Vancouver seaplane company to resume test flights with electric plane
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Many of the boats nearby in the marina do use diesel, for some of the large ones, maybe even the high sulfur bunker crude which is nasty stuff.
I'm not disagreeing, I just want to make sure we're talking about real things and not starting rumors.
I don't know about sea planes though. My guess is they use lead because that is the best educated guess.
edit: others are claiming that these planes are mostly turboprops which would then use lead free jet fuel.
Almost half Kenmore Air's fleet spews lead on us.
These planes are DHC-2 DeHaviland Beavers, which traditionally do have radial engines that would require leaded gas. So there is some significance to the rumors.
BUT... Harbour Air (the airline featured in this article) is a large seaplane airline that have converted all their Beavers to Turbo-Beavers, so they use Turbo-prop engines, which is essentially a jet engine with a propeller on the shaft instead of a fan (turbo-fan is what most commercial jetliners use, these are essentially the same type of engine but using a propeller to convert engine revolutions into propulsion as opposed to a fan). So in this case, Harbour Air's beavers actually use Jetfuel which does NOT have lead in it.
Most people would prefer to use standard automotive gasoline. You can see people in the experimental/sports aircraft category rejoicing when they can find a "MoGas" pump.
Most fuel farms at airports sell 100 octane leaded fuel by default. It is normally the odd exception that sells unleaded fuel.
The piston engine seaplanes will be using leaded fuel (as will any piston powered small plane with the exception of a few homebuilts and trainers). The turbine ones use regular Jet A.
Most de Havilland Beavers in my area are still radial engines due to the nostalgia that sells to tourists. Most companies have converted their de Havilland Otters to a turbine engine. I have seen turbine Beavers from other areas. You can visually identify the engine by the shape of the plane nose. A radial engine plane has a big, round, blunt nose and sounds like an idling drag racer with a deep glug glug glug noise. A turbine engine plane has a pointy nose and sounds like the high pitch whine of a jet engine.
Given the relatively thin margins in aviation, I think it's probably less about nostalgia and more about the $1M USD price of e.g. a PT-6 turbine
Margins on transportation flights are thin. Margins on flightseeing are not. The company I worked for chartered a Beaver between $600-$700 an hour and a turbine Otter at double that. Seats for 45-minute flightseeing (through a national monument) were priced at $185-$250. 6 pax in an Beaver and 10 in an Otter.
This is why a lot of radial engine powered planes that are many decades old have no options for new engines if there are no turbine conversion available.
I’m always amazed how people don’t know this and think “jet fuel” is some magic stuff.
I’m missing steps, but I think it’s pretty much:
oil >> tanker fuel >> diesel >> kerosene >> jet fuel
A radial looks, sounds, smells dangerous, like it's going to fly apart at any second, and that's awesome. Every so often some old warbirds fly over my neighbourhood and it's such a treat to hear those big radials thundering away. They should prescribe that sound as antidepressants.
Originally there was supposed to a 4 engined Lancaster as well but it wasn't deemed airworthy so that got postponed, even so, it was mighty impressive.
With lead.
You might be thinking of avgas which has lead in it, but turbine engines don't burn avgas.
The Russian ASH-62 is still in production, and depending on spec can produce as much as 1100hp.
No, it isn't. The "new" 62 are just old stock, or made from old stock parts, or rebuilt frankenstein engines with some new parts, or are Dongan HS-5 restamped as original 62 to pass the type test.
I used to be an aviation fan in my childhood. Tried to build a motoglider, but the process stalled before I moved out of the country.
Sure, lots of older aircraft (and lots of modern small aircraft) run on avgas or diesel, whether radial or inline. But Harbour Air's fleet is almost all turbines. I think they have just a single non-turbine aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_DHC-2_Beav...
>Viking DHC-2T Turbo Beaver
>Remanufactured Beavers by Viking Air, upgraded with a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-34 680 hp (507 kW) turboprop engine.
Many attempts have been made to remove lead from Avgas but it's fairly difficult since the substitute needs to work with the vast majority of current engines and it needs to be easy to produce and distribute in large quantities around the country. Given the much smaller demand for 100LL (primarily used in general aviation) compared to Jet-A used for turbojet aircraft there hasn't been a big push.
https://www.harbourair.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Harbou...
I'm not disagreeing, I just want to make sure we're talking about real things and not starting rumors.
> Unlike motor gasoline, which has been formulated since the 1970s to allow the use of platinum-content catalytic converters for pollution reduction, the most commonly used grades of avgas still contain tetraethyllead (TEL), a toxic substance used to prevent engine knocking (detonation). There are ongoing experiments aimed at eventually reducing or eliminating the use of TEL in aviation gasoline.
The other kicker with ethanol is that its energy density is significantly lower, so it would significantly negatively impact the range/payload of every small airplane.
Comparison to electric flight is a bad comparison as until very recently electric flight was basically considered to be impossible with present technology.
30% is not high. It might convince you to do some drag reduction on your aircraft to compensate. Most small general aviation aircraft are terribly aerodynamically inefficient even compared to state of the art aircraft 50 years ago. 30% is barely relevant for the short intracity trips in this article.
Only one of planes listed in Harbor Air’s fleet is a piston: https://www.harbourair.com/about/aircraft-fleet/
And that one is the one they're retrofitting with an electric motor
https://www.businessinsider.com/magnix-all-electric-cessna-g...
The smell at the seaplane docks is definitely Jet-A not gasoline.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/electric-floatplanes-could-help...
Aside: If you are in the Vancouver area, I recommend taking one of these flights, internal combustion or not. To/from Victoria, for example. The views are just stunning, especially over the Gulf Islands -- better than any high elevation or large plane window seat can give you. As a longtime resident, it's still goosebump gorgeous.
Like you said, that region is goosebump gorgeous. The flights are fairly cheap, too, all things considered.
The location of the planes is really convenient, too.
I've always hated the ferries anyway, but now that I've seen the light of Harbour Air, there's no going back.
The terminal being incredibly convenient makes the flight even more justified. I'd much rather take the Canada Line and then walk for a few minutes than having to line up early for a standing room only bus that goes out to the ferry terminal.
1. Both of these assume you're boarding the ferry with a vehicle which I think is a fair assumption given how insanely inconvenient the ferry terminal is.
But these electric planes are just clearly worse than conventional planes. The batteries take up a lot of weight and weigh the same at the start of the flight as at the end, and while I'm sure battery technology will continue to improve, the weight issue is going to be a problem for a long time. Trying to pursue this commercially just seems like a quick way to lose a lot of money.
Edit: I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come.
Just imagine how cheap getting your multi-engine qualifications will become.
Floatplane cert could become a lot cheaper too.
For a long time, it will be the reverse; the default will be a requirement to be able to fly a conventional-engined airplane, with electric propulsion being an endorsement (probably devoted primarily to battery & power management)
Carb freezing doesn't occur as a result of mixture mismanagement, but rather by failure to apply carburetor heat when flying in conditions conducive to carb icing.
Mismanaging the mixture is far less likely to have any acute effects. Descending with a lean[er] mixture may cause issues at lower altitudes where the mixture would be too lean, but it would be unusual for that to lead to an engine stoppage.
Further - a pilot inexperienced in mixture management would likely not lean the mixture at all and just fly full-rich which again, wouldn't likely lead to any acute failures, just higher fuel consumption and longer-term issues with the engine.
While batteries may not be viable for longer commercial flights, these short hops make sense.
But when? The snowbird business would have died off a month ago. It probably was a good business for them, and something that popped up in areas that didn’t already have short-haul flights. Maybe they still do them as charters for those that don’t want to sit with rando pax.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/snowbirds-canada-u-s-border...
But I’m sure many/most just flew down deeper into US and forwent their Canadian car (possibly buying a beater/long term rental for US).
Not to say there haven't been problematic purposes for charter flights to non-us destinations going on, either - https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-couple-charged-after-charter...
https://www.yukon-news.com/news/former-ceo-of-great-canadian...
Unsure why any law gets passed with max $500 fines and 6 months jail if they’re not going to throw jail time at the most egregious cases.
Is it the moment your gear is no longer touching the ground? The moment your wings leave ground-effect? (Is the ekranoplan technically a plane or a boat?) The moment you cross the property-line of the departing airport? (And how would that work for bush planes?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_to_Papa_Westray_flight
It makes sense for short flights. The vast majority of costs associated with aviation are in maintenance, with the majority of those costs coming from engine overhauls. This means you have a high fixed cost of operation per flight hour regardless of distance traveled/passengers carried. Electric motors will reduce that cost by orders of magnitude and make these small flights economically feasible.
> I'm not saying it won't work, just that it will be significantly more expensive than a conventional plane for the same performance for a long time to come.
The key is that you don't need the same performance of a piston engine aircraft. Batteries are just good enough now for these types of short flights to be possible. And with the maintenance savings, you come out ahead. Electric motors will also be vastly safer and more reliable than single engine piston aircraft, leading to insurance savings.
From the 2018 Nall report (the most recent I could readily find on my phone), mechanical failure is sub 20% of accidents and sub 7% of fatal accidents.
Pilots are around 75% of the primary link in the accident reports.
Here's a factory reseller of a common engine type: http://www.airpowerinc.com/productcart/pc/engines.asp?search... Note that that's the uninstalled overhauled/new engine. Add freight, 75-150 hours of labor, and some accessory overhauls to get to the all-in number.
That doesn't include the amount of maintenance that goes into it between rebuilds either. I would imagine that $10-$20/hr would be a reasonable estimate for those engines
For example: a pilot forgets to turn on the carb heat on descent, leading to loss of engine power, and crash short of the runway. Primary cause is pilot error.
The engine on a small plane is failure prone, and easy to make mistakes on. The Beavers in question are operating on an engine design from the 1930s (Pratt and Whitney Wasp 985). The major compnonents on those engines likely haven't (and can't for bureaucratic reasons) changed since the 50s. On a plane like the Beaver, a majority of the gauges are devoted to the engine. If you get a chance to fly on one of these, you'll notice that a majority of what the pilot does pre-takeoff is engine checks.
Making the engine simpler is making it easier to fly the plane, and eliminates another source of pilot error.
This is it right here; the CEO of Harbor Air is on record as saying that this is exactly where they expect the biggest costs savings (millions of dollars per year based on their flight numbers) to come from:
——-
There would be savings on fuel costs, of course, carbon taxes, and the carbon offsets that Harbour Air buys. But the real savings would be in maintenance. With electric motors, there's next to no maintenance required, whereas with turboprop engines have significant maintenance and rebuild requirements.
"You have a motor with a notional life of 10,000 hours – and that's probably being pessimistic – because it's so simple," McDougall said. "We're looking at, in rough numbers, the same 10,000 hours in a conventional turbine will cost a couple million bucks in maintenance, rebuilds and all the rest of it, whereas 10,000 hours in an electric motor should cost us virtually nothing."
——-
https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/bc-news/harbour-air-conduc...
It's a gamble that people will care about environmental concerns more than price. In Vancouver that's a decent bet.
Probably plenty of people in BC that would loooooove the combo of quick transport and looking down on those carbon-burning ferry/bus riders going to the islands/Whistler.
Could likely sell tickets for more.
Taking a gas plane and buying offsets sounds as unfun at parties as someone saying they bought a Corolla and offsets. Technical correctness matters less than image.
But yeah, I think they're mostly selling the image here. Being able to fly to Whistler in half the time of driving and tell the people you're meeting there that you took the greener method is worth a lot to some people (and that's a good thing)
Not sure where else in the world people would even pay more for such short hops because it’s electric.
I’m sure Whistler city council is looking for a way to ban carbon av emissions on their landing lake. Probably can’t because feds, but they would if they could.
This doesn't match what the company is saying - they are looking at it as a way to reduce running costs, not increase ticket prices. As far as the benefits on emissions side, I suspect it has little to do with marketing "green" to ticket buyers, and more to do with mollifying groups pressuring the harbor authorities to reduce allowed # of flights.
I doubt they’ll be any happier if the flights were “green”, but they may have shot themselves in the foot if pollution was their core complaint.
But I’ve seen how these things go. Toronto Island airport wanted to expand to operate turbojets. Somehow complaints about noise helped kill the project, even though turboprops are basically turbojets with a wharbling propellor.
The noise studies showed that the loudest things were loud cars and motorcycles at the waterfront...
At any rate, I was thinking of the pollution angle which has some currency in the area.
I've taken seaplane flights around the Northwest and the folks on the flights tend to be middle-class vacationers and business commuters, much like you'd see on any other commercial flight.
The second advantage is that they are fairly quiet.
Together, this is great for short "taxi" flights across natural barriers (fjords, mountain ranges), even at night and without need for actual airstrips at either end of the journey.
Try to land such thing in a crosswind without lateral control authority.
That's hard even with just 10kg quadcopters, and a "flying car" will be completely unlandable without extra rotor mechanisation, negating electric power advantages.
You don't get anywhere near the amount of control authority, and its speed if it depends on rotating the whole body of the aircraft weighting many tons.
Crosswind is really less of an issue near the ground, so you could first lower your altitude and precisely adjust later.
Crosswind is a bigger issue near the ground.
Yes, winds are slower at ground level, but the ground, and a crash into it is also closer!
That said, I was mainly thinking of wind speed as you said (IIRC ~ haven't flown in a long time, and only ultralight: as you approach ground, you need to compensate for crosswind, but near the ground you need to stop compensating), but was also picturing the possibility of creating structures to break wind. Isn't it done sometimes for helicopters? Hangars surrounding helipads?
No, helicopters can land in rather windy weather. They have lateral control authority, without having to change attitude, unlike quadcopters.
A bit of wind actually makes it safer for helicopters to land because it blows away the vortex ring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBGZH8PzfTI
Do you have data to back that up? I was under the impression that most of the noise came from the propeller, at least for non-ducted fans.
Top-end lithium-Ion batteries have an energy density, fully charged, of about 700 Watt-hours per kg, which converts to 2.5 MJ/kg.
Jet-A, and basically all similar refined hydrocarbons, have an energy density of 42 MJ/kg.
Is an electric plane impossible? Clearly not. Are batteries getting better and better? Absolutely; a few generations ago their density was < 1 MJ/kg.
But the numbers are still bad. 5% of the energy density for electric versus fossil fuels IF you use the latest & best.
Until battery energy density increases by an order of magnitude electric planes aren’t going to happen, at least commercially.
- Electric engines are far more efficient.
Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio.
- Lighter engines on the wing mean lighter overall plane structure
- Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel
- Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery
You can also do far more with differential thrust and potentially remove the planes tail. Actually you could do that even with normal planes as Chief Scientist at NASA H. Bowers has discovered.
Look at the next generation Tesla battery pack. The batteries are literally what is holding together the car and the resulting weight is not much larger then the structure you would have needed without the battery.
We are not there yet, it takes a complex vertically integrated approach to build such a plane, but it is not impossible. Just like with EV you need to re-engineer and rethink every aspect of the plane.
Your range might still not be as good, but hell of a lot better then 5% and also far, far cheaper to operate.
Aerospace engineer here. This is not accurate, unless you are perhaps discussing cars. But for aircraft the torque supplied by the motor is not nearly so critical.
First of all propeller thrust is a function of airspeed, and it falls off significantly as you accelerate, irrespective of whether your powertrain is electric or hydrocarbon. This is a direct consequence of physics that can't really be avoided and it's why we usually talk about propeller aircraft as being "power producers" rather than "thrust producers". Propeller horsepower is much easier to reason about, and more relevant to the performance of the aircraft, than torque.
I'm not aware of any electric-powered turbojets/turbofans beyond the prototype phase but they would theoretically have better static thrust properties by virtue of not being props rather than any particular property of electric motors.
Just to be clear for my understand, would this not only be true during optimal cruise? Outside of optimal operation, specially during the start, this would actually be an advantage of electric motors?
I was looking into the potential of electric turbofans.
I'm just happy you didn't shoot everything down.
When you say "this" do you mean "having more low-end torque than a gasoline motor"?
In theory, you could tune your prop governor to take a bigger "bite" of the air at low airspeed and thus perhaps get better acceleration and a shorter takeoff roll. But aircraft performance is very rarely limited by the torque output of the engine itself. Usually the driveshafts and gearboxes are the limiting factors in power/torque transmission.
Also, I think people really need to think about this some more and not just look at first order effects.
ery reductionist analysis.
- Electric engines are far more efficient.
- Electric engines have a significantly better trust-to-weight ratio.
- Lighter engines mean less structural load
- Batteries can be structural components, not just dead weight, unlike fuel
- Potentially you can use gravity to recharge the battery
- Electric engines have efficiency that stays the same, not optimized for one altitude
- Electric engines can go higher and use less air resistant
To achieve all of this you need to completely re-engineer planes and that is very expensive and batteries are only just getting close to the required power. The necessary investment to completely redesign plans to take advantage of these has not been made.
If you look at Alice plain for example, they have taken advantage of some of these things I mention. They were able to get away with thin wings. However they still don't exploit many of these things as they are just an integration company. Their plane carries the battery like cargo, rather then having the battery be structural.
I don't have numbers myself but 'internet says' engine maintenance for light aircraft is around $10/hr of flight time.
Good point. Airplanes waste tons of (potential and kinetic) energy while getting lower, slowing down for landing, and finally breaking.
Energy recovery sound like an excellent safety (and energy saving) feature.
This just isn't obviously true in all cases. Here we are talking about a successful small private airline that doesn't seem to be run by idiots, so it's pretty easy to make the jump to "huh, I'm probably missing something here". After all, it's not like they've committed to converting their fleet, just a pilot project to prove it out. Seems sensible.
Let's have the folks who are actually doing this because they think they can make it economically viable determine whether that's true or not eh?
Vancouver <-> Whistler/Victoria. If it's cleaner and quieter than the conventional planes then there will be a market.
But yeah it's a niche "1%er + novelty" market for sure.
You could probably use altitude to recover part of the energy expended by using the propeller to regenerate energy (like in braking), especially useful for emergency power.
Of course there are difficult hurdles to overcome, otherwise everyone would be doing it
Yeah the best option is to just sit around and wait until better technology appears out of thin air. Much easier than wasting all that money and time on R&D.
It's located at the north end of lake Washington.
A electric powered propeller plane would most likely still have most of its noise generated by the propeller, not the internal combustion engine. I presume the same is with jets.
- No noise when idling and more fine grained control over power. You can't tell apart a plane that is idling from one that is completely off with electric. Some turbo props on the other hand provide so much thrust when idling that you need to be on the brakes or it will start moving to quickly during taxiing. So, that amounts to a lot less noise for electrical planes while the plane is on the airport (i.e. where noise matters the most).
- Not all propellers are made the same. They are generally matched to torque and rpm that can be provided by the engine. With an electric engine you'd have a wider range of both as the engine torque and rpm are more easily controlled. That means you can optimize for performance, noise, or both more easily.
- Generally propellers get noisy when their tips break the speed of sound. Bigger propellers mean this happens at lower RPM. Smaller propellers can spin faster without having their tips breaking the sound barrier. Electrical engines can be small and light; meaning that you can choose to have a lot of smaller, less noisy ones instead of the big noisy ones. Also, because they can deliver more torque, you can increase the number of blades on the propeller to deliver more thrust and power at lower rpm (at the cost of more drag).
- The frequency of the noise matters too. High pitched noise doesn't carry very far. Low pitched noise can be heard miles away. Like the noise of tonnes of kerosine being burned when a big jet takes off. Not a thing with electric. Big combustion engines can be similarly noisy. It's part of what makes them sound so exciting.
You are right they won't be whisper silent but they will be a lot more silent overall, and noisy far less often (only when they need to; basically during take off).
Small jet engines, turboprops, and piston engines stall many times more frequently.
They do, and quite often
https://airfactsjournal.com/2018/10/the-bad-news-and-good-ne...
“And by far the most common reason piston engines quit is because they don’t receive fuel, either due to fuel starvation (the airplane has fuel but it doesn’t make it to the engine) or fuel exhaustion (the airplane truly ran out of it). These two causes account for over one-third of engine failure accidents”
Isn't this only true due to the maintenance schedule? This seems to be highly coupled in the "will this make sense" conversation...
huh??
The people who live near the harbours they land at in the gulf islands, or on that lake in Whistler are going to be pretty happy though.
Also Neal Stephenson describes how a wingwoman departs from a space station in orbit and lands on terra firma and goes back only utilizing air currents. Totally believable me thinks.
Future long distance electric aircraft will resemble sailplanes.
Goes back where? To orbit, using air currents?
That's physically impossible.
> Antweiler says Harbour Air is in the "sweet spot" in the industry as its flights are short, meaning battery technology as it stands today makes the project viable.
- Short distances means they can use smaller batteries.
- In small aircraft noise is a big problem.
I'm skeptical we are ready for larger scale aircraft electrification, but for some specific uses like this, it makes sense.
And for this area specifically, it'd be nice if we stopped having a giant, uncovered piles of sulphur pellets, full of sulphur powder from being dumped in piles, literally getting dispersed every second there's even the faintest amount of wind. Which, given that it's the pacific north west, is "every second of every day".
I expect the best near-term solution is just to find a way to synthesize jet fuel (or something that works equivalently) on a large scale from something other than fossil fuels. I don't know what the state-of-the-art is in synthetic fuels.
Another option would be to find a way to transfer electricity to a moving aircraft so it could recharge in the air, but I have difficulty imagining how that could be made to work (microwaves? high-power lasers and solar panels? wires held aloft by zeppelins?), especially within the constraints of modern technology.
And that's before you consider the infrastructure. A battery can be plugged in anywhere you can get electricity. Which is pretty much everywhere. Hydrogen requires (currently) non existent supply chains, transport, storage, pumping, etc. infrastructure.
There are some decent batteries on the market and better ones are on the way. Also, there's a difference between shoving a tonne of battery into an existing plane and using e.g. structural batteries to strengthen the fuselage of a purposely designed plane. So, yes, you should expect some improvements in range with the coming few years as technology, designs, and thinking evolves. I think 2-3X range improvement is basically a given in the next 15 years or so. Current electric planes actually flying use technology that was certified years ago (it's a slow process) that are hardly state of the art at this point.
You're probably out of date with your info. Hydrogen based aircraft are happening now.