Eviation’s Alice is an all-electric, nine-person aircraft

There's no particular reason charging a big, multicell battery needs to bottleneck on a single charger. (is there?) It's done with cars for what I always assumed were cost and convenience reasons.

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=18620766&goto=item%3Fi...

If you’re buying a fleet of new aircraft I suppose it’s competitive but for similar price a Pilatus PC-12 gets you significantly more utility. Land just about anywhere and easily find fuel.

Another factor is these MSRP estimates are really hard to pin down before the aircraft is fully developed. In the early 2000s there was a flood of companies claiming $1 million jets. Eclipse Jet being the most notable. Most of those programs either didn’t survive or ended up charging more like $5-10 million. Getting an aircraft certified isn’t cheap and it’s really hard to get economies of scale on something so expensive.

I don’t want to completely discount the program but I keep going back to the charging when I try to flesh this idea out. The only possible way I see this succeeding is if the company also facilitates building a charging network. When I was in high school I worked at a small Midwest airport and the idea that the city, who owned the airport, would build charging infrastructure for a niche aircraft is laughable. They almost shutdown their Jet A fueling infrastructure (that they charged money for) because they claimed it was too expensive to maintain.

Overall point is that it’s doable but there are hurdles and a half baked idea and marketing fluff is going to result in yet another failed aviation venture.

The character in my new novel Tina Taggins will be a gnome though. I haven't written in that character yet.

"is" vs "will" is a tense thing. This isn't yet a plane like Tina Taggins isn't yet a character in my novel so "will" is a appropriate.

With electrical planes you'd expect similar benefits. Maybe a regular quick inspection of the few moving parts for wear and tear, make sure battery performance is fine and that any sensor read outs don't hint at any problems with cooling, performance, etc. Of course you still need to inspect the rest of the plane as usual. However, the engine tends to be one of the more expensive parts normally.

Jets are indeed reliable but they do need to be inspected regularly to ensure they stay that way. If e.g. there's some hairline cracks or corrosion, the engine might still work but be about to fail in some spectacular way. Inspections for that are expensive and a regular thing. Same with piston engines. Typically engines are certified for a fixed number of hours before they need their overhaul. I expect similar inspections and overhauls to be needed for electrical engines for the same reasons. But they should be much cheaper to do and the engines could likely be certified for much longer because there is less that can go wrong with them. So, less frequent inspections and overhauls, and cheaper inspections are a good thing. Also replacing parts / engines is likely to be a lot simpler if there are any problems.

Other factors are that unused engines tend to need more attention when you take them back into use. E.g. oil can solidify, fuel lines can clog up, etc. Most planes need to be flow regularly in order to avoid extra maintenance cost. To make sure things are functioning, you also have elaborate warmup and runup procedures before take off. A jet or piston engine is not usable until a few minutes after startup when everything is nicely warmed up and properly lubricated. Then you need to typically still go through elaborate runup procedures. Electrical engines are a lot less needy. Also they don't need to warm up, you just flip a switch and they are ready to go.

And that's aside from the fuel cost of course, which is a big deal as well.

Some back of the envelope math for the Model 3 battery: it has 4416 2170 cells, 66g each, is 291.5 kg, and the total battery pack weight is 478 kg. So only 60% of the battery pack weight is the actual battery cells.

The thing is about 60% battery by take-off weight. That's not as crazy as it sounds. A 777 is about half fuel at max fuel load.

Airplanes this size can use cruise missile engines, which are very light. See the F-5 for more info (7:1 thrust to weight ratio.)

> On top of that you totally eliminate the need for variable pitch props

Why is that? Variable pitch props have nothing to do with engine type. They're variable to be more efficient depending on RPM and speed.

> You also negate a lot of hydraulic systems (and their redundant backups) without the need for things like fuel pumps, thrust reversers,

Not really. A lot of flight controls are boosted with hydraulics, and thrust reversers are for increasing drag (descending faster or slowing down.) None of these depend on engine type.

The real issue with electric planes is that they're a fire hazard. Already people have been killed when their electric plane's battery caught fire mid-air:

https://www.flyingmag.com/two-people-killed-in-first-crash-e...

The JAL 787 battery fire was a near-tragedy and resulted in interruption of service to SJC for 2 months:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_...

I find the most erroneous posts on HN to be about airplanes and databases.

That seem to be non trivial amount of weight.

I am curious how that compare to weight of typical fuel + engine for a small plane.

Slight quibble: that's specific energy (ie, per mass). Density is per volume. (For airplanes, specific energy is the hugely important metric)

VTOL will get less back because it's grossly inefficient.

Note that drag needs to be deducted from the potential energy. There's parasitic and induced drag.

Also, the adverse yaw if you lose one of the wingtip motors or propellers will be severe.