I know that they'll be properly tested and certified and that people probably thought the same when we moved from propellers to jet engines but anyone else feel a little uneasy about the idea of electric planes? It's one thing stopping on the hard shoulder because your battery has died earlier than expected but something else plunging out of the sky because that happens.
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presumably, a bit like solar or wind, storage is going to be the problem... plane will weigh a ton
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well, you know what I mean, a ton more than it normally would
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For the time being they seem to be hybrids with both electric and jet engines.
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They'll be designed to glide if the power cuts out completely, much like all aircraft are.
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That's some reassurance but still no use half way across the Atlantic 1,000 miles from an airport.
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The pilot will just have to do a Sully. They'll be multi-engine, so unlikely
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Not like you can fill up with kerosene halfway across the Atlantic either, so I don't see that it makes much difference. It's just a fuel source.
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Pancakes the difference is the tech behind fuel guages has been around for years and seems reasonably reliable but from what I've read about electric cars the tech is less reliable and you don't want to find that someone has left an electrical system on after take off that's killed the battery range.
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Plus they can fairly accurately calculate the number of gallons of fuel needed for an x mile margin of error and have it loaded but that's not so easy to do with electricity.
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Not if the ground crew load up fuel in imperial measures when they should have been doing it in metric, or vice-versa. Which did happen more than once.
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The only way I'd get on one is if Dirk Benedict made me drink some funny tasting milk.
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Also, presumably the financial incentive to keep your fuel load as accurate and as low as possible is lessened with electrical systems, and you can afford to over-budget per aircraft a little more (assuming that there would even be much opportunity to vary the amount of charge stored on each one).
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are they (leccy planes) designed so that the batteries recharge in flight?
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Electrical motors have far fewer moving parts than machines driven by internal combustion or jet engines and the engineering is less volatile too. That said, electrical circuits are prone to fails like shorts, outages, corrosion, power spikes etc. So in principle this as a major improvement over jet and turbo prop provided they (a) wire and solder it all up well (b) put in multiple redundancy layers and (c) develop a different form of maintenance inspection regimes for leccy systems.
On that last point, of course they can, but they will be losing the advantage of millions of miles/hours of flying time and experience of engine function which currently provides the intel to create a safe(ish) aviation industry dependent on combustion. The current maintenance of a Boeing also includes significant electronic maintenance schedules so it should not be too difficult to adapt.
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All to be constructed by the cheapest bidder.
enjoy your flight.
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Speaking as someone who has been on an aircraft with a knackered fuel gauge I don't think you can point to gauge technology as a plus point. Civil aviation is one of the most highly regulated industries going with a very good safety record, so if it gets certified I'll be pretty content to fly on an electric plane.
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