The founder seems to sneak in the word "hybrid", around 1m30 mark in the video below.
https://youtu.be/nM86DBOqgPM?si=5unXLmPxk6M_kmuN&t=86
Note: not being negative, I just want to ensure I understand correctly since the title might imply something else.
Update: confirmed, it does use aviation fuel.
> "The airplane will also include a reserve-hybrid configuration, consisting of two turbo generators powered by sustainable aviation fuel. The reserve-hybrid system is installed to secure reserve energy requirements without cannibalizing battery range, and it can also be used during cruise on longer flights to complement the electrical power provided by the batteries."
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-unve...
You make it sound like it is acceptable for a badly planned flight to have a fuel emergency. It is not.
If there is a fuel emergency (or the plane lands with less than 30min of fuel) there will be an incident investigation that treats the situation as serious as if the plane had crashed. If the investigation discovers it was nothing more than bad planning, (at minimum) the planning procedures will be changed to ensure it never happens again.
I somewhat doubt that. Part of the advantage of the design is that the generators don't need to be sized as big enough to power take off, climb and a potential go-around on landing. They only need to be sized as big enough for cruising.
So powering them up during critical phases wouldn't help with safety. If anything, normal operating procedures might actually require shutting them down during critical phases.
What this does mean is that the batteries need to be reasonably full when it comes into land, possibly as high as 50%. And most go arounds will require immediately powering up the generators, so it probably needs to be fuelled for all but the shortest flights.
That aircraft would need a very large battery to do that, and it's way more efficient to have some burnable fuel there that you'll never actually use.
The way modern hybrids can charge from an outlet, I classify them as EV-Hybrid, and only use gas if need be vs older ones that only charge through the gas engine, Hybrid.
Smaller, lighter, simpler, cheaper, and more flexible about fuel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeG4zLlFkak
Linear engine starts around 11:19
Generation II then.
"My father, a mechanical engineer, was a tireless advocate of the hypocycloid crankshaft mechanism."
For some reason just reading that brought a smile to my face.
Jet fuel has a specific energy of 12 kwh/kg and a density of 6.7 lb/gal (2). So 80 gallons of jet fuel is 536 lb, or 243 kg, and contains 2,916 kwh of energy. Jet engines are not very efficient, so lets say only 30% of this energy actually ends up being used. So 875 kwh.
Lets say we are using batteries that are 300 wh/kg (0.3 kwh/kg), which seems on the high side of what electric cars are using now (and that there are no efficiency loses in the electric motors or elsewhere).
Now maybe I messed up my unit conversions but I think that means to carry the same energy onboard you would need 6,428 lbs of batteries. And you are still going to carry atleast 1,600 lbs of fuel on top of that. And you have the weight of both electric and conventional engines.
I could see this reducing costs like they say but when many big costs are fixed (pilot, hangar, etc.) will this actually make sense? Will airlines fly something that has thousands of pounds less payload than a competitor but lower running costs? I don't know but it will be interesting to see.
(1) https://airinsight.com/seat-miles-gallon-fuel-burn-update/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
In terms of operating cost, not just cost of fuel, but if the electric engines can be much less costly in terms of periodic maintenance and overhaul. Maintenance and overhaul costs on turboprop and small jet turbine engines are not cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...
Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes and attack Europe's short flight market (which is already cheap). Now we need bigger planes or more frequent planes and the next startup to solve the energy needs.
I'm not sure how building an electric aircraft would help with this. Are people going to suddenly switch to commuting by plane?
Fixing America's commute problem is primarily an urban planning one (ie, putting all the homes nowhere near anything) and not an insufficient-electric-aircraft one.
For people commuting from suburb to suburb you put bus connections at the train station. Buses are lower capacity but cheaper to purchase and operate so you can run a bunch of them in low density[0] for improved coverage. If demand is really bad[1] you create a "microtransit zone" - i.e. offer shuttle taxi service to the rider's final destination.
What I'm describing is basically how UTA's FrontRunner commuter rail service works; but it's not materially different from, say, the NY MTA's LIRR or MNR besides the larger scale of the NY systems and the fact that New York is weirdly bad at buses. For various reasons America has actually done decently well at retaining the commuter rail systems that worked and rebuilding the ones that got scrapped. This is primarily because these systems tend to be small-scale enough that state & local governments can fund them with their own money and the meager amount of FTA funds available.
The comment you replied to confused "rail commute" with "commuter rail"; but the grandparent was specifically talking about intercity travel. Here is where America is actually malincompetent[2] at building anything. Our primary intercity rail operator, Amtrak, was built as a last-ditch service preservation measure as railroads were bleeding money on passenger traffic. It doesn't own most of the rail it operates on, and that rail has been actively getting worse as Class I railroads have been destroying their own infrastructure (especially Union Pacific). The two-and-a-half attempts at building high-speed services in the US have all been various flavors of bad:
1. The most successful, the Acela, works primarily because Amtrak owns most of the corridor. Even then, it barely gets up to speed because "high speed[4]" (80+ mph) trains have to be grade-separated in the US, which is expensive, and the Acela was sold on the promise of incremental upgrades that haven't really panned out
2. BrightLine partnered with a freight railroad that wanted to get back into the passenger market, and it's actually operating at "higher speed[4]", but it's also bleeding money. They have a second route planned from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, but it's a project they bought out because it was... also bleeding money.
3. California wanted to build their own Acela, with blackjack and hookers, and wound up massively overselling it to voters. At least in terms of how much it would cost and how quickly it could be built. They bet the farm on FTA funds that got impounded the moment Trump retook office. I have no idea if this will ever happen.
You'll notice I never mentioned population density, and that's because it doesn't matter for intercity travel at all. The vast majority of flyers get a taxi to the airport and a rental car at their destination, and it still works out anyway. The only difference to those kinds of travelers between a train and a plane is time and whether or not they have to take their shoes off before boarding the vehicle.
[0] Or, if you're New York, you run way too many of them through medium and high density areas that really SHOULD have a subway but don't anyway build QueensLink and NO WAY WITH QUEENSWAY
[1] From a customer perspective, anything less frequent than an every 30 minutes bus probably could be served better with on-demand taxis.
[2] Malicious? Incompetent? Why not both!
[3] I am going to use "commuter rail" to refer to both commuter and regional rail systems as they are roughly the same scale. The difference comes down to scheduling patterns: commuter rail is scheduled around 9-to-5 rush hour traffic while regional rail is built to be more broadly useful.
[4] Strictly speaking, "high speed rail" means 125mph or higher and anything less is conventional speed. Rail just was already pretty fast even before Japan decided to make really fast trains.
Or is the noise from turbulence through the air or something? I honestly would think they'd be minimising turbulence anyway for energy efficiency.
I happened to be in Plattsburgh the day of this flight, on my way to a fishing trip on the lake. They used that facility for the long former SAC base runway, but I think it’s also appropriate given the nature of the NY North country that an ultra low operating cost aircraft would see flight there.
The death of most industry really hurt these regions, which are largely cut off from the prosperity of the normal economy. The ability to affordably link places like Plattsburgh or Watertown NY to the broader world. That region in particular prospered with rail links driven by iron and timber.
90 minute flights to places like NYC metro or Boston Metro would be transformative, and may even create new airline operating models.
More likely, this replaces the turboprop or commuter jet from Colorado Springs to Denver to catch the connecting fright to any other major airport.
Likewise, if you're a nerd, you can spend your free time building stuff you thought you would never get around to.
Yes, AI as marketed is a bit of a snakeoil, but much more real and meaningful than crypto and social media. And math nerds finally can get a high paying job that's not about peddling ads or figuring out how to make a hedge fund even richer.
tl;dr I have a few qualms with this app[1].
Now, this thing might take off (pun intended) anyway, for one simple reason: a theoretically faster train does not compete with it if it doesn't exist. The midwest and west are chock full of towns whose rail connections were either abandoned or never existed in the first place, but have regional airports. This thing would be perfect to service feeder flights from hub airports to regionals or as a charter plane.
That being said I wouldn't expect this to revolutionize air travel. You're still going to be packed into a sardine can and made to pay extra for the privilege of bringing a reasonable amount of toiletries with you. And all the long-haul flights are still going to be using fossil fuels because the energy density of batteries sucks. But still, I'd rather have this than 10 million AI companies.
[0] 500 miles for hybrid operation on SAF, because the FAA would not certify a plane with such a small range
The key thing question is whether smaller more frequent flights eat up too much runway time to be economical.
"Half of all flights in the world are under 2 hours." Then they give examples of Fjord-town hopping in Norway, or Island hopping in Hawaii, which seem very niche.
Will they be able to compete in any of the busiest routes? Could it take me Melbourne-Sydney in 1 - 2 hours for < $100? I'd sacrifice some time and $ for an eco-friendly option, but obviously there's a limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_flig...
Boston, Massachusetts (1h) Washington, D.C. (1h) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (45m) Baltimore, Maryland (1h) Toronto, Ontario (1h 45m) Montreal, Quebec (1h 30m) Cleveland, Ohio (1h 45m) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1h 15m) Buffalo, New York (1h 10m) Providence, Rhode Island (45m) Portland, Maine (1h 10m) Bermuda (1h 50m) Nantucket, Massachusetts (1h 15m) Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (1h 25m) Ottawa, Ontario (1h 30m) Quebec City, Quebec (1h 45m) Rochester, New York (1h 5m) Syracuse, New York (1h) Manchester, New Hampshire (1h) Bangor, Maine (1h 25m) Burlington, Vermont (1h 10m) Richmond, Virginia (1h 10m) Norfolk, Virginia (1h 15m) Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina (1h 25m) Charlotte, North Carolina (1h 45m) Greensboro, North Carolina (1h 30m) Charleston, South Carolina (2h) Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (1h 45m) Savannah, Georgia (2h)
If it gets a little better than current 2 hour flight time then Detroit Chicago and Atlanta are in range - very significant.
The range is apparently 125 miles electric, and 500 miles as a hybrid. That's not enough for Melbourne Sydney. Give it a couple doubling-times though (5 years total?) and it will be.
Meanwhile aircraft take forever to develop and there should be enough of a market in shorter hall flights to occupy a scaling company in the meantime anyways.
Companies like Joby, Archer and others also seem to be taking the huge gamble that battery density in Watt-hours per kilogram will SIGNIFICANTLY increase in the next 5-10 years (before they run out of money/investors) making the range of their aircraft much greater, and more viable for commercial operation.
This is the statement that matters and why I think electric is a huge deal. We can't get new designs into the air. It costs too much and takes too long. Electric has the potential to bring the design cycle back to something reasonable. Electric engines, and the supporting systems around them, are just so much simpler so there is so much less to certify. Once we really start designing for electric, and iterating on those designs, I think we will start seeing massive gains very rapidly.
https://www.wired.com/story/magnix-electric-plane-motor/
So much simpler.
Fuel is often placed in wings because adding/burning fuel from your center of lift means your CG doesn't significantly change through a flight and you spend less on pumping fuel within the aircraft. With batteries, you are looking at a constant mass from the beginning of the flight to the end... so you can place it anywhere. Electric motors are orders of magnitude lighter than jet engines. Also, you don't need to pump electrons against gravity so placing all of that weight lower has handling/performance advantages.
By using an airframe shape that is well known, they are reducing risk and appealing to existing pilots. By building it from the ground-up, they are taking advantage of differences between the tech.
eg: all of that weight in the fuselage instead of the wings means that rolling is going to be much more nimble. Yaw might be affected as well, depending on the placement/moment of the batteries.
I know many planes use their wings as fuel tanks but given the weight of batteries maybe that doesn’t work.
I agree it’s interesting. Not a small undertaking.
On a 737 they can put about 8k pounds per wing.
Even little planes like Cessnas have wing tanks.
Might see planes just a smidge differently now :)
It's surprising what you can fly formation with, even without an engine [1] :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0icOICQLTc
Dumping (most of the) water before landing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Yv-V7eozk
[1] this particular glider does have a small engine for takeoff, but maximum speed with the engine extended is 180 km/h and here they are flying at 280 km/h.
That glider next to the world's fastest aircraft (in 1953) dressed up for a fight, how about that.
And they can water the grass...
-
So several thousand $ to get trained and certified and finally be ready to get towed and soar...
but just a few hundred (California) to try for half an hour behind a pro in the cockpit--oh yeah!
...omg they let you fly the thing for another couple bucks!!!
Which may result in them being too cold and you needing to spend power heating them, so someone needs to do the math on that.
Every kg saved is a kg more of freight that can be transported (or a little less fuel used to keep the plane in the air); save 500g for each seat of a 200-seat plane, and you can put one more paying passenger in the cabin.
Still an incredible feat, but no idea where the $5 comes from. Maybe that’s just the power they use to get from the threshold of the runway to wheels up.
To be fair though it is more likely to be 50 kWh just for the take-off, so that's probably where their $5 figure came from (at $0.10 / kWh). For comparison: a single gallon of Jet-A = ~150MJ. 320 kWh = 320,000 W for one hour so 3600 * 320,000 = 1150MJ, or about 40 gallons and I suspect that these electric motors are quite efficient.
So it does pencil out, I think. Or maybe my pencil is broken and no doubt HN will correct my math.
If this is a hybrid, I am curious where they are stealing energy from.
Cool stuff regardless!
This plane basically has to outperform a Saab 340.
Fixed wing commercial airliners generally don't, because airlines' biggest cost is fuel and new aircraft are a lot more efficient than older ones
Seems optimistic to think that a first generation electric plane will avoid that challenge: in theory if you're only operating on electricity the kinetic efficiency doesn't matter quite so much, but 125 miles range on electric power is really quite limiting and crucially newer generation electric aircraft would be expected to offer more electric range. I guess a lot might depend on how easily it is to legally retrofit better batteries to older gen aircraft.
They'll want to sell for more than the market value of an old Saab 340, that's for sure...
If anything, planes have real autopilots!
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/musks-claim-teslas-appreciat...
Range: 125 miles all electric
500 miles with hybrid system (electric + conventional turbo prop)The higher reliability of electric.
Losing an turbine engine doesn't mean asymmetrical thrust. Plane still flies normally.
Losing an engine on takeoff you still have full power.
Electric motors spin up faster than turbines. Which means faster throttle response. Which you need when hit with a wind shear on landing.
Take off and landing under electric power means much less noise.
Efficiency, you can increase the number of props or fans to get a much higher bypass ratio. Worth noting the plane in the video has four props.
Cool drones can test and validate the solution without risking a pilot!
There's room for thoughtful skepticism and critique, but not dismissive sarcasm, nor supercilious putdowns like "Yeah...", "just a joke", "yet another high wing puddle jumper". All that is exactly what we ask commenters to avoid on this site. As the guidelines say, "A good critical comment teaches us something."
Your account unfortunately has a long history of breaking the site guidelines—enough, I'm afraid to say, that I instinctively brace myself when I see your username. We've asked you about this multiple times over the years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29222114 (Nov 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697507 (Jan 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21094881 (Sept 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20314315 (June 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469358 (March 2019)
If you wouldn't mind taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart and really correcting this pattern, we'd appreciate it. You're obviously knowledgeable and a good commenter apart from this, but it's a problem.
I'm going to push back on one bit though, which I suspect is just a misunderstanding on your part: "yet another high wing puddle jumper" is not remotely dismissive or trivializing! Being "high wing" is purely descriptive, and correct, and a "puddle jumper" is a widely used term for short-range passenger aircraft (like the Dash 8, which I also mentioned), here's a great reddit thread for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/rs7i4m/what_is_t...
I'm not saying this to make the designers feel bad verbally. I'm literally saying they've produced an aircraft that competes poorly in the market with something DeHavilland was selling in the 1980's.
My first sentence was almost 100% sarcasm though and I'll take the hit on that.
I appreciate the reply.
What an age to witness.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, pusher props are way cooler. If the wings are far back and the plane has canards, even cooler.
Even ignoring land acquisition (which is a big thing to ignore in populated areas where a train would most benefit the population), there are simple things like road crossings, other infrastructure crossing, etc.
In this case an airplane may be simply a lower friction solution.
This I don't get. I've seen rail stops in the smallest towns, where the train stops for 30 seconds to let a couple people on or off. Places where even the smallest airplane makes no sense at all. Not 30-100, 1-2.
> the grueling two hour drives
What country are you in, and perhaps more importantly, what roads are you driving on?
Huh, perhaps then it wouldn’t be suited to places where people drive at that speed. In the US I doubt people drive 200 miles routinely in 2 hours. It would be closer to 3.5 h I think going by the routine 6 h it takes SF to LA which is about 350 mi.
I think if you have very high speed road/rail transportation that dominates this across fixed routes. Road at 100 mph average definitely wins for flexibility.
What car are you driving?
How are you not dead?
...Which would mean you're driving at 250mph.
Most cars take off at that speed.
Yes, it can go farther if you burn fuel. But so can a Dash-8, very effectively. No one is interested in hybrid range per se, only if the hybrid mode is more efficient.
And sure, there are places in the world that don't have limited access highways. But the 125 mile range is already served very well by piston-driven lightplanes! Again, who's going to buy one of these vs. just continuing to run their 40+ year old Beavers or Caravans or whatever?
Also: if the only market for your high tech electric superplane startup is backcountry work in Alaska, you're probably never going to get funded to begin with.
I think you would be pleased at the very first selling points on their website, as well as on the product page. It seems they have at least considered the most obvious issue in their product space.
Very few highways between the Hawaiian islands. Or Caribbean. Probably plenty of other places.
There are tons of places in the world with short haul flights today, even if good highways exist.
Every one of those planes is a potential target for replacement.
You’re arguing most short haul flights shouldn’t exist. Maybe do, but they do.
More of a replacement for the "helicopter market"...
I will never fly on any aircraft that does not have a minimum two-person crew on the flight deck. The ability to "feel" the plane is invaluable in an emergency situation. Frankly, just the fact that someone whose life is literally on the line doing the walkaround is an invaluable part of the safety of commercial flight.
I was rooting for this company when I saw the news of their first flight. I am no longer rooting for them because it is obvious that their leadership does not understand the human element of commercial air travel.
then we are not tied to global fuel politics
and maybe airports will become far less toxic with leaded fuel finally being completely eliminated
(and there is a Ycombinator video channel? never knew)
Things seem to go in the right direction, with an unleaded alternative in the process of being certified. But aviation, especially general aviation moves at a glacial pace, usually for good reasons, maturity is important, but not poisoning people is important too.
Most of the video is the workshop.
Where is the airplane??
Uh, what about the Bombardier C-series (A220)?
Hence 18 years.
They need to hire an actual designer, if the plane weighs 0.5% more but has actual human usability that's worth it.
It being barebones from the factory is not a problem.
The competition in this market segment doesn't look like Middle Eastern airlines' first class cabin concept art, it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340#/media/File:Mesaba_Ai...
.jpg){kind=link}
related : many flight demonstrators in the past for large passenger planes have had no interior at all aside from the cockpit and ballast kits.