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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

The plane is a Pipistrel Alpha Electro [0]. Designed and built entirely in Slovenia. Kind of a weird/misleading article as it presents the plane as Australian.

[0] http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/alpha-electro/overview

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This is local news so what they mean is that this is the first plane in the country with those characteristics. The internet makes local news sites global and it probably never even crossed their minds that someone not local would naturally make that interpretation from the headline.

What about "First electric passenger plane takes to the skies in Australia"?

That's better, except someone would then complain that "first" implies that it's the world's first and happens to be in Australia. We used your suggestion but reordered the phrases above.

Edit: actually, I think we can get around all this by just using the first sentence of the article.

Additionally I'm not sure I would call a 2 seater, a "passenger plane".

Then what would you call the person in the second seat, who isn't flying the plane?

A weight distributor.

ballast

Self-loading freight.

>Then what would you call the person in the second seat, who isn't flying the plane?

Instructor. These are designed pretty much exclusively as LSA trainers.

Touring motor gliders are often sold to couples that want to travel together. I've known people who own/fly: Dimona H36 and Taifun 17E. I have a family member who recently purchased a TL Sting S4 (a microlight) for similar purposes.

Not this one. Pipistrel brings their planes to EAA Oshkosh every year and their internal combustion planes are marketed as touring motor gliders. But the electric Alpha Electro is just touted as a training plane because its range is so short.

I don't see how practical it is as a trainer though. At least when I was learning, those planes wouldn't get much if any downtime. You will still need more time to charge than it does to just throw some avgas in the plane. Also it would be impossible to do some parts of your flight training in this plane because of its tiny endurance.

someone to talk to

speaking weight

Hypoxia redundancy system.

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