practical range

Joined
Nov 27, 2015
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S.E. Idaho USA
I flew to West Yellowstone MT, via the Grand Tetons, this weekend, in my little homebuilt kitplane. It's nothing high tech, mostly aluminum and fabric construction, with a chrome moly fuselage. Slow too, for an airplane. The E Montague folder came in very handy as usual once on the ground, as the airport is quite a ways from town.

BUT, it has a tremendous duration, on it's 35 gallon capacity of regular car gas (total, rarely filled) well over 8 hours, with reserves. This flight was 4 hrs of flight time, 2 there and 2 back, though different routes. Once back home I had over half of my fuel capacity left, I could have made the flight again..... purely from a practical viewpoint, this is very handy, not to mention safer. I started thinking, what electric plane could do that, that is currently available? None that I know of, not even close, and at any price! I was surpised to have this thought, as I am excited about e flight as most, and will continue to be so, I just thought it was indicative of how much more work needs to be done before they will challenge an ICE powered machine as a practical traveling machine. It will happen I'm sure, but we're not there yet.
 
craneplaneguy said:
BUT, it has a tremendous duration, on it's 35 gallon capacity of regular car gas (total, rarely filled) well over 8 hours, with reserves. This flight was 4 hrs of flight time, 2 there and 2 back, though different routes. Once back home I had over half of my fuel capacity left, I could have made the flight again..... purely from a practical viewpoint, this is very handy, not to mention safer. I started thinking, what electric plane could do that, that is currently available? None that I know of, not even close, and at any price!
Consider an aircraft that looks like a Cessna Skymaster, with a Rotax 582 in the back and a ~150kW electric motor (with folding prop) up front. You get the range of an ICE engine, and the power (and simplicity, and redundancy) of electric.
 
Could any of the SunFlyers have done the trip? Not available yet, but SunFlyer 2 seems to be getting closer to a cert.
 
In theory, using their projected #'s. But it appears that it will sell for $289,000.00, and if anything that price will go up. So about 6.5 times cost then my bird. Plus, it's a "go fast", super clean, with little dinky tires, my bird is much draggier as it's set up for off airport, i could never operate a Sunflyer off my place, it needs a paved "real" runway, mine doesn't.
 
Heh, you didn't mention off-airport! Though, maybe for paved strips "not even close, at any price" could be "getting closer, at the price of a fancy Cirrus"? I think off-airport ops are likely to remain challenging for EVs even after regional jets, with all their infrastructure support, are spinning EDFs instead of turbofans.
 
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