Comment by dghlsakjg
3 hours ago
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.
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.
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.