Pipistrel e plane surges production

Wow! 5 to 6 a month is serious production. If they maintain that rate for 12 months, it would put them easily in the top 10 selling aircraft for the year. For a short-legged, two-seat trainer! (Unless I'm misreading this http://www.fi-aeroweb.com/General-Aviation.html)
 
Yeah I found that optimistic and impressive I guess also. But I can really see how in a training enviroment, especially as compared to a clapped out C-152 or 172, they would make sense. BUT, this just occurred to me....while any e plane will be able to teach one how to FLY, communicate properly via the radio with the tower, and generally learn how to work within the system, it won't be able to teach how to operate a ICE powered aircraft. I suppose any flight school, e plane equipped, would still require a little time in a conventional ICE powered one, just to teach how to lean and otherwise operate a legacy aviation engine. Interesting times....!
 
craneplaneguy said:
Yeah I found that optimistic and impressive I guess also. But I can really see how in a training enviroment, especially as compared to a clapped out C-152 or 172, they would make sense. BUT, this just occurred to me....while any e plane will be able to teach one how to FLY, communicate properly via the radio with the tower, and generally learn how to work within the system, it won't be able to teach how to operate a ICE powered aircraft.
Well, but that's happening anyway. As even conventional piston singles get FADEC and fuel injection, there will be fewer and fewer pilots that need to understand carb heat, mixtures, RPM drops per magneto set etc.
 
Right, this seems like it would only make sense to the bigger flight schools as an ab-initio trainer, and maybe an hours builder? There's apparently a guy in Canada who bought his for commuting around Vancouver though, so I guess the duration's enough for some people... BTW, for those interested, https://www.pipistrel-online.com/ has a fair bit of information about this aircraft buried in there; there's a few operation videos and the training course for the Alpha Electro is free and gives some info about the drivetrain.
 
I recall reading years ago that there used to be one step when going from a single-engine license to a twin. Cessna came out with the 336/337. With inline twin engines, it had no yaw characteristics (if one engine fails), so a 336 license did not allow you to fly a standard twin-engine plane.

http://www.airports-worldwide.com/articles/article1166.php

I wonder what cells they will be using? They would have to have the best possible range per Kg, and possibly high C-rate? This would be one application where a hot-swappable battery pack really makes sense.
 
Cell choice is discussed a bit in the podcast in the first post. Although they don't say the specific cells they're using, they do say the energy density is significantly worse than state-of-the-art in order to support multiple back-to-back charge/discharge cycles per day without too much degradation or overheating.
 
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