There has been a lot of reporting on the Sept. 28, 2022, first flight of Alice, the all-electric twin-motor aircraft. Billed as a technology demonstrator by the company, the first flight was a successful eight minutes.
Bravo to team Alice. Any successful first flight should be celebrated.
And while I am no engineer, over the last few years I’ve come to better understand the limitations of current battery technology.
That made this quote from Alice CEO Greg Davis from Dominic Gates’ Seattle Times story on Alice’s first flight all the more interesting.
“Are the batteries on the prototype aircraft capable of propelling the certification aircraft, capable of providing sufficient energy? The answer is no, absolutely not.”
Remember, as Alice flew, it is a technology demonstrator.
While I can imagine everyone involved with the Arlington, Washington-based company is thrilled with a successful first flight, at the same time, there must be a feeling of frustration at being so reliant upon technology that is both insufficient and wholly outside of your control.
I’m one of many who are hoping for a breakthrough in battery technology.
But my rose-colored glasses have been put away.
The biggest problem I see is that you cannot that them anywhere so they are for local flights only. What good is such an aircraft if you cannot get a charge when you fly cross country?
I don’t think it will ever happen in next 25 years if ever .A two seat trainer with 2.5 hrs battery at best with 3_4 batteries on the chargers to swap out between students
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There are some of the world’s best engineers, chemists, physics guys etc working on battery technology. And they’ve been at this for a long time. Unless they can discover something new we aren’t likely to improve much on current batteries. Yeah they’ll get a little better but not enough to make something like this viable.
Some things that we do are just for fun, like electric airplanes. We learned all about them when we were kids in the 1960’s. Quiet, easy to fly, they only flew a short time/distance in the air with any load, batteries were usually heavier thsn the whoe rest of the plane, and new batteries or recharging was expensive and/or took a long time.
The basic physics and lomits are unchanged when moving up to people carrying airplanes. A 4 ton battery? WOW – That should tell the world something about energy density and practicality of electric passenger aircraft. Nuclear powered airplanes would be practical with their ultra high energy density, even considering shielding. But that is just History znd Hysteria!
All it needs is a battery with 3-4x the capacity of the existing Li-ion batteries.
There is work on other anode-cathode technologies that may get to 4x improvement in energy density.
But , then with a 2,400 KWhr battery to get 1+ hours of flight time, plus reserve, the recharge time is still a huge issue.
With a DC fast charger of 350 kw, it will take over 6 hours to recharge., and swapping out a 4 ton battery is probably not a practical solution.