Airbus has flown its E-Fan electric twin across the English Channel and, to celebrate, has published a page comparing the new aircraft to Bleriot’s. The Bleriot crossing was in 1909 in a one-seat, one-engine airplane. The latest crossing was in a two-seat (though the second is always empty?), two-engine plane. The Airbus page makes for interesting reading and I’m personally very excited about the potential for a low-vibration quiet electric trainer. I do wonder if a flight school would need 3X as many of these as gas-powered airplanes. Consider a typical flight school that dispatches aircraft every two hours for training flights that last 1 to 1.5 hours. If the aircraft takes 4 hours to recharge then what does the school do on a summer weekend when everyone wants to fly? Separately I can’t even imagine would it would take to get publicly run airports to run 240V circuits out to the tie-downs. I haven’t seen any evidence of quick-swap battery packs in electric airplane designs.
(Note that the Channel was actually crossed in an electric French-built Cri-cri 12 hours earlier by Hughes Duwal (Australian Flying), and would have been crossed a few days earlier in an electric Slovenian-designed Pipistrel but for some contract/legal/regulatory hassles.)
Related:
Paul Burtorelli of Avweb has a great review of the new Pipistrel electric airplane. The engineers who built it seem to have created something that is very smart and practical. It has swappable batteries.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WiADDbeFanU
It also seems that when a back of the napkin calculation is made regarding electric aircraft it becomes clear that if you are staying below 10K feet local flights of an hour or a little more are all that is currently possible because of the thickness of the air and the power density of batteries. Pipistrel understands this and their airplane looks really impressive.
It would be more impressive of Airbus if they were building something that was flying up high where an electric aircraft could travel much faster and farther in thinner air.
The E-fan’s batteries are mounted in the inboard sections of the wings. It wouldn’t be impossible to make the batteries swappable if this was something the market demanded. Also the charge time is reported as 1 hour charging for 1 hour flying, not 4, in the wiki. Does that change your answer?
Getting publicly run anythings to do anything is a pain, but if electric aircraft became ubiquitous, this would not be an unreachable goal. It’s really very cheap to run electric lines, even if the cost is inflated by the fact that you are dealing with government bureaucracies. If this was something you were doing privately, the cost would be on the order of low 4 figures/charging station including labor and materials, so even if you inflate it 10x for studies on the effect of electric fields on the wild goose population you are talking in the order of tens of thousands of dollars, not millions. Airfields already have all sorts of buried electrical for lights, etc. so it’s not as if introducing electricity to the airfield is an untried concept.
The video on the WSJ website suggests that you’ll be able to physically replace the batteries. (Maybe Tesla can put some superchargers in G.A. airports, too)
Also, if they can make this fly with reasonable performance, I wonder if they could put a tiny micro-turbine in the belly that can provide consistent power for charging and cruise. (Without the hassles of turbine engine management)