France: First All Electric Light Aircraft Flight
January 8th, 2008“As far as I can tell, there is no viable propulsion system on the horizon for aircraft outside of liquid fuels… You won’t see a plug-in Boeing 747 anytime soon.”
—Sandia’s Sunshine to Petrol Project Seeks Fuel from Thin Air
Nope. You won’t see a plug-in Boeing 747 anytime soon. But this reminds me of the freaks who wanted electric cars so badly (over the last couple of decades) that they couldn’t help themselves. So, at great expense, they converted conventional cars to run on electric power, and the results pretty much sucked. (I know, someone with a lead acid powered Pinto dragster is going to slap me on the face with a white glove over that last statement.)
Now that professionally engineered and built electric cars are nearly here (again), the same freaks want to take to the skies on electric power.
So, when will viable electric aircraft come into existence?
Again: Not in the foreseeable future, is my best guess. For me, “Not in the foreseeable future,” means that I can’t even theorize how it would be possible in the next twenty years, given my knowledge of power storage technologies (both current and under development). For it to happen sooner would require some kind of wildcard development/technology release from a government crypt, etc. It would be almost infinitely easier to run that existing 747 on algae juice, and, as it turns out: They are.
Still, someone had to lay claim to the first all electric light aircraft flight…
Via: Times Online:
Little noticed by the outside world, on December 23, a pilot took off from an Alpine airfield and flew for 48 minutes in the first light aircraft to be powered by electricity.
With electric cars and boats finally in action, that might sound like no big deal. But electric power has long been the impossible dream of aviation because the energy is so puny compared with the dead weight of the batteries. Sitting behind the noisy, gas-gulping beast that pulls my little plane through the sky, I often muse on what it would be like to have a smooth quiet motor turning the blades and belching no carbon into the air. That, in modest form, is exactly what the APAME, a team of French engineers at the village of Saint Pierre d’Argencon, have just achieved.
Their “Electra”, a kit-built single-seater, flew around the high Alps with a 25 horse-power electric motor and 47 kilogrammes of lithium-polymer batteries. The flight shows that non-polluting, quiet and inexpensive flying is withing reach, Anne Lavrand, the president of the APAME group, said. “This will be a real aeroplane that will have an airworthiness certificate. It’s a machine built for anyone with a pilot’s license.”
Several far richer outfits, mainly in the USA, are working on similar power packs but so far none have got off the ground. Lavrand told me that they started the project quietly 18 months ago, partly financed by donations from aerospace groups. “It’s not always a question of money. When we began, no-one believed we could do it.” Having proved that “ecological aviation” is viable, her group aims to extend the range and power of their technology, which for the moment uses a modified golf cart motor made by LCM, a British firm.
Like most aviation advances, the Electra project is not a leap but an evolutionary step. Batteries now power most radio-controlled model aircraft and some small unmanned observation “drones”. Electric motors provide the auxiliary power in some motor-gliders and experimental flying machines with ultra-long solar panel wings have been flown successfully since 1980. NASA and Boeing in the USA are working on future projects that derive electric power from hydrogen fuel cells. The French group also achieved the first electric flight by a delta-wing ultra-light aircraft last summer.
The difference with the Electra project is that electricity has been used for the first time to power an ordinary light plane, albeit a small one. This opens the way to practical, manned electric flight.
As long as batteries are needed, the performance will be low.
