All electric commuter (9 pax) aircraft
 

600 mile range
240 kts
$200/hr operating cost
Israeli design
$4m purchase price

https://youtu.be/aXR_jiKBaoY

https://youtu.be/yyQaWEBGNxg

How long to recharge between flights?

How many cycles in battery life?

So they quote a 2:1 recharge time, in other words you fly two hours you charge one hour. Seems fast, maybe they are using three phase 480v power found at most airports coming into jetways?

Did not mention cycles. It's a 920kwh "useful" battery. Which means it will have a higher capacity but be limited to preserve life.

Side tangent, keeping your battery between 40%-80% charge will significantly increase its lifespan. Something like 6x the lifespan vs always charging to 100%. Low voltage and high voltage contribute to damaging cells at a faster pace, which is why leaving your device charging overnight is so bad. I have only charged my non work phone and iPad to 100% a half dozen times (by accident) and rarely let them go below 40%.

Of note on batteries, the inventor of the current day lipo battery has discovered a new way to produce them. No degradation and tens of thousands of cycles, no fire risk, and lighter. He has street cred. Hopefully it pans out, it could revolutionize transportation.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise...RHREsifQ%3D%3D

Cape Air ordered at least 10 of these...

Eventually, wide body aircraft will be all-electric...

And pilotless...

I highly doubt that battery technology makes it out of the regional jet size, not enough energy density. Biofuel has a better future if it can be made using solar, or nuclear energy.

No. No possible battery chemistry can provide the required energy density/specific energy. Chemistry is a very mature science, we're not going to suddenly find a new molecular structure when can store ten times the energy.

All we can do with batteries is improve the efficiency of known chemistry towards the theoretical max. Also improve cycle life and charge cycle degradation characteristics.

Right now mature (commercially viable) battery technology can get to around 200 W hours/KG. Theoretical chemical limit is about 1,000 Wh/KG.

Jet A is 12,000 Wh/KG...

There's no uncharted territory in molecular chemistry which is going to provide an order of magnitude+ improvement in specific energy. The answer is going too be biofuel.

Cheaper - by far - to just use fossil fuel and offset the carbon release with carbon capture technology. Doubt that will change in the next several decades, at least not without a hellacious capital investment that would take even more decades to recover.

Or build a nuke power plant and count the natural gas you are NOT burning as recapture.

Science, math, and logic favors offsets. But politics probably will require elimination of the carbon output, to remove the big target on the aviation's back (ala OAC). Aviation industry sponsored carbon capture (one for one) might suffice, and that could very well be cheaper than biofuel.

I wonder if they’ll provide video games in the airplane that you can plane with the controls like you can in the Tesla while you wait for the batteries to recharge...[emoji120][emoji106][emoji849]


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