Peter_Mundy wrote:
KLM Flight Academy have ordered 16 electric aircraft so I guess they see a future for them.
I just googled KLM flight academy – I note with irony the “job vacancies” have nothing to do with actual flying. I suspect strongly that this is a purely PR related move, funded by the airline and probably part of is “carbon offsets”.
WRT electric aeroplanes, even for flight school use, Im still trying to reconcile the whole flight time & safety reserves thing. And that is if you assume your average flight school can afford to actually buy a brand new electric aeroplane and afford the gear/certification to run it. Remember most flight schools use your trusty C152/PA28/DR400 which are not exactly new…
Regards, SD..
I agree; it’s a PR stunt.
The other concern, which I well remember from my PPL 20 years ago, is that if a student changes types during training, the whole thing takes a lot longer. Easily 10-20hrs longer… I have quite unhappy memories of how I got shafted and screwed over by a flying school (now gone) operating unairworthy dangerous junk (they had a CAA AOC for a Seneca charter – the G-OMAR report is a nice read – so “of course” they were “gold plated”) and when I moved to another school I lost those hours, plus some exam passes. So any deal where you change between types for different flights is going to rip off the customer.
It is easy for us “old timers” to laugh at this because once you can “fly” it’s all basically the same, GPS and stuff, but if you are new and only just hanging in there, going from a PA38 to a C152 etc is a huge change.
And unless battery tech improves roughly at least 5x this is going to be a problem. I think 3x would be enough to cover in-PPL x/c requirements for the one flight, but the downtime for charging will bust the economics (the obvious workaround – more planes – means loads of capital tied up). This means charging needs to be done at night, so you need lots more battery capacity.
Also, unless there is a big State subsidy, the cost of the connection is nontrivial. Here in the UK, domestically, there is a ~ few k charge for connecting you to a 3 phase supply of ~100A per phase, even if it is say 5m to the cable under the street outside, and it goes up steeply above that. Very steeply if a new 11kV/33kV connection is needed (we did this before here). The labour is very significant so it will cost the same everywhere in Europe – the difference will be in subsidies.
Silvaire wrote:
The end result for GA in those areas will be silly little planes flown in circles by people who can’t afford to buy their own and wait their turn in line to go around the pattern a few times.
Which is why I consider my RV-7 build something of a race against time. Not simply to finish it at all – because I think I’ll be able to finish in time to fly it burning avgas – but to get a decent number of years out of it before burning avgas becomes either illegal or taxed to the point that it may as well be illegal.
I envisage that one day, maybe 20 years from now, I will have to either discard it or convert it to electric propulsion. It should be theoretically possible, with the performance and endurance dependent on battery technology progress (or lack thereof) and may be very limiting – but at least I will have my own.
Take alook around the world – ie not western Europe.
Petrol, and most definitely diesel and Jet A1, will be around for alot longer than we are being told in the navel gazing west…
Regards, SD..
In 20 years I think the major difference in my US base is that there will be some idiotic on line training required to drive my gasoline powered car or motorcycle from the gate to my hangar 
The chance of not being able to fuel my plane once I’m there is zero, and it’s very likely that the plane I hope to be flying then already exists now.
2021 activism will not create 2041 reality.
Silvaire wrote:
The chance of not being able to fuel my plane once I’m there is zero
Fully agree, but in the UK I’m not quite so confident. Hopeful, but not overly confident.
Silvaire wrote:
None of the above stops a bubble growing or the naive pouring money into the accounts of those who offer a vision that they want to hear.
Looking objectively at GA as a whole, it can easily be argued that the growth of GA in the 60s and 70s was exactly such a bubble. Small, silly, slow and already outdated airplanes flooding the market pretending to offer a solution for travelling. What happened was commercial airlines taking over everything, offering much cheaper, faster, farther travel for everyone.
The next bubble was the UL in Europe starting in the 80s. It can objectively be understood as a reaction to the utterly stale, not offering anything new or better, except exponentially larger cost and bureaucracy – classical certified GA. Today that UL bubble has more or less become what it initially offered an alternative for: stale and nothing new, except exponentially growing cost and more bureaucracy :-)
Then there is homebuilt. All of it put together is small compared to the European UL or the 60-70s certified GA. But it does offer something new and exiting every year, and it does offer something for everyone. It’s the original spirit of aviation, and has lived on since the very beginning of aviation itself.
In the last year and a half, digital “travel” has made huge dents in physical travel. It will come back of course, but not at full power. The world has already changed, even if we 50+ pretend it hasn’t
Private GA is mostly driven by feelings and dreams. It is mostly backward looking nostalgia or forward looking (pipe) dreams. There is close to none practical utility value except a few exceptions here and there. Take out recreation, sport and hobby/enthusiasts from private GA, and there is literally nothing left. Nothing with enough pure utility value to sustain itself (again, with a few exceptions). Electric propulsion fits right into this, and opens up a whole lot of other stuff, previously not even dreamed of as physically possible. The only thing it doesn’t offer is range, not today at least, but it is very early. AFAIK there still is only one certified electric airplane available today.
IMO, the truer you are able to stay to the original “spirit of aviation”, the easier the life as a private GA pilot becomes. Then you will see electric as an addition that could make private GA even more cool.
The lack of GA utility value is caused mostly by poor airport management in Europe, in combination with alternatives (in central Europe, easy driving, and cheap airlines). Electric planes won’t help there.
As regards the technical viability of electric planes, I am sure that 10 or 20 years from now this conversation will run differently, but it isn’t there yet.
Peter wrote:
Electric planes won’t help there.
Electric planes is good for the “spirit”. That’s what I mean If it is good for anything else, and exactly what, remains to be seen.
What exactly do you mean by poor airport management?
If you are talking of cost, handling, ppr, then that is down to the places you like to fly. In France I can keep my airport costs low to non existent. The last time I did a PPR was at Sywell in the UK and they told me I need not have bothered because they had my flight plan. I only ever do PNRs at points of entry and exit from France.
And the only time I have had handling in the last few years was in Guernsey, and a good service it was and not overly expensive.
Utility means different things to different people. To the ULM crowd here, most of them doing between 100 and 150 hours a year, although one guy did 80hours in 3 weeks. They use their aircraft to travel around the country and to other countries, and there are quite a few hotels and restaurants with their own air strips.
As for electric aircraft, or hybrid aircraft or hydrogen powered aircraft, they will evolve because the market, especially in Europe, will make it happen by Avgas becoming either nonexistent or too costly due to lack of demand for it.
Last week I stayed at an hotel in UK. It was a new hotel and there were 10 Tesla charging points in the car park.
I heard of one of those electric scooters where recharging the battery has been designed to include super capacitors. They can recharge in 20 seconds. At the moment they are only capable of 10km range but that’s all they need for food delivery outfits such as Just Eat or Uber.
So things are changing and the momentum seems to be picking up.
