All-electric trainer aircraft, cheaper than Cessna
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Also a small beef with the article - it makes it seem like there just aren't enough pilots to fly commercial planes, which simply isn't true. There are plenty of pilots, they just don't want to work for the terrible pay and life-destroying hours most carriers are offering, while at the same time often having to cover their own massive training costs. Some more info on the situation: http://time.com/4257940/pilot-shortage/
A big part of training is doing "touch and goes" to practice approaches, landing, and taking off (the most dangerous phases of flight) which I would think would tax the battery a lot more than just cruising around for three hours.
Batteries are just as heavy at landing as they were at takeoff.
A reasonable rule of thumb is that fuel costs between 20 and 33% of the total cost of owning and operating the airplane. Battery tech won't materially change the total costs in my estimation/experience. It would be nice to get rid of TEL-doped fuel, but electric trainers are not going to make flying cheaper, especially when compared to a 60s/70s 150/152/172.
I'm not sure why you think the fuel costs are off-putting. I fly a Cessna 150 which burn 5.5 gallons per hour. If you fill it with unleaded (which can be done with a $150 piece of paper), the fuel cost is less than $15/hr.
I wonder if a distinction will be made (in the not so far future) between getting rated on a combustion plane vs. electric? Much like you get rated for high-performance or twin engines today.
Right. None of which are relevant to turbine aircraft anyways, which is the majority of all planes in the sky.
It's relevant sure but the big things you learn in flight training are how to figure out where in the sky you are and should be, lift/drag stick and rudder stuff, and endless amounts of regulations.
The means of propulsion is important sure but it's a small minority of the info you absorb.
You won't find a lot of turbines in general aviation...
Fuel isn't the dominant cost in flight training. (Source: I bought my first airplane during flight training and have been flying for almost 2 decades now. Fuel is more than a rounding error, but tends to run around 1/4 of my all-in costs.)
As far as career progression for a professional pilot, most pilots don't deal with mixture/carb heat etc as jet engine themselves are mostly fully automatic with a start button and a fuel cutoff switch and a thrust lever. And even some of those are coming out too and will become obsolete within just a few years time.
An airplane engine has a far more steady-state load condition. As a result, fixed ignition timing and mechanical fuel injection with manual mixture control is "good enough" and very simple/reliable. Likewise for carbs and carb heat on the O- engines. It works and works very well.
There is a process for modifying certified aircraft. STC (Supplemental Type Certificate) is the primary means for changing engine configuration. It's some amount of work, but isn't prohibitive. (I have STC'd modifications on every airplane I've ever owned. It's not that big of a deal, if your modification has sound engineering basis.)
Converting from a carb to fuel injection is possible, but many of those conversions involve installing a fuel header tank that the airframe didn't originally have. Sometimes this changes the fuel system for the worse (eliminating the "both" tank setting) and/or puts a header tank in a place to spray pressurized fuel into the cabin in the event of a forced landing. I looked into converting my 182 to an IO-550 (from an O-470) and that was unappealing to me. Instead, I upgraded to an O-520 (still carb'd, but larger displacement).
Yes, and for example you can choose your new-from-the-factory Robinson R44 helicopter with either carb ( Raven I ) or injection ( II ). The former has slightly lower fuel consumption and longer engine life, the latter better performance.
Minor nit: high performance is an endorsement, not a rating. (It's a CFI sign-off, not a checkride.)
Not an expert - don't know if they can be compared and the article lacks any actual specs to compare by, but the pipistrel's electric plane seems to be much cheaper.
"Pipistrel expects to bring the final product to the market in 2015 with a target price below 100,000 EUR."
For example, the Sinus shows a base price of 78500 EUR, and the Alpha Trainer Electro Experimental shows 110000 EUR: http://www.pipistrel-usa.com/price-list/RTF-price.html
Is there some large undisclosed fee that is added to this? Or do the "add ons" actually required to have a flyable plane?
The Tesla P85D has less than half of that.
The Caravan has much less initial acceleration than a Tesla, but far more torque.
And surely people are working on them, but you don't hear about that as much as you do automobiles. Anyone know anything about this?
For one thing, the technology for truly automatic or nearly-automatic landing (takeoff might be simpler) requires a lot of equipment at the airport, which the vast majority of airports a hobby pilot would fly from will never install. Since takeoff and landing are by far the most difficult and dangerous parts of the flight, this pretty much automatically precludes the possibility of an untrained pilot.
Add to that, the stance in aviation is that the pilot must be capable of taking control of the aircraft if there is any problem with the automation. I don't know the statistics, but presumably the sensors and automation by itself are not reliable enough to function completely autonomously and without supervision 100% of the time. And if you're gonna have a hobby pilot that is perfectly capable of flying the plane manually, full automation is just a massive waste of money.
I see this sort of statement made about electric cars also, and I think it's really not true. Modern internal combustion engines are very reliable, and need very little maintenance. Yes they need oil changes every so often, and I guess that's "dramatically" more in a divide-by-zero kind of way, but realistically it's not going to make a huge difference in the operational expense of a GA aircraft. Also not addressed in this piece, how long do the batteries last and what does it cost to replace them?
Batteries are definitely the bottleneck but its basically the only area further innovation is needed for the foreseeable future.
Basically what this means is that with electric vehicles you can continually drive and repair them until the chassis is no longer serviceable OR more likely your EULA runs out and you are forced to upgrade for licensing (software) reasons because there will be significant services revolving around these vehicles (autonomous driving, parking, recharging, repairs).
edit: word