know: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There's room for thoughtful skepticism and critique, but not dismissive sarcasm, nor supercilious putdowns like "Yeah...", "just a joke", "yet another high wing puddle jumper". All that is exactly what we ask commenters to avoid on this site. As the guidelines say, "A good critical comment teaches us something."
Your account unfortunately has a long history of breaking the site guidelines—enough, I'm afraid to say, that I instinctively brace myself when I see your username. We've asked you about this multiple times over the years:
If you wouldn't mind taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart and really correcting this pattern, we'd appreciate it. You're obviously knowledgeable and a good commenter apart from this, but it's a problem.
ajross 18 hours ago [-]
Fair enough. I'd view it as "florid" vs. "shallow", but it's not my opinion that matters and I fully agree that there's a spectrum between "strongly held" and "offensive" and you have to put the boundary somewhere.
I'm going to push back on one bit though, which I suspect is just a misunderstanding on your part: "yet another high wing puddle jumper" is not remotely dismissive or trivializing! Being "high wing" is purely descriptive, and correct, and a "puddle jumper" is a widely used term for short-range passenger aircraft (like the Dash 8, which I also mentioned), here's a great reddit thread for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/rs7i4m/what_is_t...
I'm not saying this to make the designers feel bad verbally. I'm literally saying they've produced an aircraft that competes poorly in the market with something DeHavilland was selling in the 1980's.
My first sentence was almost 100% sarcasm though and I'll take the hit on that.
dang 18 hours ago [-]
I take your points on "high wing" and "puddle jumper", especially the latter since I didn't know the term. But "yet another" is still a dismissive swipe!
I appreciate the reply.
chrishare 19 hours ago [-]
The video cites the large number of existing flights that are short enough for the electric. I am not sure they should be judged based on whether they make air travel more appealing overall - making it cheaper and lower emission is plenty.
bdamm 19 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty excited for the hybrid airplane. Use battery charge to get up to altitude. Hybrid power during cruise and top off the battery with the leftover power. Far less power requirements, far less fuel use, better climb performance, and can use the most efficient engine rather than hugely inefficient but power dense turbines. And as a bonus, put the prop power anywhere you want. Designs that distribute props across the leading endge, or right on the leading edge of the rudder, are exciting.
What an age to witness.
rbanffy 17 hours ago [-]
> Designs that distribute props across the leading endge, or right on the leading edge of the rudder, are exciting
From a purely aesthetic point of view, pusher props are way cooler. If the wings are far back and the plane has canards, even cooler.
pkulak 19 hours ago [-]
Can I be the one to make the obligatory train comment? Moving hundreds of people 500 miles in comfort, using only electricity, is also a VERY solved problem.
HolyLampshade 19 hours ago [-]
Man, I’d love more trains but we can’t act like the infrastructure necessary to support them, if not present, is very challenging to develop.
Even ignoring land acquisition (which is a big thing to ignore in populated areas where a train would most benefit the population), there are simple things like road crossings, other infrastructure crossing, etc.
In this case an airplane may be simply a lower friction solution.
pkulak 29 minutes ago [-]
I don't disagree, and yet, despite all of that, new freeways can _always_ be built. And they require far more land and cost. It's totally possible for us to build things still. Just have to care.
mr_toad 14 hours ago [-]
The biggest costs and sources of delays to building high speed rail in the UK are legal challenges from people who don’t want any construction to take place anywhere near them.
HolyLampshade 4 hours ago [-]
I’ll believe it. If someone were to try to achieve the same in my area (not even high speed rail), between two metropolitan areas, they’d have to contend with thousands of private land owners.
I lived in the UK for a few years, so I can appreciate and really enjoy a robust rail network, but it’s not an easy thing to achieve.
chrishare 19 hours ago [-]
Trains are great, but they can only go where tracks go. Planes are faster, too, noting that boarding times can dilute that. Trains are perfect for freight and super frequent routes, though.
tmtvl 18 hours ago [-]
Commercial passenger planes can generally only lift off and on at dedicated facilities, though.
jryle70 18 hours ago [-]
So both can coexist? what's the issue? Why does HN waste energy on pointless pissing contests?
tmtvl 2 hours ago [-]
Yep, both can coexist perfectly well, in fact rail + flight + water + cycling should be good enough to account for the vast majority of mobility requirements.
7952 18 hours ago [-]
Those facilities can be much more modest and can scale up and down depending on location. Particularly for smaller short haul aircraft.
pkulak 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe. But they can almost never be in places where people actually need to be; like central cities.
boelboel 19 hours ago [-]
It's not about moving hundreds of people, it's about moving 30-100 people. Many places don't have the demand or physical possibility for a railway. If this wasn't the case there wouldn't be so many short distance flights.
pkulak 16 hours ago [-]
> Many places don't have the demand or physical possibility for a railway.
This I don't get. I've seen rail stops in the smallest towns, where the train stops for 30 seconds to let a couple people on or off. Places where even the smallest airplane makes no sense at all. Not 30-100, 1-2.
boelboel 6 hours ago [-]
Old lines which have some more riders on other stops I imagine. You only need to maintain the rail which has been laid 150+ years ago.
lotsofpulp 18 hours ago [-]
Can I be the one to make the obligatory land acquisition and permitting comment? Navigating the acquisition of all the land and environmental and other rights via US courts is a VERY unsolved problem.
7952 18 hours ago [-]
But politically and financially it is very challenging to build new capacity in a lot of places.
newsclues 18 hours ago [-]
How do you get a train from Vancouver to Victoria on the island?
runako 19 hours ago [-]
> 500 miles with hybrid system
> the grueling two hour drives
What country are you in, and perhaps more importantly, what roads are you driving on?
bryanlarsen 16 hours ago [-]
According to the video, 2/3rds of that range is for loiter and divert capability. It's illegal to fly a route without the capability to loiter and divert. You need 30-60 minutes of loiter + 100 miles of divert. This plane cannot be used on any route longer than about ~200 miles. Which can be driven in 2 hours, although obviously the OP was referring to the 120 mile electric range.
arjie 15 hours ago [-]
> This plane cannot be used on any route longer than about ~200 miles. Which can be driven in 2 hours.
Huh, perhaps then it wouldn’t be suited to places where people drive at that speed. In the US I doubt people drive 200 miles routinely in 2 hours. It would be closer to 3.5 h I think going by the routine 6 h it takes SF to LA which is about 350 mi.
I think if you have very high speed road/rail transportation that dominates this across fixed routes. Road at 100 mph average definitely wins for flexibility.
bryanlarsen 3 hours ago [-]
There's a small but real market for < 120mile flights where geography makes a road between the two destinations impossible. "Puddle jumpers" is the standard term.
However, the real market is for connecting flights to nearby small cities. For a transfer, you're already at the airport, you're already through security and you don't have your car. I'd never fly from Ottawa to Montreal (200km), but I do that flight quite regularly when I'm going to Europe.
RajT88 19 hours ago [-]
Gotta be Germany and the Autobahn. The questions really are:
What car are you driving?
How are you not dead?
jillesvangurp 18 hours ago [-]
I live in Germany. 500 miles is more than essentially all domestic flights in Germany. Two hours driving by car from Berlin gets you nowhere all that interesting. You'd probably spend close to an hour just getting out of the city. Two hours might get you as far as Magdeburg or Dresden when traffic is mild. Good luck with that on a busy weekday. Dresden would be about 200km. Magdeburg is a bit closer to 160km. And much of the way you'd be facing speed limits. And traffic jams.
RajT88 18 hours ago [-]
runako was making a joke about someone's grueling drive of 500 miles in 2 hours.
...Which would mean you're driving at 250mph.
rbanffy 17 hours ago [-]
“250mph” AVERAGE speed.
Most cars take off at that speed.
RajT88 15 hours ago [-]
Most cars burn their engines out long before that. But damn, if it would not be fun to melt an engine driving at the redline in a straight line.
w-m 7 hours ago [-]
There are cars with engines that will bring you to 250 mph without burning out, like the Bugatti Chiron. Unfortunately you will burn through your $40k set of tires after 15 minutes at that speed. But don’t fret, because your fuel tank will be empty after 9 minutes anyhow.
ajross 19 hours ago [-]
Both of you are misunderstanding the point: I was responding (pretty clearly I thought!) to the ridiculous "all electric" range.
Yes, it can go farther if you burn fuel. But so can a Dash-8, very effectively. No one is interested in hybrid range per se, only if the hybrid mode is more efficient.
ajross 19 hours ago [-]
To repeat: the market is filled with fuel-driven turboprops. This only wins if it's better, and it's only better if it's cheaper. Is it cheaper? If it's cheaper they should say, and not spend time talking about "all electric" range in a regime that doesn't want aircraft at all.
And sure, there are places in the world that don't have limited access highways. But the 125 mile range is already served very well by piston-driven lightplanes! Again, who's going to buy one of these vs. just continuing to run their 40+ year old Beavers or Caravans or whatever?
Also: if the only market for your high tech electric superplane startup is backcountry work in Alaska, you're probably never going to get funded to begin with.
runako 12 hours ago [-]
> If it's cheaper they should say
I think you would be pleased at the very first selling points on their website, as well as on the product page. It seems they have at least considered the most obvious issue in their product space.
MBCook 19 hours ago [-]
Island hoppers?
Very few highways between the Hawaiian islands. Or Caribbean. Probably plenty of other places.
There are tons of places in the world with short haul flights today, even if good highways exist.
Every one of those planes is a potential target for replacement.
You’re arguing most short haul flights shouldn’t exist. Maybe do, but they do.
patapong 17 hours ago [-]
It might be cheaper when internalizing the externalities of CO2 emissions. Once/If we start properly taxing the impact of these emissions, this plane could offer much cheaper flights then fossil fuel driven competition.
notahacker 18 hours ago [-]
I mean, for the all-electric distances it's pretty much a given that it's cheaper: fuel consumed is the largest item on airlines' expenditure. The bigger question is at what distance you start having to burn more fuel than if you weren't lugging batteries round with you. If it's [eventually] commercially competitive at 400m range it's going to be useful on a variety of routes currently operated by ATR-42s and Saab 340s etc, the sort of thing that's definitely not operated by 40 year old 9-seaters. If it isn't... well islands still exist, they're just a fairly small niche
mikeweiss 19 hours ago [-]
I feel as a civilization we are further behind in battery technology than we should be at this point.
ajross 19 hours ago [-]
It's chemistry, not technology. Motive engines that can suck ~70% of their reactant mass from the atmosphere have a horrifyingly unfair advantage.
the_gastropod 17 hours ago [-]
I'm far too dumb to understand the intricacies of such technology, but the continued research into Lithium-air batteries seems incredibly inspiring. If we can figure that technology out, seems like it'd unlock a whole host of battery-powered transportation options.
ElijahLynn 3 days ago [-]
Thought this was a great watch, as a first time founder myself!
subpixel 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I get the 'appreciating asset' point he makes in the video. How will the plane perform better in 10 years?
Cool stuff regardless!
projektfu 17 hours ago [-]
It won't likely perform better as it ages but it may continue out-performing a fleet that tends to hold its value. If the maintenance cost of the electric motors and batteries along with the turbines operating at reduced power is better than the maintenance cost of two turbines that are operated at 100% power to take off, it could really pay off, as that tends to be a very expensive part of the operation. Airframes also often appreciate these days, as it is very expensive to buy a new one and an old one is somewhat proven.
This plane basically has to outperform a Saab 340.
notahacker 16 hours ago [-]
Turbine powered helicopters can appreciate in value if demand picks up because the tech doesn't move that quickly, as can GA aircraft that are already old because they're all cheap and rudimentary to start off with. (The supposed appreciating asset tends to cost a lot more than the asset appreciation to maintain though...)
Fixed wing commercial airliners generally don't, because airlines' biggest cost is fuel and new aircraft are a lot more efficient than older ones
Seems optimistic to think that a first generation electric plane will avoid that challenge: in theory if you're only operating on electricity the kinetic efficiency doesn't matter quite so much, but 125 miles range on electric power is really quite limiting and crucially newer generation electric aircraft would be expected to offer more electric range. I guess a lot might depend on how easily it is to legally retrofit better batteries to older gen aircraft.
They'll want to sell for more than the market value of an old Saab 340, that's for sure...
apt-apt-apt-apt 17 hours ago [-]
That made me double take too, but he must be talking about the software getting better, and thus higher value.
Mashimo 8 hours ago [-]
Or fuel prices going up?
bamboozled 17 hours ago [-]
Better battery tech ?
agnosticmantis 17 hours ago [-]
If Teslas could be appreciating assets [0], why not electric planes? /s
The moment he talked about "remote pilots managing many planes," I closed the tab. Remote pilots sound great until something goes wrong, and things inevitably go wrong, not often, but they go wrong.
I will never fly on any aircraft that does not have a minimum two-person crew on the flight deck. The ability to "feel" the plane is invaluable in an emergency situation. Frankly, just the fact that someone whose life is literally on the line doing the walkaround is an invaluable part of the safety of commercial flight.
I was rooting for this company when I saw the news of their first flight. I am no longer rooting for them because it is obvious that their leadership does not understand the human element of commercial air travel.
jacquesm 15 hours ago [-]
Indeed, it also is a bit silly: they have enough on their plate just getting this plane type certified.
perilunar 10 hours ago [-]
> I will never fly on any aircraft that does not have a minimum two-person crew on the flight deck.
You're missing out. Flying solo in a small plane is great.
sandreas 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder if these airplanes are using helium to "reduce the weight"... that is something I also don't usually on drones. Probably too expensive.
ck2 19 hours ago [-]
the concept of electric motors with ultimate "any" fuel flexibility for generators is definitely the future
then we are not tied to global fuel politics
and maybe airports will become far less toxic with leaded fuel finally being completely eliminated
(and there is a Ycombinator video channel? never knew)
10u152 18 hours ago [-]
Agreed, however only fuel for piston engine aircraft is leaded. Not many of them at a large commercial airport. More of a GA issue.
GuB-42 17 hours ago [-]
I still find it crazy that piston engine aircraft still run on leaded fuel. The only reason it is still the case is mostly regulatory. We can make compatible unleaded fuel, we could have done it decades ago, but it would have required costly recertification and maybe minor retrofits and the use of additives, and considering the small scale of GA, considered not worth it.
Things seem to go in the right direction, with an unleaded alternative in the process of being certified. But aviation, especially general aviation moves at a glacial pace, usually for good reasons, maturity is important, but not poisoning people is important too.
More of a replacement for the "helicopter market"...
arijun 18 hours ago [-]
The noise wouldn't be significantly lower during takeoff/landing, only during taxi, right? Good for workers on the tarmac, but doesn't get rid of the largest noise pollution issue.
aidenn0 10 hours ago [-]
Noise at takeoff depends on the propeller geometry a lot. A necessary (but not sufficient) requirement for a quieter takeoff would be lower propeller tip-speed.
One of the ways to achieve high thrust at low tip speed is to have larger total propeller surface. The best shot of the propellers is around 9s and these don't look like particularly large propeller blades, but there are 20 propeller blades compared to 8-12 that you might see on a 50-ish seat turboprop airliner.
But it's unlikely to ever be quiet to lift 20 tons into the air.
sandworm101 4 hours ago [-]
I will give the heaviest electric, but it is nowhere near largestt.
To be clear, this is a hybrid aircraft, but it's still an awesome step forward!
timbit42 2 hours ago [-]
The X1, which is what flew, is all electric. The ES-30, their proposed product, is hybrid.
rotringlvr 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mandeepj 14 hours ago [-]
Hybrid! That's what happens when you build new devices around old infra. Steve Jobs didn't design the iPhone around Carriers; it was the other way around.
timbit42 2 hours ago [-]
Steve Jobs didn't have to deal with FAA safety requirements.
Robdel12 18 hours ago [-]
This is awesome! More of this in YC and less Flock's.
hasanpiker 44 minutes ago [-]
"eLeCtRiC"
tantalor 15 hours ago [-]
Did it fly?
Most of the video is the workshop.
Where is the airplane??
timbit42 2 hours ago [-]
Watch the end.
Scrimptech 3 days ago [-]
Hope it's accurate. Sounds good to be true.
AmVess 15 hours ago [-]
It's true. Good? Nope. This thing will burn giant piles of cash in repairs, and that's not even considering battery replacement, which completely obviates the entire point of this thing.
gavinsyancey 18 hours ago [-]
> It's the first clean sheet airliner to be flown in any category, electric or not, uh, in the US in in the last 18 years.
Uh, what about the Bombardier C-series (A220)?
ojbyrne 18 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia says “It was initially developed by Bombardier Aviation with the program launched on 13 July 2008 and had two years in-service as the Bombardier CSeries.”
Hence 18 years.
tristanj 19 hours ago [-]
The interior of the plane is clearly designed by an engineer. They stripped everything down to save weight, passenger comfort be dammed. The seats don't even look comfortable.
They need to hire an actual designer, if the plane weighs 0.5% more but has actual human usability that's worth it.
dmurray 18 hours ago [-]
Really, a prototype airplane, the first of this size ever built with this novel propulsion system, had engineers involved in the design?
tristanj 18 hours ago [-]
You've missed the point. The engineers went too far optimizing for weight, to the point of sacrificing usability.
notahacker 18 hours ago [-]
What does "usability" mean in the context of a prototype short haul passenger aircraft? It's got seats for people to sit in...
The company that makes the airplane is not normally the company that installs the interior anyways. The airline that buys the plane typically determines what the interior will look like (stuff like ratio of business to economy, overall # of seats, in flight entertainment, etc)
It being barebones from the factory is not a problem.
amluto 18 hours ago [-]
It’s a prototype. Surely easy access to the structure and equipment is a lot more valuable than nice seats and a finished-looking interior surface.
alkonaut 8 hours ago [-]
It's a prototype. But yes, the seats are going to take the trend of "lighter seats" even further. For example, for such short flights it's probably worth not having tables in the seats.
BUT, where current aircraft are usually constrained on size, cramming as many passengers as possible into the cabin is the goal.
Here, space will be less of an issue than weight. So cabins can offer more room between seats minimalist seats.
MBCook 19 hours ago [-]
But maybe they’re aiming at short haul cargo. And either way, wouldn’t that really be one of the last things to do? Just proving the plane can even get in the air and stay there for a useful distance on electricity is more important than how comfortable it is.
tristanj 18 hours ago [-]
The video shows dozens of seats, so they are not only aiming for short haul cargo.
mhb 18 hours ago [-]
And, unsurprisingly, the video also includes speaking where the head of the company says that.
serf 17 hours ago [-]
customers buy furniture options when they order the plane.
related : many flight demonstrators in the past for large passenger planes have had no interior at all aside from the cockpit and ballast kits.
The founder seems to sneak in the word "hybrid", around 1m30 mark in the video below.
https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?si=5unXLmPxk6M_kmuN&t=86
Note: not being negative, I just want to ensure I understand correctly since the title might imply something else.
Update: confirmed, it does use aviation fuel.
> "The airplane will also include a reserve-hybrid configuration, consisting of two turbo generators powered by sustainable aviation fuel. The reserve-hybrid system is installed to secure reserve energy requirements without cannibalizing battery range, and it can also be used during cruise on longer flights to complement the electrical power provided by the batteries."
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-unve...
[0] https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?si=BdoZzp1Dxa4S3C_9&t=616
And in larger aircraft, multiple independent engines. See for instance ETOPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
From the pictures, I see that this new aircraft has 4 engines. So it should be adequately resilient to single engine failure.
We pay about $120 for the privilege, which takes 20 minutes of flying.
So I think even in this case the reserve capacity is "needed" (for the reserve requierement), but I can see them realistically being able to fly between the islands purely on electric power.
Unless we ignore the additional maintenance cost of having to completely different proportion systems to maintain (and it is worse than a twin engine plane, because the propulsion systems are different, so you have to stock up on more different kinds of parts and possibly have different kinds of mechanics on staff to understand them)
Because the required buffer is HUGE and we’re at a point where electric planes barely have enough energy for the actual route. So they’re doing the sensible thing here, flying the actual route electrically and falling back to combustion if the plane needs to divert.
You make it sound like it is acceptable for a badly planned flight to have a fuel emergency. It is not.
If there is a fuel emergency (or the plane lands with less than 30min of fuel) there will be an incident investigation that treats the situation as serious as if the plane had crashed. If the investigation discovers it was nothing more than bad planning, (at minimum) the planning procedures will be changed to ensure it never happens again.
That aircraft would need a very large battery to do that, and it's way more efficient to have some burnable fuel there that you'll never actually use.
I somewhat doubt that. Part of the advantage of the design is that the generators don't need to be sized as big enough to power take off, climb and a potential go-around on landing. They only need to be sized as big enough for cruising.
So powering them up during critical phases wouldn't help with safety. If anything, normal operating procedures might actually require shutting them down during critical phases.
What this does mean is that the batteries need to be reasonably full when it comes into land, possibly as high as 50%. And most go arounds will require immediately powering up the generators, so it probably needs to be fuelled for all but the shortest flights.
There's a ton of small routes that just aren't getting much service now because of operating costs - the founder speaks to that in the video - that this could serve.
A slightly larger aircraft able to do ~300 miles on battery and then say 1,000 in hybrid mode, might resurrect the economically unviable but relatively fast LHR/LGW flights down to NQY. The six hour drive is pretty, but... yeah...
Assuming you have a straight road in that direction with a speed limit that allows an average speed of more than 100km/h.
But I doubt we have the capital to buy them new.
Now, of course, most of the hassle of getting to NYC from Boston is transit to and from the airport. And of course, transit from JFK, Laguardia, etc into the city.
There are at least 5 capable airports/airstrips closer to me than Logan or T.F. Green. Only one of them, Worcester, offers NYC flights. Worcester is almost an hour from me on average, and a bit more expensive. It’s an hour from takeoff to landing (I’ve arrived 10 minutes before takeoff, at the PARKING LOT many times without it being an issue).
If they can get this in and out of even smaller airports, like in Stow, MA, which is beyond capable, it will be a gamechanger.
I don’t know where you live or what you drive, but I just punched in a destination 200 km away as the crow flies, the Alps are in the way and I’m looking at five hours of driving.
Also, water.
Dayuuum, ... you're smart.
People tend to have friends and family they want to visit regularly. So they try plan their life around not moving too far from where they grew up. That means people won't even look at a move of 125 miles away if there is not good transportation back. In turn if the high speed route between the two destinations they won't move there and in turn won't be making those trips.
Note that I said route above, not highways. Trains, boats, airplanes, cars, or anything else you can imagine works. The method of travel doesn't matter at all. What matters is how long it takes, and that you would use it for the trip.
Half an hour door to door (by whatever travel means) means you can have dinner after work with those friends once in a while. 1 hour means you can visit every weekend, but you lose those dinner mid week dinners. 2-3 hours means you visit for every minor holiday, but it isn't every weekend. At 4-6 hours every visit is an overnight. At 8+ hours this is a week long trip.
The above ranges are guidelines, not rules, they get fudged and overlapped all the time depending on various details. If the trip is 5 hours by train you might still do it as a day trip since you can plan to nap on the train. Even if you have to drive 6 hours each way: you might attend a funeral and return all in one day.
I don’t care about the rest of your post, I just want you to understand that a completely straight highway through some corn fields isn’t how the rest of the planet drives.
Even then there are lots of flights in Europe that are between cities less than 1 hour apart.
This idea generally makes more sense in Europe than the US, I think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-haul_flight_ban?#Overvie...
There are a lot of "island hopper" and bushpilot mini airlines in the world. The current world record is a route in Scotland that, on good days, takes less than a minute of flight time [1].
It is much much easier to supply such islands with electricity (there almost always is a power grid tied to whatever the nearest mainland is) than to continuously haul fuel around.
And in Croatia... that is easy enough distance to cover Rijeka-Zadar for example, which is about three hours worth of car or bus drive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_to_Papa_Westray_flight
Report recently from my area.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/transporta...
Of course those -should- be easy on trains too…
He cannot make them work if he has to store enough battery to fly around for an additional hour or two searching for an airport to divert to in an emergency, which is an FAA requirement.
So he has the heavy battery bank for regular trips costing almost nothing per flight-hour, and the expensive fueled backup system for emergencies.
The way modern hybrids can charge from an outlet, I classify them as EV-Hybrid, and only use gas if need be vs older ones that only charge through the gas engine, Hybrid.
[0] https://www.heartaerospace.com/es-30
Smaller, lighter, simpler, cheaper, and more flexible about fuel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeG4zLlFkak
Linear engine starts around 11:19
Generation II then.
"My father, a mechanical engineer, was a tireless advocate of the hypocycloid crankshaft mechanism."
For some reason just reading that brought a smile to my face.
Jet fuel has a specific energy of 12 kwh/kg and a density of 6.7 lb/gal (2). So 80 gallons of jet fuel is 536 lb, or 243 kg, and contains 2,916 kwh of energy. Jet engines are not very efficient, so lets say only 30% of this energy actually ends up being used. So 875 kwh.
Lets say we are using batteries that are 300 wh/kg (0.3 kwh/kg), which seems on the high side of what electric cars are using now (and that there are no efficiency loses in the electric motors or elsewhere).
Now maybe I messed up my unit conversions but I think that means to carry the same energy onboard you would need 6,428 lbs of batteries. And you are still going to carry atleast 1,600 lbs of fuel on top of that. And you have the weight of both electric and conventional engines.
I could see this reducing costs like they say but when many big costs are fixed (pilot, hangar, etc.) will this actually make sense? Will airlines fly something that has thousands of pounds less payload than a competitor but lower running costs? I don't know but it will be interesting to see.
(1) https://airinsight.com/seat-miles-gallon-fuel-burn-update/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...
There are opportunities for which airplanes have never made economic sense because they have big fixed costs like pilot, hangar, fuel-infra, engine(-maintenance). So will small short haul (?pilot-less) rechargeable planes have enough allure to beat out alternatives where planes were never considered before?
probably not at any major scale in a future where it competes with other autonomous transport, but that's me guessing at numbers. There will be enough of a market to build these things for niche constraints (eg the fuel-infra if small modular reactors become widespread).
Even a farmer is unlikely to be willing to give up that much space from their farmer operation. I do know farmers who have their own private runways, but they love flying and so are willing to give up some income to have a runway. They are giving up thousands of dollars in gross income to have that runway.
I happen to have a backyard that is big enough for a helicopter (I think - I never measured but I think I'm at the minimums the FAA requires), but I have an oversized yard. There are a lot more places for a helicopter. Most local parks have enough space, but I think communities would object to regular use. (if used only a couple times a month no problem, but more that and the noise and need to clear everyone else out will make it an objection)
In terms of operating cost, not just cost of fuel, but if the electric engines can be much less costly in terms of periodic maintenance and overhaul. Maintenance and overhaul costs on turboprop and small jet turbine engines are not cheap.
400 Wh/kg are almost there [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?t=541
I wonder how annoying this is for the engineers to stay within landing weight limits (MLW)
They need to account for it of course, but it seems more like account for it, not difficult. Any engineer in this space able to comment?
>Aircraft have two main types of weight limits: the maximum takeoff weight is composed of dry operating weight (DOW) plus payload (passengers and cargo), collectively the zero fuel weight (ZFW), plus the trip fuel, contingency, alternate, final reserve and the block fuel (taxi fuel), and the maximum structural landing weight, with the maximum structural landing weight almost always being the lower of the two. This allows an aircraft on a normal, routine flight to take off at a higher weight, consume fuel en route, and arrive at a lower weight. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_dumping
This plane isn’t a 737, it isn’t even a jet, it doesn’t run the motors the same way, the flight profiles are all different.
It is a valid question though: how do we get more of the long distant freight onto trains. Followed closely by how to we get existing freight trains to move to all electric instead of diesel electric (I've been told railroads have studied this: if diesel gets to $8/gallon it is cost effective - but I can't find any references to cite and so you should take this "Fact" with some salt)
But you found out... how?
They must be good at something, otherwise China wouldn't be where it is.
So flat out dismissing anything from China is not enough of an argument.
Mind you, I'm not saying you're generally wrong, just your "generally" is wrong. ;-)
If I look at a BYD at my local dealership, and compare it to a comparable spec German car (I live in the UK, so tariffs are not the thing shifting the needle here), I can see where the cost savings are and the trade-offs.
I don't think they're artificially more affordable. I just think they're more affordable.
Using public funds to invest in capital expenditure is - outside of the US - considered a wise use of public funds. If the result is a more competitive industry, whether that's ship building (South Korea), steel production (recent UK nationalisation efforts), military hardware (United States), or medical research, physics, chemistry, computing (look at the history of all the G7 there), and so on, and so on... irrelevant.
China has decided to spend it on complex manufacturing that they've been the supply chain for to Western manufacturers for the last 30 years. That's not controversial - it's been obvious this is where they were heading for some time.
I'm not being super academic with citations, but the CCP investments in BYD, to the point it makes no sense to exist without aren't exactly hard to find secrets.
You're not comparing comparable things, in the UK, there is a great deal of expectations of what an employee has as rights for instance. There are extremely rigorous safety regulations that are very onerous. We can debate wether those are justified but it's a very complex topic you're brushing off. Their innovation seems mostly on small iterative gadgets, but look more closely into what they tolerate as self driving and the death it causes, and be sure you want that in the UK for profit margins.
I'm really not against neither subsidies nor artificially inflating one's strategic advantage at all to develop a market and corner the competition. I never said China is wrong to do what it's doing. What I am saying is that its dangerous for us outside of China to buy into it now. Beyond the security implications of chinese robots with sensors everywhere roaming about cities the CCP considers their ennemies, there's just the dependency risk, there's the "how much do you trust the people who fed paint to their babies to handle super dense explosives that cant be put out by water in dense cities", and the basic question, maybe its better to have the lightest car possible, not the most gadgetty with drones and ipads.
So the basic point above "China has more electric trucks therefore it makes economic sense" is helped by none of this
If you steal my IP and you make a better - or at least comparative but cheaper - product, that's on me for not innovating further.
Chinese EV trucks make no economic sense even though they're 30% of China's fleet but also they're only investing all that as a trojan horse even though they use them almost exclusively domestically, plus the old "Asians don't innovate they just copy" canard even though there wasn't much Western IP on electric trucks to copy in the first place and China's battery technology is somehow not Alibaba knockoffs but more performant than Western equivalents (whilst state sponsored Chinese industries remain generations behind in stuff that's actually strategically critical for them to clone via industrial espionage like semiconductors and jet engines)
If you replace 'public' with 'VC', isn't that the exact same as the US does in Silicon Valley?
It makes more of both as the Chinese grid gets cleaner.
Their off peak prices have generally been overnight, ideal for truck charging, though they have started having them around noon too like many other nations with growing solar share. Great for a mid shift top-up.
Coal is worse to burn than gasoline, but a car engine throws 80 percent of that away so you have to burn more compared with an efficient EV.
This has all been debated to death for over a decade, MIT has interactive tools to calculate figures, there's really no excuse for not knowing this about a subject you are so passionate about.
Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes and attack Europe's short flight market (which is already cheap). Now we need bigger planes or more frequent planes and the next startup to solve the energy needs.
I'm not sure how building an electric aircraft would help with this. Are people going to suddenly switch to commuting by plane?
Fixing America's commute problem is primarily an urban planning one (ie, putting all the homes nowhere near anything) and not an insufficient-electric-aircraft one.
Or is the noise from turbulence through the air or something? I honestly would think they'd be minimising turbulence anyway for energy efficiency.
I happened to be in Plattsburgh the day of this flight, on my way to a fishing trip on the lake. They used that facility for the long former SAC base runway, but I think it’s also appropriate given the nature of the NY North country that an ultra low operating cost aircraft would see flight there.
The death of most industry really hurt these regions, which are largely cut off from the prosperity of the normal economy. The ability to affordably link places like Plattsburgh or Watertown NY to the broader world. That region in particular prospered with rail links driven by iron and timber.
90 minute flights to places like NYC metro or Boston Metro would be transformative, and may even create new airline operating models.
For people commuting from suburb to suburb you put bus connections at the train station. Buses are lower capacity but cheaper to purchase and operate so you can run a bunch of them in low density[0] for improved coverage. If demand is really bad[1] you create a "microtransit zone" - i.e. offer shuttle taxi service to the rider's final destination.
What I'm describing is basically how UTA's FrontRunner commuter rail service works; but it's not materially different from, say, the NY MTA's LIRR or MNR besides the larger scale of the NY systems and the fact that New York is weirdly bad at buses. For various reasons America has actually done decently well at retaining the commuter rail systems that worked and rebuilding the ones that got scrapped. This is primarily because these systems tend to be small-scale enough that state & local governments can fund them with their own money and the meager amount of FTA funds available.
The comment you replied to confused "rail commute" with "commuter rail"; but the grandparent was specifically talking about intercity travel. Here is where America is actually malincompetent[2] at building anything. Our primary intercity rail operator, Amtrak, was built as a last-ditch service preservation measure as railroads were bleeding money on passenger traffic. It doesn't own most of the rail it operates on, and that rail has been actively getting worse as Class I railroads have been destroying their own infrastructure (especially Union Pacific). The two-and-a-half attempts at building high-speed services in the US have all been various flavors of bad:
1. The most successful, the Acela, works primarily because Amtrak owns most of the corridor. Even then, it barely gets up to speed because "high speed[4]" (80+ mph) trains have to be grade-separated in the US, which is expensive, and the Acela was sold on the promise of incremental upgrades that haven't really panned out
2. BrightLine partnered with a freight railroad that wanted to get back into the passenger market, and it's actually operating at "higher speed[4]", but it's also bleeding money. They have a second route planned from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, but it's a project they bought out because it was... also bleeding money.
3. California wanted to build their own Acela, with blackjack and hookers, and wound up massively overselling it to voters. At least in terms of how much it would cost and how quickly it could be built. They bet the farm on FTA funds that got impounded the moment Trump retook office. I have no idea if this will ever happen.
You'll notice I never mentioned population density, and that's because it doesn't matter for intercity travel at all. The vast majority of flyers get a taxi to the airport and a rental car at their destination, and it still works out anyway. The only difference to those kinds of travelers between a train and a plane is time and whether or not they have to take their shoes off before boarding the vehicle.
[0] Or, if you're New York, you run way too many of them through medium and high density areas that really SHOULD have a subway but don't anyway build QueensLink and NO WAY WITH QUEENSWAY
[1] From a customer perspective, anything less frequent than an every 30 minutes bus probably could be served better with on-demand taxis.
[2] Malicious? Incompetent? Why not both!
[3] I am going to use "commuter rail" to refer to both commuter and regional rail systems as they are roughly the same scale. The difference comes down to scheduling patterns: commuter rail is scheduled around 9-to-5 rush hour traffic while regional rail is built to be more broadly useful.
[4] Strictly speaking, "high speed rail" means 125mph or higher and anything less is conventional speed. Rail just was already pretty fast even before Japan decided to make really fast trains.
More likely, this replaces the turboprop or commuter jet from Colorado Springs to Denver to catch the connecting fright to any other major airport.
A piston or turbine powered aircraft can run all day.
Likewise, if you're a nerd, you can spend your free time building stuff you thought you would never get around to.
Yes, AI as marketed is a bit of a snakeoil, but much more real and meaningful than crypto and social media. And math nerds finally can get a high paying job that's not about peddling ads or figuring out how to make a hedge fund even richer.
Now, I think this is very neat, but I doubt we'll ever set foot on an electric plane this century.
125 mile range is also far from being suitable for all <2 hr flights. I don't think there are many sub 125 mile connections either.
Love to see this work out. 100 pax and 500 mile (electricity) range minimum is where I see it having a (good!) chance for mainstream.
tl;dr I have a few qualms with this app[1].
Now, this thing might take off (pun intended) anyway, for one simple reason: a theoretically faster train does not compete with it if it doesn't exist. The midwest and west are chock full of towns whose rail connections were either abandoned or never existed in the first place, but have regional airports. This thing would be perfect to service feeder flights from hub airports to regionals or as a charter plane.
That being said I wouldn't expect this to revolutionize air travel. You're still going to be packed into a sardine can and made to pay extra for the privilege of bringing a reasonable amount of toiletries with you. And all the long-haul flights are still going to be using fossil fuels because the energy density of batteries sucks. But still, I'd rather have this than 10 million AI companies.
[0] 500 miles for hybrid operation on SAF, because the FAA would not certify a plane with such a small range
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
This is utterly 100% false!
The US made the decision to focus rail roads on freight. You never think about freight because you never use it for anything personal, but it is still there. The US beats any place in Europe for Freight and few countries even come close to US for freight rail.
There was a decision made to get rid of passenger rail. However most of those destroyed routes are routes that nobody sane would put passenger rail on today even in high rail mode share countries. There are only a small number of routes should return - for most of the lost routes a bus is better. That isn't to say passenger rail is bad. However the routes we had were bad.
The key thing question is whether smaller more frequent flights eat up too much runway time to be economical.
Also, most countries are not that large. If we ignore the top 10 largest by area, possibly most of the domestic flights can be served.
The design battery energy density is 1300 Wh/kg (present) or 2000 Wh/kg (projected): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
"Half of all flights in the world are under 2 hours." Then they give examples of Fjord-town hopping in Norway, or Island hopping in Hawaii, which seem very niche.
Will they be able to compete in any of the busiest routes? Could it take me Melbourne-Sydney in 1 - 2 hours for < $100? I'd sacrifice some time and $ for an eco-friendly option, but obviously there's a limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_flig...
Boston, Massachusetts (1h) Washington, D.C. (1h) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (45m) Baltimore, Maryland (1h) Toronto, Ontario (1h 45m) Montreal, Quebec (1h 30m) Cleveland, Ohio (1h 45m) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1h 15m) Buffalo, New York (1h 10m) Providence, Rhode Island (45m) Portland, Maine (1h 10m) Bermuda (1h 50m) Nantucket, Massachusetts (1h 15m) Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (1h 25m) Ottawa, Ontario (1h 30m) Quebec City, Quebec (1h 45m) Rochester, New York (1h 5m) Syracuse, New York (1h) Manchester, New Hampshire (1h) Bangor, Maine (1h 25m) Burlington, Vermont (1h 10m) Richmond, Virginia (1h 10m) Norfolk, Virginia (1h 15m) Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina (1h 25m) Charlotte, North Carolina (1h 45m) Greensboro, North Carolina (1h 30m) Charleston, South Carolina (2h) Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (1h 45m) Savannah, Georgia (2h)
If it gets a little better than current 2 hour flight time then Detroit Chicago and Atlanta are in range - very significant.
The range is apparently 125 miles electric, and 500 miles as a hybrid. That's not enough for Melbourne Sydney. Give it a couple doubling-times though (5 years total?) and it will be.
Meanwhile aircraft take forever to develop and there should be enough of a market in shorter hall flights to occupy a scaling company in the meantime anyways.
There's already an Australian electric trucking company trailing plug n'replace heavy battery packs (with a forklift).
That allows for fast turnover times while used batteries recharge at terminals.
High altitude where the air is less dense is better for speed due to less drag. This is also power source agnostic.
Still an incredible feat, but no idea where the $5 comes from. Maybe that’s just the power they use to get from the threshold of the runway to wheels up.
To be fair though it is more likely to be 50 kWh just for the take-off, so that's probably where their $5 figure came from (at $0.10 / kWh). For comparison: a single gallon of Jet-A = ~150MJ. 320 kWh = 320,000 W for one hour so 3600 * 320,000 = 1150MJ, or about 40 gallons and I suspect that these electric motors are quite efficient.
So it does pencil out, I think. Or maybe my pencil is broken and no doubt HN will correct my math.
1.6 MW power [1]. Would be 2 minutes for take-off realistic?
[1] https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?t=475
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...
I still think it is an amazing achievement. I just don’t see how they were able to get it done on $5 worth of power, or they just quoted the wrong price.
Again, I believe that the napkin math checks out.
So you can barely make it work if you price electricity at a rate that doesn’t exist in the country they did it, using an amount of power that much, much smaller planes usually require to stay aloft (A Cesnna 172, which will struggle with 4 adults, uses 145hp/115kw for takeoff and climbout at a much lower speed). A plane of comparable size and capacity uses 1500-2000 hp turbine engines. That lines up with their own megawatt plus claim.
Regular rates in the area they operate in get them less than 25kwh. They would have had to negotiated a hell if a discount to have pulled it off. And even so, it would be a deceptive claim. It’s like claiming that you doubled the cost efficiency of a 737 (by getting a sponsorship from Shell).
Drag coefficient is about the shape and needs to be multiplied by area to get drag. Your car is a lot smaller when viewed from the front than a 737.
And there's no way a plane flying at the speed it does has the same drag losses as two EVs.
I don’t know what speeds they flew, but AFAIK most maiden flights are very tame. My point stands, low hundreds of kilowatthours of energy seems like the right ballpark.
Fuel is often placed in wings because adding/burning fuel from your center of lift means your CG doesn't significantly change through a flight and you spend less on pumping fuel within the aircraft. With batteries, you are looking at a constant mass from the beginning of the flight to the end... so you can place it anywhere. Electric motors are orders of magnitude lighter than jet engines. Also, you don't need to pump electrons against gravity so placing all of that weight lower has handling/performance advantages.
By using an airframe shape that is well known, they are reducing risk and appealing to existing pilots. By building it from the ground-up, they are taking advantage of differences between the tech.
eg: all of that weight in the fuselage instead of the wings means that rolling is going to be much more nimble. Yaw might be affected as well, depending on the placement/moment of the batteries.
I know many planes use their wings as fuel tanks but given the weight of batteries maybe that doesn’t work.
I agree it’s interesting. Not a small undertaking.
On a 737 they can put about 8k pounds per wing.
Even little planes like Cessnas have wing tanks.
Might see planes just a smidge differently now :)
It's surprising what you can fly formation with, even without an engine [1] :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0icOICQLTc
Dumping (most of the) water before landing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Yv-V7eozk
[1] this particular glider does have a small engine for takeoff, but maximum speed with the engine extended is 180 km/h and here they are flying at 280 km/h.
That glider next to the world's fastest aircraft (in 1953) dressed up for a fight, how about that.
And they can water the grass...
-
So several thousand $ to get trained and certified and finally be ready to get towed and soar...
but just a few hundred (California) to try for half an hour behind a pro in the cockpit--oh yeah!
...omg they let you fly the thing for another couple bucks!!!
Here's a video of me taking a student for their first lesson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDZN21xzsRo
That's in a DG1000, actually this exact one ZK-GGR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeueijUoL70
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ShTUTiqlM
And how that looks from the other end of the rope:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRxcJR-zipI
And from the door of the hangar (using the runway in the opposite direction). Turn it up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUnXuMVhKfs
Coming back to more like the current topic, an electric powered glider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F2gS9ENl5k
Also from Stefan's channel, some fun here in New Zealand ... this flight passes just a couple of km from the Lord of the Rings "Weathertop" site (Google maps knows it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggz2CzvPNUc
Which may result in them being too cold and you needing to spend power heating them, so someone needs to do the math on that.
If you build only the propulsion system you would be 100% dependent of existing aircraft companies, which are heavily invested in jet engines. It would probably be much harder to innovate and make good design choices in such a setting.
Every kg saved is a kg more of freight that can be transported (or a little less fuel used to keep the plane in the air); save 500g for each seat of a 200-seat plane, and you can put one more paying passenger in the cabin.
https://www.weflywright.com/products/motor
But then again, they also ship now stuff for datacenters (facepalm):
https://www.weflywright.com/products/densegen-3750
They seemed to have a lot of former Embraer engineers from Brazil, I wonder if they brought them over to the US.
> Heart warned that Europe needed to respond to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act if it wanted: “to retain technology companies like Heart within the EU”
2 years later:
> "We are deeply grateful to our team in Sweden for being part of this chapter of Heart’s journey, and for all the support we have received in Sweden," said Anders Forslund. "However, as our customers, partners, and investors are increasingly based in the U.S, we see greater opportunity in focusing our resources here. By consolidating our operations in Los Angeles, we can accelerate development, strengthen collaboration, and better position Heart Aerospace for the future."
Looks like a combination of regulatory and business/operations made USA more attractive.
[1] https://www.regeringen.se/contentassets/0a5c91ad1a1c4fdaaefb... (PDF)
[2] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
Grid Battery seemed to mostly survive but not sure if there's as much crossover there as with EVs.
This is the statement that matters and why I think electric is a huge deal. We can't get new designs into the air. It costs too much and takes too long. Electric has the potential to bring the design cycle back to something reasonable. Electric engines, and the supporting systems around them, are just so much simpler so there is so much less to certify. Once we really start designing for electric, and iterating on those designs, I think we will start seeing massive gains very rapidly.
https://www.wired.com/story/magnix-electric-plane-motor/
So much simpler.
Companies like Joby, Archer and others also seem to be taking the huge gamble that battery density in Watt-hours per kilogram will SIGNIFICANTLY increase in the next 5-10 years (before they run out of money/investors) making the range of their aircraft much greater, and more viable for commercial operation.
Unfortunately as the crow flies that seems to be closer to 800 miles than 125.
I'm in London and the airport itself is already 60 miles away.
On another note, other than the struts, the design is reminiscent of the DHC Dash-7, a STOL airliner from the '60s that also used slower propellers (with gearing instead of an electric motor, of course) to reduce noise. That plane wasn't particularly fast either (240kts max speed).
I guess an additional advantage in this design is that the weight of the batteries is in the fuselage rather than the wing, so additional strengthening of some type may be necessary in either scenario.
While poking around their website to try and find good still images from a top-down angle of their demonstrator, I did notice that there is no bracing in the concept images of the ES-30, for whatever that is worth.
https://polaristechbridge.org/bluetide/
https://www.regentcraft.com/
If this is a hybrid, I am curious where they are stealing energy from.
Is it still competitive?
Can we realistically get lots of it, like ever?
Synfuel made just from air and electricity is doable (both water and carbon dioxyde can be extracted from the atmosphere). And with 10% of what's spend on IA we'd be way out of the lab...
Thankfully there are military budgets (synfuel makes sense on a nuclear carrier)
Range: 125 miles all electric
The higher reliability of electric.
Losing an turbine engine doesn't mean asymmetrical thrust. Plane still flies normally.
Losing an engine on takeoff you still have full power.
Electric motors spin up faster than turbines. Which means faster throttle response. Which you need when hit with a wind shear on landing.
Take off and landing under electric power means much less noise.
Efficiency, you can increase the number of props or fans to get a much higher bypass ratio. Worth noting the plane in the video has four props.
Cool drones can test and validate the solution without risking a pilot!
There's room for thoughtful skepticism and critique, but not dismissive sarcasm, nor supercilious putdowns like "Yeah...", "just a joke", "yet another high wing puddle jumper". All that is exactly what we ask commenters to avoid on this site. As the guidelines say, "A good critical comment teaches us something."
Your account unfortunately has a long history of breaking the site guidelines—enough, I'm afraid to say, that I instinctively brace myself when I see your username. We've asked you about this multiple times over the years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29222114 (Nov 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697507 (Jan 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21094881 (Sept 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20314315 (June 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469358 (March 2019)
If you wouldn't mind taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart and really correcting this pattern, we'd appreciate it. You're obviously knowledgeable and a good commenter apart from this, but it's a problem.
I'm going to push back on one bit though, which I suspect is just a misunderstanding on your part: "yet another high wing puddle jumper" is not remotely dismissive or trivializing! Being "high wing" is purely descriptive, and correct, and a "puddle jumper" is a widely used term for short-range passenger aircraft (like the Dash 8, which I also mentioned), here's a great reddit thread for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/rs7i4m/what_is_t...
I'm not saying this to make the designers feel bad verbally. I'm literally saying they've produced an aircraft that competes poorly in the market with something DeHavilland was selling in the 1980's.
My first sentence was almost 100% sarcasm though and I'll take the hit on that.
I appreciate the reply.
What an age to witness.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, pusher props are way cooler. If the wings are far back and the plane has canards, even cooler.
Even ignoring land acquisition (which is a big thing to ignore in populated areas where a train would most benefit the population), there are simple things like road crossings, other infrastructure crossing, etc.
In this case an airplane may be simply a lower friction solution.
I lived in the UK for a few years, so I can appreciate and really enjoy a robust rail network, but it’s not an easy thing to achieve.
This I don't get. I've seen rail stops in the smallest towns, where the train stops for 30 seconds to let a couple people on or off. Places where even the smallest airplane makes no sense at all. Not 30-100, 1-2.
> the grueling two hour drives
What country are you in, and perhaps more importantly, what roads are you driving on?
Huh, perhaps then it wouldn’t be suited to places where people drive at that speed. In the US I doubt people drive 200 miles routinely in 2 hours. It would be closer to 3.5 h I think going by the routine 6 h it takes SF to LA which is about 350 mi.
I think if you have very high speed road/rail transportation that dominates this across fixed routes. Road at 100 mph average definitely wins for flexibility.
However, the real market is for connecting flights to nearby small cities. For a transfer, you're already at the airport, you're already through security and you don't have your car. I'd never fly from Ottawa to Montreal (200km), but I do that flight quite regularly when I'm going to Europe.
What car are you driving?
How are you not dead?
...Which would mean you're driving at 250mph.
Most cars take off at that speed.
Yes, it can go farther if you burn fuel. But so can a Dash-8, very effectively. No one is interested in hybrid range per se, only if the hybrid mode is more efficient.
And sure, there are places in the world that don't have limited access highways. But the 125 mile range is already served very well by piston-driven lightplanes! Again, who's going to buy one of these vs. just continuing to run their 40+ year old Beavers or Caravans or whatever?
Also: if the only market for your high tech electric superplane startup is backcountry work in Alaska, you're probably never going to get funded to begin with.
I think you would be pleased at the very first selling points on their website, as well as on the product page. It seems they have at least considered the most obvious issue in their product space.
Very few highways between the Hawaiian islands. Or Caribbean. Probably plenty of other places.
There are tons of places in the world with short haul flights today, even if good highways exist.
Every one of those planes is a potential target for replacement.
You’re arguing most short haul flights shouldn’t exist. Maybe do, but they do.
Cool stuff regardless!
This plane basically has to outperform a Saab 340.
Fixed wing commercial airliners generally don't, because airlines' biggest cost is fuel and new aircraft are a lot more efficient than older ones
Seems optimistic to think that a first generation electric plane will avoid that challenge: in theory if you're only operating on electricity the kinetic efficiency doesn't matter quite so much, but 125 miles range on electric power is really quite limiting and crucially newer generation electric aircraft would be expected to offer more electric range. I guess a lot might depend on how easily it is to legally retrofit better batteries to older gen aircraft.
They'll want to sell for more than the market value of an old Saab 340, that's for sure...
If anything, planes have real autopilots!
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/musks-claim-teslas-appreciat...
I will never fly on any aircraft that does not have a minimum two-person crew on the flight deck. The ability to "feel" the plane is invaluable in an emergency situation. Frankly, just the fact that someone whose life is literally on the line doing the walkaround is an invaluable part of the safety of commercial flight.
I was rooting for this company when I saw the news of their first flight. I am no longer rooting for them because it is obvious that their leadership does not understand the human element of commercial air travel.
You're missing out. Flying solo in a small plane is great.
then we are not tied to global fuel politics
and maybe airports will become far less toxic with leaded fuel finally being completely eliminated
(and there is a Ycombinator video channel? never knew)
Things seem to go in the right direction, with an unleaded alternative in the process of being certified. But aviation, especially general aviation moves at a glacial pace, usually for good reasons, maturity is important, but not poisoning people is important too.
More of a replacement for the "helicopter market"...
One of the ways to achieve high thrust at low tip speed is to have larger total propeller surface. The best shot of the propellers is around 9s and these don't look like particularly large propeller blades, but there are 20 propeller blades compared to 8-12 that you might see on a 50-ish seat turboprop airliner.
But it's unlikely to ever be quiet to lift 20 tons into the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype
Wingspans basically double at 200+ feet across.
Most of the video is the workshop.
Where is the airplane??
Uh, what about the Bombardier C-series (A220)?
Hence 18 years.
They need to hire an actual designer, if the plane weighs 0.5% more but has actual human usability that's worth it.
The competition in this market segment doesn't look like Middle Eastern airlines' first class cabin concept art, it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340#/media/File:Mesaba_Ai...
It being barebones from the factory is not a problem.
BUT, where current aircraft are usually constrained on size, cramming as many passengers as possible into the cabin is the goal.
Here, space will be less of an issue than weight. So cabins can offer more room between seats minimalist seats.
related : many flight demonstrators in the past for large passenger planes have had no interior at all aside from the cockpit and ballast kits.