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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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 08 2018, @03:05PM (2 children)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:38PM (1 child)
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
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]