Comment by runako
13 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?
13 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?
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.
> 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.
Gotta be Germany and the Autobahn. The questions really are:
What car are you driving?
How are you not dead?
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.
runako was making a joke about someone's grueling drive of 500 miles in 2 hours.
...Which would mean you're driving at 250mph.
3 replies →
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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