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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 08 2018, @01:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the electric-everywhere dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Australia's first electric aircraft has begun test flights at Perth's Jandakot Airport, amid hopes the plane will be flying to nearby Rottnest Island within months.

The two-seater single-engine Pipistrel Alpha Electro has two batteries that can keep the plane in the air for an hour, with an extra 30 minutes in reserve.

The team behind the plane says while there are environmental benefits in doing away with jet fuel, electric planes are also safer and easier to fly.

"Electric propulsion is a lot simpler than a petrol engine," Electro.Aero founder Joshua Portlock said. "Inside a petrol engine you have hundreds of moving parts. "In this aircraft you have one switch to turn the aircraft on and one throttle lever to fly."

The engine is powered by two lithium-ion batteries, similar to those used in the Tesla electric car. There is no gear box or multiple moving engine parts —instead the plane's motor attaches directly to the propeller. Rather than a fuel gauge, a panel tells the pilot the amount of power left in the battery, and estimated minutes of flight time, based on the throttle position.

The batteries are re-energised in about an hour by a supercharger based at the Jandakot airfield.

[...] In mid-January Mr Bodley will begin training local pilots to fly the single-engine electric plane, with registered pilots required to complete a familiarisation flight before flying solo.

Mr Portlock said the group had held discussions with the Rottnest Island Authority to install a supercharger to tap into its solar array, allowing pilots to fly the plane to the island.

Future plans include electric air-taxis capable of carrying up to five people to the holiday destination.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 08 2018, @01:44AM (16 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 08 2018, @01:44AM (#619355)

    In the early days, I can completely understand having a human pilot in charge of the aircraft, but with the simplicity of the electric motor the only major variable I see blocking autopilot take off and landing would be bad weather. Certainly would increase the carrying capacity of a 2 seater aircraft if one seat didn't have to be taken by a pilot.

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @02:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @02:22AM (#619367)

    Filthy sow, get pregnant! Ah, too good! Cumming!

    Oh, I see... it wasn't your asshole that I was squirting my diseased tadpoles into, it was a hunk of your rancid feces! Regardless, it's pregnant now, and it's all mine. Duuuuuu, I found another pinworm!

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday January 08 2018, @03:59AM (8 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Monday January 08 2018, @03:59AM (#619395) Journal

    Another guy who's never been in a small plane.

    Every gust of wind.
    Every updraft off of hill or microburst over a runway.
    Ever reach to a piece of luggage.
    Every errant bird.
    Every other aircraft.

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    • (Score: 4, Funny) by mmh on Monday January 08 2018, @02:13PM

      by mmh (721) on Monday January 08 2018, @02:13PM (#619502)

      𝅘𝅥𝅯 I'll be watching you. 𝅘𝅥𝅯

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 08 2018, @02:54PM (6 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 08 2018, @02:54PM (#619511)

      I've only had about 20 hours in light aircraft (2 and 4 seat), hands on stick for maybe 1 hour total, no formal pilot training.

      I did, however, develop an autopilot for a tiny unmanned fixed wing drone... lurches happen and autopilots are pretty good at recovery. Birds get out of the way or die (evasive can be more dangerous than taking the strike), other aircraft? Hopefully ATC can effectively manage traffic.

      As I was saying: not on day one, not in year one, but it's an achievable goal worth pursuing. After a few thousand clean take off and landings with a competent pilot in the seat ready to take over, but autopilot in charge (like they're doing with cars), I'd be ready to trust it.

      I'd certainly trust autopilot like that in the air, takeoff and landing more than auto-drive on urban freeways at 100+kph.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:16PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:16PM (#619551)

        > Birds get out of the way or die

        Sure, they die, but a bad hit can take you with 'em. I'm speaking from personal experience; I've been in a mid-sized plane (100 seats or so) that was hit by a bird right in one of the engines. That engine died. Luckily, the planes can keep flying without an engine or two, and it happened shortly after take-off, so we could return to the airport.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 08 2018, @06:23PM (4 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 08 2018, @06:23PM (#619616)

          Aye, so - how will the human pilot be better? Like "Sully" demonstrated, the computer can decide go/nogo for available airfields and whether a water-landing is preferable much faster than a human, and apparently humans aren't too good at evading birds - arguably, autopilots could be more diligent at scanning radar looking for birds ahead...

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          • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday January 09 2018, @03:24AM (3 children)

            by dry (223) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @03:24AM (#619854) Journal

            I wonder how much it was the pilot and how much it was the computer or dumb luck that they landed on a busy waterway without hitting any boats?
            Hmm reading wiki, it seems it was all the pilots decision with the fly by wire system first helping the glide and then stopping the pilot achieving maximum landing flare which would have softened the impact.
            Reminds me of the Gimli glider, where the pilot straddled a guard rail to shed speed and not run over the kids in front of the aircraft. Whether a computer would have made that decision is questionable, along with the computer being aware of the abandoned air field in the middle of nowhere and being capable of gliding a 767 which was considered unglidable. It was also an example of bad data (mixing up imperial and metric) along with a defective gas gauge in leading to big problems. Better outcome then the Mars Climate Orbiter which was on full autopilot.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider [wikipedia.org]

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:08PM (2 children)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:08PM (#619983)

              Certainly, human pilots tend to have more experience and data input sources (primarily visual scanning field) than autopilots and autopilot software authors do today....

              However, we are quickly approaching the cusp at which autopilots will have more data input sources that they can process - more than a human will ever be capable of. (Good) autopilot software should be accumulating knowledge in a relatively immortal fashion, and eventually be trained beyond the capacity of 30 years of human experience.

              There will always remain situations where a human can find a creative novel, potentially superior, solution to a unique problem that an autopilot would miss - but the point at which that advantage no longer outweighs the autopilots' massive database, lightning reflexes, and aggregation of more real-time data sources would seem to be approaching.

              Meanwhile, bad stuff will be happening during autopilot development. I find it interesting that this Google search:

              https://www.google.com/search?q=gainesville+autopilot+crash+terminal [google.com]

              does not turn up the story of researchers who had outfitted a light aircraft with experimental more-autonomous autopilot hardware/software and accidentally crashed it into the Gainesville airport terminal with some pretty serious consequences. Details are fuzzy in my head, but it happened within ~ the last 10 years and was considered an extreme setback in that particular autopilot development program.

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              • (Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:30PM (1 child)

                by dry (223) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:30PM (#620105) Journal

                You're probably right about autopilots getting better and better and overall improving things. Perhaps it is human nature or just my age to be distrustful of machines driving/flying autonomously, especially the idea of totally eliminating the possibility of a human piloting a vehicle.
                As for your search, it is interesting how Google serves results to different people. Here, the second result, sandwiched between 2 results of a Tesla fatal autopilot crash was http://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20080407/news/604159153/GS/ [gainesville.com] which is probably the accident you're thinking off. Seems there was too much damage to say what exactly caused the crash but does talk about the autopilot.

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:32PM

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:32PM (#620136)

                  Yep, that's the one - my first page of results was over 50% Tesla and didn't have this, which is doubly odd because I've used Google to search for and read this exact article in the past...

                  The thing I trust autopilots with the least is negotiating with human pilots, especially in crowded conditions like freeway traffic.

                  As for autopilot development - we lost a drone during development (apparently it went down deep in the woods - best possible result after a recovery without damage) and post-loss analysis showed us about a half dozen decisions which led to the loss, any one of those decisions being taken more conservatively would have saved the day (flying without the RDF tracker attached was my favorite mistake to remind people of) - but... this was about flight #25 in the program, and if we scrubbed for every "maybe" during development, at least half of the prior flights would have been grounded. Risk is one expense in progress.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 08 2018, @05:01AM (5 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday January 08 2018, @05:01AM (#619412)

    Somehow I doubt that an easier-to-manage throttle significantly simplifies taking off and landing, by far the most dangerous and unpredictable parts of any flight.

    Cruising maybe, but then autopilots have been able to mostly handle that since they were little more than a gyroscope and a brick on the gas pedal.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 08 2018, @03:05PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 08 2018, @03:05PM (#619517)

      It's not about the easier throttle management, it is about the reduction in variables of power production, there are so many more (and more common) failure modes of internal combustion, and you manage lots of them differently based on feel and experience and things that sensors don't communicate.

      Electric can fail - it can even go intermittent, bearings can seize or spall, props can take birdstrikes and potentially break in an unbalanced partial failure mode, lots of weird and seriously bad stuff can still happen, but the frequency of occurrence is much lower in a well maintained electrical powertrain and the FMEA is not so huge and full of intangibles that I think you need a human in the loop to achieve acceptable mitigation.

      Put another way, I think that doubling the number of passengers with an autopilot would result in more passenger miles per fatality than having a human pilot in one seat ferrying one passenger at a time.

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:38PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:38PM (#619565)

        Of course as passenger I'm not interested in passenger miles per fatality, but in the probability that this specific flight I'm on will not have a fatality. That probability will generally be the same whether there's a second passenger on board or not. It may not be the same whether there's a pilot on board or not.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 08 2018, @06:26PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday January 08 2018, @06:26PM (#619618)

          But, if you're two passengers, traveling on two planes instead of one, you've now doubled your odds of one of you dying... do you care about that?

          It's too early to make this argument, but, long term - we will eventually show that autopilots have less chance of killing the passengers than a human captain, maybe not today's autopilots, but eventually.

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    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 08 2018, @06:45PM (1 child)

      by frojack (1554) on Monday January 08 2018, @06:45PM (#619634) Journal

      Somehow I doubt that an easier-to-manage throttle significantly simplifies taking off and landing,

      You'd be supersized. Takeoff and landings are the times when the pilot of a small plane almost never takes a hand off of the throttle.

      Less so on take off perhaps. Its just firewall it, for the most part, and then throttle back at some acceptable altitude. Its precisely THEN, as you throttle back after a sustained full power run, that an internal combustion engine is going to come apart (if its ever going to come apart).

      On approach and landing you are always fiddling with power settings. Un-intuitively, power controls altitude and stick (pitch) controls speed during approach and landing.
      Making small power adjustments to control sink rate, you have to be aware of carb icing, you end up having to apply power just to keep the engine warm and ready, you have to not let it idle too long during descent, you have to be constantly aware that an IC engine has a response delay, you don't get power the instant you ask for it. If you slam the throttle to the firewall you are like to induce misfires due to flooding when you are most in need of power quickly.

      Throttle management is a huge part of takeoff and landing work load.

      Will electrics be any better? Hard to say. You substitute range anxiety for engine micromanagement. So who knows.

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      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:38AM

        by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @04:38AM (#619862)

        Oh, I'm willing to bet electric saves a whole lot of headaches, especially during landing. But I also suspect that aspect of the takeoff and landing would already be the easiest to automate. It's the rest of it, especially in adverse conditions or the occasional, inevitable, emergency landing, that I suspect will keep human pilots in the cockpit for many years to come.