nmflyguy wrote:Hell, I'd be excited if the GA engine manufacturers would develop and market a replacement unleaded fueled, liquid-cooled, high-horsepower-to-weight, electronic ignition, computer controlled FADEC engine, with a 5,000 hour TBO that operates anywhere near the efficiencies (hp/weight and fuel consumption) of the cheapest modern small car engines out there, and get it STC'd by the FAA to retrofit the entire legacy fleet. The technology is already developed, and if they brought the prices down to anywhere near car engine prices, even the legacy aircraft owners - like me - would rush to buy the new engines and put them in our airplanes.

Wouldn't that be nice? The big boys, initials C and L, have a major unlikely bedfellow with the initials FAA, that virtually insures that by the time the engine you just described becomes certified for use in a 172, that electric technology will have matured. Seriously, major beef here. Rotax takes a ribbing from the conservative engine crowd (how's that for mock politicalization of aircraft engine market? ) but their liquid cooling really does a much better job of maintaining an even temperature across all cylinders. Electronic ignition? Got it. I concede that it's built for a lighter market, but the concept of FAA certification being this rubber stamp that keeps us safe is starting to approach ridiculousness. Technology shouldn't need to be 40 years old before it's allowed in our aircraft. Jet-A diesels with FADEC should be here, NOW, in wide usage. Why aren't they? Does anyone here really believe that their O-320 is more reliable than the VTEC in a modern Honda Civic?

One thought I had was that perhaps the market for a more efficient and reliable engine doesn't really exist because the typical airplane nut (us) enjoys owning an engine that they understand and comprehend.

Rant on!

I worked for a long time at a company called Exponent ( I worked for the Chief technical officer on billion dollar projects, with huge risk, while I was one of the least schooled people on the staff.) The one thing that happened over and over was this.....that I did not know any limits, because no one told me it had been tried before. This is why me and my team got the really hard "out there" projects to figure out. We just tried stuff, and put the time in on it, to make it work. Over and over we pulled it off. Yes it cost a lot, but we produced the impossible, and figured out how and why.

I never say that something can't be done, because I've seen the impossible done, I have seen the future made. Notice in the link I posted the engineers from China seem to have this kind of thing going on.

We need to figure out an solution at least half way with GA and take the risks that go with it, or we will be like the English and American motor cycle companies, dead for a time. Pilots tend to be conservative, because they want to live, and real forward motion is gotten in a time of war when people just don't look at the small risks. But really, we hold the aircraft in one place, and that is what the EAA is about. Why has this not worked? It has, but too slow. The money is just not there to push out product that is not hand made. Every small airplane I've ever worked on is hand made, it's me fitting parts with great care (if you think you can skip this part...well I'll let others answer that one.) They are just not up to modern standards of manufacture, and need too much attention. Now while I love working on them, and am very good at it, my friends roll their eyes and go to dinner with the woman. Who is winning there?


The power plant is the center of the machine, I wish we could figure this out at home before others beat us to it. We can't even get an IO550's valves and bore to go to TBO... Really, if most of the really cool engineers I know were not working on machines to kill and control people, this would be done already.

Zona wrote:....I however worry about in flight fires, and would like a way to dump the batteries in case .....

Do it the same way that the newer Star Trek starships do the "eject the warp core" trick. For that matter, forget electric flight, how about warp power? It'd be great, if only they could just get past that constant problem of the starboard naccelle venting plasma......

EZFlap wrote:.....So this fellow pointed out that living 50 or even 75 miles away from the city and commuting by an efficient electric or hybrid aircraft is absolutely do-able........ you could live more cheaply and peacefully out in the country 50 or 75 miles out from the city, and (with proper pilot licensure and GPS/nav ability) commute to work in the city a LOT faster than a two hour drive. No gridlock, no expensive road projects (funded by higher taxes). ....

Like Zane pointed out, this sounds just like the "airplane in every garage" marketing idea from the late forties. Sounds good, but it didn't work then & ain't gonna work now, for the reasons that Zane pointed out.

You guys misunderstood the point I was making (first time for everything, I guess).

Everyone in this game knows that dino fuel is more dense. Nobody worth their salt in the whiz-bang alternative airplane power world disagrees with that. Nobody of any stature thinks that batteries or chemical gizmos will replace the fuel tanks in your 185 or Super Sub within any small number of years.

What I stand behind saying, and what is actually being accomplished now by more than one company on a beta-testing level is that with an efficient airframe and a decent electric system you can do a reasonably significant and useful amount of personal flying, and you could easily do a daily one or two hour commute by air.

The only point that I thought was directly relevant to "back country flying" is that the increase in pilots and pro-aviation people would help all general aviation. Unfortunately, I have to agree that an electric Super Cub flying daily in the vast Alaska Interior with 900 pounds of dead moose will not happen anytime soon.

All this daydream really means is that someone could live further from the city than they do now, to be that much closer to the back country. The truth is that an electric motorglider like the one Dave Morss tested actually is capable of what I had heard at that presentation. Dave could live out in Grass Valley or Placerville and fly that Chinese motorglider to and from a job in the Bay area at least 90% of the time. Dave could also use this aircraft to fly for pleasure on a local basis, within a hundred miles or so of his country home. He could teach his kids how to fly, or go out to relax, or do the typical Saturday $100 hamburger that represents a large chunk of most pilots' logbooks.

In this example, Dave would NOT be able to fly cross country very far, and he would NOT be able to carry a large load. SO WHAT? Where's the big news there?

The Vtec Civic that was mentioned is also not a big semi cargo truck either, but many people get a lot of daily use out of the Honda econobox on a budget. Many people have a Jet-Ski for cheaper fuel-efficient fun on the water, and they realize full well it is not a cargo ship or a big block ski boat. Many people have motorcycles that they love to ride cheap, and they harbor no illusions that the bike will replace their old Chevy truck.

In the 1940's and 1950's the "airplane in every garage" was an idea that never came to fruition in the world of that time. How does that fact prevent the same concept from being viable today?

Examples:

In 1950, if I said to you "50 years from now all pilots would have little electronic hand held black boxes running on store bought AA batteries, with the sectional charts and approach plates viewable on a color screen, and that all your basic navigational functions would be in that little box, and that the box would talk to satellites orbiting around the planet to figure out where you are, and nobody would ever really need to have an E6B or a celestial nav sextant, and with this little gadget your J-3 Cub could navigate every bit as accurately as a professional DC-7 or Super Connie crew ... and it will only cost you a couple hundred bucks (in 1950 money)" ... you would have laughed me out of the room.

What if I told you in 1970 that some little nerd would become the richest man in the world because he developed a way for those huge scientific computers to be easily used by an average person with very little training. And that those huge computers would be the shrunk to the size of a phone book, and that you'd be able to carry on a conversation with anyone anywhere in the world, talk about strange subjects and exchange ideas, send pictures over the telephone line, and retrieve billions and billions of documents and unlimited information in seconds... all from the comfort of your living room.

What if around 1970 I told you that in five years a guy with huge pork-chop sideburns would figure a way for an average home mechanic to build an airplane, in your garage, for about five or eight grand, that would fly twice as fast as your Cessna 150 on the same engine and make you feel like you were flying a jet fighter.

An older guy I once knew many years ago was approached in the early 1930's to be the guinea pig for a new kind of radio broadcasting. They told him that this new technology would not only play live sound over the airwaves but also a picture. He did the test, and the gadget barely worked, but it worked a little with a grainy picture. He said that he thought it would never work for real, and that nobody would have this kind of contraption in their house instead of their trusty old radio. It would never catch on, he thought. He told me he was never so happy to be wrong... 15 or 18 years later they came back to him, told him it worked better now, and that they wanted him to put his radio show on the air with pictures. They called it "television".

Some Popular Mechanics fairy tales DO come true. Electric airplanes exist in a minimal usable form right now. They may never be able to do what a loaded 185 can do with 100 gallons of dead dinosaur aboard. But 100 gallons of dinosaur ten years from now may be a month or two worth of your salary.

EZFlap wrote:You guys misunderstood the point I was making

You paraphrased the fellow as saying that personal transportation infrastructure was going to expand to the sky because no new roads were being built. Here's what you wrote:

EZFlap wrote:This fellow pointed out that we are not building roads or rail lines anywhere near fast enough to keep up with the population growth.... The cities are exploding with people and the city infrastructures are not growing fast enough either.
...
So this fellow pointed out that living 50 or even 75 miles away from the city and commuting by an efficient electric or hybrid aircraft is absolutely do-able, even with today's technology.
...
It makes sense that there would be altitudes and corridors for these semi-amateur-pilots who are not lifelong aviators. Maybe 500 AGL to 2500 AGL. Speeds would have to be standardized for given flyways, to minimize overtaking. But compared to a 50 foot wide road, you could have many many "passing lanes" or different speeds in a five mile wide flyway.

EZFlap wrote:What I stand behind saying, and what is actually being accomplished now by more than one company on a beta-testing level is that with an efficient airframe and a decent electric system you can do a reasonably significant and useful amount of personal flying, and you could easily do a daily one or two hour commute by air.

What if I told you that even 50 years from now, people who can't parallel park a Honda Civic today still won't be able to safely fly an aircraft? Airmanship is not trivial no matter how you slice it. I'm not trying to be elitist or somehow paint us as this group of Right Stuffers, but can you really imagine all those assholes in freeway traffic at the controls of an aircraft? Trained and dedicated pilots can't keep perfectly airworthy craft aloft despite a regulatory system that's designed to protect the ground dwelling innocents. I'm not sure what unforeseen event would have to take place to transform the capability and attitudes of the general public to make that possible, but I don't see it shaping up on the level of electronic gadget advances.

I think the technology may be available for what you are talking about, but society will never be able to adopt that unless it was fully automated and decision making and judgment is removed from the equation. This tangent has a lot in common with the "Making Aviation Appeal to the Younger Generation" thread from last week.

As cool as the lightweight electric prospects are I don't see a major shift to air as personal transportation until automated/networked VTOL craft are developed that use some derivative of field propulsion. Think like the car-things Fifth Element or even the Jetsons.

This afternoon I was walking through the Smithsonian and thinking about this question while looking at the Spirit of St Louis display. The write up talked about the "Lindbergh bloom" that occurred after he completed his transoceanic flight and how much optimism there was surrounding aviation. There are some cool initiatives underway now but nothing that would make a pilot a household name or have the influence to bring the masses into aviation as we know it (nor would we want that).

Automate it though and eliminate the need for runways, then there'd be real potential.

The Jetsons stuff is all well and good, but let's remember there is a viable, actually existing reality now for a significant number of people.

So what if people have to go off and learn how to fly an airplane correctly? People have to learn to be doctors, lawyers and plumbers. Many people are not cut out for law school. I know it's not for everyone. I know that Grandma Blue Hair and Al the wino aren't good candidates for a real pilot license. But what about the chunk of the population that IS a good candidate?

So instead of 90% of the population being able to take advantage of an idiot-proof electric aircraft... what if only the top 20% of people who had enough on the ball became pilots? We'd have a 20X increase in the number of pilots and aviation supporters compared to what we have now (something like 1%), and we'd still NOT have Granny Blue Hair or Al the Wino flying around next to us and over everyone's head. We'd have a potential for 20% less road traffic into the cities which would ease he burden greatly.

None of the solutions are perfect, from subways to bullet trains to hovercrafts to jet-pack VTOL. But one of the wild hare solutions (a relatively traditional airplane with E-power) would create a large number of voters and taxpayers that are pro-aviation.

nmflyguy wrote:Electric engines for airplanes are highly unlikely to be a practical powerplant in our lifetimes. You just can't store enough 'trons, chemically speaking, in a light enough package to come anywhere near the capabilities of the oldest, creakiest, most ancient internal combustion engines powered by hydrocarbon fuels.

This is why we could just use hydrogen as a fuel and an I.C. type engine or a fuel cell system.
We just need the main power grid to produce emission free electricity, as it requires massive power to produce hydrogen.

I don't think the problem is/would be with a lack of skills- it's a matter of logistics. You'd need an airport near home and one near worksite, and/or ground transportation. For example, I've worked at a construction site about 100 miles (by road) west of home, pretty close to a two hour drive. I've flown to that job too: 20 minute drive (north) to airport, 10 minutes to preflight & fuel up,1 hour chock-to-chock, 5 minutes to tie down, then 10 minutes to job via co-worker's car. Net savings, less than 15 minutes. Fuel burned: 8 gallons, versus about 3-1/2 in car. Conclusion: flying is more fun, but driving is more convenient, less expensive, and less weather dependent.
The weather factor is the other bugaboo- with everyone flying to work, imagine the number of VFR-into-IMC accidents. At least up here where we don't get the 360 days a year sunshine.

^^ Hence my comments about VTOL capability (no new runways required, maybe port of some kind) and automated/networked (reduces the wx cape criticality) as prereqs to make this concept work on a widespread basis

hotrod150 wrote:You'd need an airport near home and one near worksite, and/or ground transportation.

Yes, but there is a fair chance that the "airport" would only need to be less than 1000 feet of dirt road. One of the big advantages of those long, high aspect, camber changing wings that E- airplanes borrowed from sailplanes, is that they have much better STOL takeoff performance. 1000 feet (assuming no 200 foot Redwoods at each end) would be genuinely do-able, not silly dreaming.

There are already electric folding bikes and scooters for ground transport. For a simple country-to-city-commuter situation, you could have a cheap car at the "airport" to get you to your office.

Again I'm not saying that this proposed airplane scheme is immediately perfect with no issues.Lord knows there would be many issues. I'm saying that even considering the issues, it is indeed a lot cheaper and more within reach than building thousands of miles of new roads or rail infrastructure at $5 Million or whatever per mile.

three words:

TEXTING WHILE FLYING

1SeventyZ wrote:

nmflyguy wrote:Hell, I'd be excited if the GA engine manufacturers would develop and market a replacement unleaded fueled, liquid-cooled, high-horsepower-to-weight, electronic ignition, computer controlled FADEC engine, with a 5,000 hour TBO that operates anywhere near the efficiencies (hp/weight and fuel consumption) of the cheapest modern small car engines out there, and get it STC'd by the FAA to retrofit the entire legacy fleet. The technology is already developed, and if they brought the prices down to anywhere near car engine prices, even the legacy aircraft owners - like me - would rush to buy the new engines and put them in our airplanes.

One thought I had was that perhaps the market for a more efficient and reliable engine doesn't really exist because the typical airplane nut (us) enjoys owning an engine that they understand and comprehend.

Rant on!

Zane - maybe the backyard mechanic, "Zen of Airplane Mechanics" thing might be important to some pilots ... mostly the EAA membership ... but the large majority of today's pilots would be more than happy if we just had a replacement airplane powerplant that was (1) more reliable and (2) more economical ... and as Meatball sang a few years back,

"... two out of three ain't bad!"

I as much as I too dream of flying to work I have to agree with Z. Sit at a 4 way stop or a roundabout for half an hour somtime and think about how many of these morons you want flying over your head. Aviation is best left to those of us who think about what we are doing, while we are doing it!

Flying to work is possible now, it just takes the right combination of aircraft and "work".

I've flown a total of 8 times now (and soon to be 9) to my ranch job installing a solar water pumping system. Each time I've saved a 2 1/2 hour drive (one way) on a busy two lane road. It's a 55 minute flight.


My 600 dollar car gets 32 MPG, so that's about 3.75 gallons for the 120 mile one way drive.

The S7-S burns that (at most, actually a bit less) an hour, so the 55 minute flight fuel wise is even steven. Both use mo-gas, but the plane needs premium. So, my cost to fly is maybe 60 cents more, but I save 3 hours every round trip, and my time is worth more then 20 cents an hour!

I posted earlier on this, but I think we'll see practical aircraft using hybrid technology way before pure electric's, exactly like what has happened in the auto industry and for the same reasons.

courierguy wrote: My 600 dollar car...

Courierguy, you are an inspiration! I like how you are making the technology work for you. Can we see a picture of the $600 car though?

How about a hybrid -electric with engine charging a battery with some lithium -ion batteries .Lots of wing area with light weight airframe. Modern aerodynamics low drag with high lift 2 place should do.
fold-able wings so you can home and keep at your house. Bill Berle and I come from the R/C model airplane (electric) backgrounds- light weight airframes with lots of wing area. Bill is a Glider pilot of
many years. Lighter airplanes fly better either big or small.

Hybrid power for an airplane: both motors pulling on takeoff, in cruise a smaller then normal gas engine is plenty for cruising due to the lower power requirements. And......recharging somewhat of the battery while descending, like regenerative braking!

The 600 buck car: look past the dirt (one of the pleasures of this ilk, who cares!) 32 mpg combined city/highway, on demand 4 wheel drive, handles great (dual sway bars) no rust at all, no slop in anything, and best of all, almost paid for! 1989 Toyota Corolla AllTrac, frigging bulletproof rig, especially with only 141 K. When cleaned up it ain't bad, nothing to be ashamed of for sure. I'd drive it anywhere/anytime. And, it can be towed on all 4 wheels no problem, a great feature for me. This reminds me, when non pilots ask what I have in my plane, I just say "about what a new pickup costs", and that puts it in perspective somewhat.