Speed Select

The market will decide.

France may impose these restrictions in the near term, then face unintended consequences that ultimately lead back to market equilibrium.

Excargodog

Marine LaPen will put a stop to all this foolishness when she is elected, n’est ce pas?

gloopy

Then all their outbound international flights hve to land in JFK.

sailingfun

Harbor air created a aircraft that could carry zero payload for 5 minutes. They are a decade away from even a chance at making it work despite what they say. The batteries need to weigh at least ⅛ of current technology and charge 10 times as fast. Every week it seems a new super battery is announced that will be ready in two years. Those predictions have had zero success. Charging is a whole other issue.

https://youtu.be/nsBgDXHVorE

Arturito

No connection possible in CDG ?
The high speed train station is litterally downstairs ...

sailingfun

It only runs to Paris. You can however ride into Paris and then change trains. Takes time however.

Arturito

It already goes to a couple cities without connection (the ones too close to have a flight). It wouldnt require much work to have direct trains to most cities in the 2.5 hr range they want to implement.

Hedley

People will just buy tickets on British Air or Lufthansa and connect to the smaller French cities through their hubs. The only thing that will be accomplished is a loss of jobs in France.

APCLurker

While flying around in his own private jet.....

rickair7777

Unfortunately, there is no technical path for all-electric narrowbodies or larger. The underlying physics and chemistry utterly preclude that (without fundamental changes to the fabric of the universe as we know it).

Electric airliners may address a small niche of lower-end regional aircraft on short hops... might be 10-20% of the global market max. Think EAS, plus some 50-seat route.

Even hybrid concepts are painfully difficult to make an energy-accounting case once you add the volume and weight of the extra hardaware.

Current-technology battery pack-level specific-energy capacity is about 250Wh/Kg. That's bleeding edge, aviation applications obviously need to be more conservative.

The absolute theoretical max of battery chemistry is about 1,000 Wh/Kg. That upper limit cannot change since it's underpinned by the atomic and subatomic structure of the atoms being used; no amount of R&D at least in this universe will change that. That's the chemical limit at the individual cell... once you account for overhead for battery pack management systems, the actual max capacity is somewhat lower.

Aggravating factor... on longer flights as fuel burns the plane gets significantly lighter. On very-long haul that can be 50% of the TOW. Batteries don't get lighter enroute.

Jet A has a specific energy of 12,000 Wh/kg. See the problem?

Liquid fuel is the only way for mainline and most regional ops. SAF is the obvious practical way forward, it can be scaled up and used in current aircraft designs. You can even make it carbon-zero from green energy, water, and air. Hydrogen is a possibility but would require major ground infrastructure + clean-sheet design aircraft. H2 has better specific energy than even Jet A, but it's specific volume is horrible.. a practical H2 jet would need a LOT of extra fuselage volume to accommodate the large tanks, like flying-wing (or blended) design. Consider the space-shuttle... recognizable in form as an aircraft. But it's H2 had to be carried in that giant orange drop tank.