From The Vancouver Sun
Somebody check me here, but doesn’t this seem like a whooooolllllleeeee lot of wishful thinking?~ctm
A B.C. airline and a Seattle-area engine maker say they’ve found a quicker route to electrification by converting a small bush plane with batteries and an electric motor
Jeff Bell, Victoria Times Colonist
Updated: March 26, 2019
A transition from seaplane to e-plane is set to begin.
Harbour Air is embarking on what is believed to be a world first, adding an electric plane to its fleet — a zero-emission aircraft powered by a 750-horsepower electric motor.
The company has 42 planes and 12 routes, and operates from centres such as Victoria, Vancouver and Seattle. It is North America’s largest seaplane airline, serving 500,000 passengers on 30,000 commercial flights every year.
“The intent is to eventually convert the whole fleet,” said Harbour Air’s founder and CEO. Greg McDougall. of the move to electric planes. “It would be a staged situation because the range of the (electric) aircraft presently, with the present battery capacity, would be around a half an hour with a half-an-hour reserve.
“But that’s changing very rapidly with the development of the battery technology.”
The first plane to be converted will be the six-passenger DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver, which is used across Harbour Air routes.
“The first one would be a prototype, which is basically proving the technology for Transport Canada and getting toward certification,” McDougall said.
Harbour Air is taking on the electric-plane venture with Washington state’s magniX — a company specializing in creating electric propulsion for air travel. The partners anticipate conducting the first flight tests in November.
McDougall said nobody has ever flown a fully electric commercial flight.
“If you think about it, it’s the evolution of transportation toward electric propulsion,” he said. “The internal combustion engine is all but obsolete, really, for future development.
HT/Toto
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Soon or later we will go back to the bicycle plane :
Produced in bicycle energy fueled plants 🙂
Getting a seaplane to unstick is more of an energy challenge than wheels
I’ve booked a flight for April 1, 2030; with an option to cancel.
Last year, MagniX sounded a bit less optimistic than does Harbour Air now:
https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/magnix-milestone-all-electric-aircraft-motors-2819972/
Let’s see if it ever gets beyond the virtue signalling prototype.
My guess is that a year from now, the electric plane will be quietly mothballed.
The announcements of the death of the internal combustion engine are somewhat exagerated.
Incidently, I heard that the Chinese just launched an electric rocket for a moonshot. They are now looking for a socket halfway to recharge.
Given the short distances between Victoria, Vancouver and Seattle, ….. and flying low altitude, mostly all over water …… and no mountains to cross, ….. their electric conversion might work ….. iffen the “takeoffs” don’t put too much drain on the battery charge. And iffen they run out of battery “juice”, just ser er down on the water.
Maybe they could use an electrically powered catapult system for takeoff, like aircraft carriers use, to conserve some battery power.
That shur would set the passengers back in their seats.
“And iffen they run out of battery “juice”, just ser er down on the water.” Except they would be landing at full/takeoff load deadstick and if the water was rough …. at all …. it would probably mean crash landing. Landing with pontoons on even minimally agitated water is risky.
This from the AAIA website:
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/departments/electric-plane-viability/
As an accomplished engineer and long-time AIAA member, I was disappointed to say the least, when I read July/August’s Aerospace America cover article, “Fly the Electric Skies.” The article dreamily speculates that battery/electric propulsion is the wave of the future without any supporting evidence. It has no technical content whatsoever, yet the subject screams for it.
First of all, let me say that I am an electric skeptic. There are huge problems in competing with hydrocarbon energy in every sector of energy use. Aerospace is perhaps the most difficult discipline for electric because of the tremendous importance of weight. But I would be glad to read an article that presents the real issues and provides evidence for any reasonable alternatives.
For example, this article could have discussed the weight challenge — where do batteries stand compared to current fuels in energy-to-weight comparisons? What threshold do they need to achieve to create a viable product? There are other demands, as well, that aren’t even discussed in the article. The high pressure produced by gas turbines powers airliner Environmental Control Systems — how will electric aircraft cool/heat the cabin, and how does the added weight affect the concept viability? Hydraulics are used for heavy lifting like landing gear and flaps — is there an electric alternative that doesn’t introduce unacceptable weight penalties? The airport economics are important, as well. The hub-and-spoke model didn’t just develop because of special interest influences — there are real economic benefits to that approach, as there are economic issues with a more distributed regional system. Delving into this topic quantitatively, instead of presenting only qualitative inconvenience issues with hub-and-spoke, would be extremely informative to all of us. The whole article seems to lack objectivity, and just as importantly, any meat.
I realize that Aerospace America is not an AIAA journal. But that doesn’t mean it should contain only the fantasies and whims of someone who has a vested interest in seeing them funded.
Torger J. Anderson
AIAA associate fellow
Alexandria, Virginia
torg_anderson@hotmail.com
Test e-plane concept with a 1960 Beaver is like test electric car concept with a 1960 Impala, a joke.
Maybe a battery powered glider with one person on board, towed up to 2000 feet to start, but a SEA plane with 6 people taking off from the water?? NO WAY JOSE
Add a couple of pedals per person and a flintstonesque design and some people might buy it.
A little historical perspective:
Electrical aircraft today are about where IC-powered aircraft were in 1908, performance wise.
A decade after that small-scale, short-range (e g London-Paris) scheduled passenger operation started
Twenty years after that, small-scale, high-price, island-hopping transatlantic and transpacific scheduled operations started.
And twenty years after that, aircraft had more or less outcompeted ocean liners
And that was with two world wars to help accelerate aircraft development.
Past results do not guarantee future performance.
There were attempts at engineering other types of electrically powered transportation. like autos, back then, too, yet most fell by the wayside, losing out to the ice. Why was that?
Even if aviation has learned a lot, one still learns from mistakes. One of the most valuable lessons is that too much fuel on board has claimed less lives than not enough of it.
Then electric subsides kicked in.
Bush aviation gives a false hope for usefulness of batteries only energy for short legs.
This is most often VFR low altitude navigation. Right where weather can show it’s bag of tricks at any moment.
The most energy inefficient flight profile. And very limited battery reserve to cope with it.
Why this is so professionally unethical ? Well, risks are that those who ask will never understand the answer. Until the moment they firewall the throttles in a gust and nothing expected happens, only terrain comes closer and closer.
They can always build in a huge parachute just to be safe.
Electric commercial flights should be very interesting in cold weather when the batteries no longer work well.
This looks like another way to get into the public trough under the pretext of moving towards “clean energy”. I’d like to know the details of any subsidies from government or other sources. Odds are that there’s a giant siphon into public funds.
The Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver area is a fortress of the green progressive left, think Suzuki, Weaver, Gates. Harbor Air has been facing the opposition of its so-called noisy fossil fuel operation so this is virtual signalling for survival. Time will tell if electric will work on these short quick routes. From my observation, most of the travellers seem to be business, government daytrippers with no or little luggage so maybe the weight of batteries may not be too much of an issue in this operation.
This came to me part way through the comments, and I rushed with hopes that no one else had thought of it.
Think like a liberal/Democrat and imagine a hybrid float plane.
But instead of a small gas motor the plane has another propeller.
This is connected to a generator that keeps the juice up in the battery pack.
Nothing to it.
Got to go–I’m off to the patent office.
Later….
Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoomian air boats were driven by “a spring which ran the lenght of the keel”. There was never any mention of how the spring was wound
I fly regularly on Harbour Air (HA). I am also a private pilot. A key piece of this story is that HA is utterly dependent on government employees travelling between Victoria (the capital on Vancouver Island) and Vancouver. The Government of BC is committed to lowering GHG emissions. HA might figure it has tremendous upward flexibility in its ticket prices because the government will pay for the virtue-signalling value it gets for going electric. Harbour Air serves the government, and its only real competitor is Helijet Airways, which already charges much more than Harbour Air to take people by helicopter instead of float plane. So in the end it might make business sense for HA, but only because its main customer is the taxpayer.
I’ll check back on this story in 10 years and see how they’ve progressed.
Last year at the Experimental Aircraft Assoc (EAA) annual fly in in Oshkosh, Wi. One of the displays was from this manufacturer
https://electrek.co/2018/01/10/battery-electric-airplane-production-pipistrelp-alpha-electro/
The needs of a flight school are quite a bit different then for an airline, and a light two place aircraft with an hour of flight time fits the bill. Flight school aircraft spend most of their time in the vicinity of the airport, and do a lot of take offs requiring full power, and they never need to carry any baggage.
My recollection was that there were a couple of flight schools planning on using these for primary training. So if they’re still in business this summer it might be an actual successful application of electric powered flight.
Actually the G-2 griff swooned over is also a successful application. It is actually a sailplane, but one that can “tow itself” into the air with an electric motor and battery.
Remember the Dreamliner battery fires?
Now imagine something a thousand times worse.
As you increase the number of cells you linearly increase the chance of a short forming, and a fire.
If I wanted to haul batteries around, I’d do it by barge.
Hmmm…these are seaplanes?
I see hope for Hawaii’s tourist industry under AOC Lame new Deal.
Set up a string of floating windmills from the US to Hawaii so the seaplanes can “land” and recharge.
Flight time from CA to Hawaii is 5 to 6 hours on a jet. Since there’s no such thing an electric jet engine that time would at least double? Triple? One hour between recharges? Two to three hours to recharge, assuming advances in battery and recharging technology? But only 6-10 passengers at a time…. well, why not?
Since high speed rail can’t reach the islands, use low speed air!
Has no one noticed that April 1st is imminent?
“This is a GREAT idea. All they have to do is put a windmill behind each propeller!” – AOC