AirBear

Bye Aero Racks Up Commitments for All-electric eFlyer

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-n..._hsmi=74875187

Short version is direct operating cost less than $30/hour, $100 less than piston engine trainers, very quiet operation, 3 hour endurance:

Bye Aerospace said Sunday at EAA AirVenture that it has received 624 “customer commitments” for its series of all-electric eFlyer training aircraft: 170 deposits, 318 memoranda of understanding (MOUs), and 136 MOU options. Major new orders include a commitment for 60 eFlyer2 two-seat aircraft from Norway’s OSM Group and 100 eFlyer4 models from BlackBird air taxi. CEO George Bye said that the company’s technology demonstrator aircraft recently began flying with a 20 percent more powerful Rolls-Royce Siemens SB70 V10 motor that can deliver speeds of up to 90 knots while consuming 35 kilowatts of power and the ability to carry 450 pounds of passenger payload for flight durations up to three hours.

He further said noise from the aircraft is not detectable at a distance of 500 feet on the ground and that the production aircraft would be equipped with both cabin heat and air conditioning to enhance passenger comfort and provide a more stable battery environment. Other planned aircraft features include a new three-blade propeller, Garmin G3X avionics, and a BRS emergency whole-aircraft parachute system.

According to Bye, the market for both the two-passenger eFlyer2 and the larger four-passenger eFlyer4 could be up to 60,000 units and that the company has set a target of 20,000 aircraft. “It’s a $9 billion business case,” he said, noting that direct operating costs for both aircraft were $23 and $30 per hour, respectively, some $100 less per hour than comparable avgas-powered aircraft.

The company is focused on selling into the aircraft training market where much of the fleet is populated by aircraft that are 50 years old and the cost of training—more than $150,000 for airline pilot candidates—discourages many students. “Pilot training is our top priority,” Bye said, noting that 30 percent of the nation’s airline pilots will retire in the next three years. “We’ll have a shortage of 15,000 pilots in the U.S. by 2026,” and need an additional 790,000 pilots over the next 20 years, he said.

Bye said his company had recently grown to 47 employees, received new venture capital, and had begun work on a third design, a retractable gear and pressurized eFlyerX that would offer greater speed and range than the eFlyer4.

TiredSoul

I’d hate to see a battery fire on one of these.
I think it’s too ambitious and the future of GA is in retrofit alternative fuel engines be it Diesel/JetA or soybean oil.
A run of the mill PA28 doubles its range and endurance with a JetA engine.
10hrs/1000 miles.
There might be a niche market for electric in light sport or Powered parachutes or something similar.
Maybe...

rickair7777

Actually the case for electric is quite strong at the light ASEL end of the spectrum. At this point fully practical I think to do 1-2 hour local training flights with an all electric plane.

They do as you said have to tighten up on the fire safety and certification of batteries. But that's really a matter of doing it... don't need new tech, just need very rigorous production tolerances and QA in battery manufacture. Batteries really only fail catastrophically if they are made sloppily (or damaged but hopefully they would be packaged/mounted so as to preclude that in an aircraft).

But if they take shortcuts on battery safety in their rush to market it will blow up in their faces (pun intended).


The battery case gets weaker as you get bigger, maxing out around ten pax and 500-800 NM range. After that you need hybrid which has an additional technical challenge: weight of all the extra gear cancels out the benefit. I expect they can make enough progress on the system weight issue to make hybrid practical in the short (maybe medium) haul RJ market.

After that, it gets harder to make the case for even hybrid although you could probably get benefit from having say two electric motor-powered fans driven by two jumbo APUs (engines really) internal to the fuselage. Use both APU's for critical phases and climb, but shut one down in cruise to save gas and wear and tear. The cruise APU would be optimized to run at one speed and power setting in cruise and would be very efficient. But no real case for batteries in long haul ops so you'd have to burn liquid fuel for all your energy needs, not practical to try to bring grid power with you.

Compared to liquid fuel batteries have another big drawback that nobody ever thinks of... they don't get lighter over the course of a long flight.

TiredSoul

Good points.
Now they did initially get the battery wrong with the 787.
Still think the future is in retrofitting tens of thousands of old airframes.
Diesel/JetA with an electric constant speed prop.
Think a 1960’s Piper Aztec with 12hrs endurance and a 1800-2000 mile range.
I’d really like me one of those.

AirBear

12 hours? Where would you put the Lav in an Aztec?

TiredSoul

$120

https://www.amazon.com/Dometic-301097606-Portable-Toilet-Gallon/dp/B0050EFHWW

As long as it’s not a permanent installation or you’ll catch sh!t from the FAA....Hehehehehe

fasteddie800

Definitely sounds encouraging, and I'm all for reducing the cost to fly GA.

But I have a hard time putting a lot of faith in an airplane that comes to arguably the world's most famous airshow, and yet doesn't, ya know, fly.

It's one thing to have a snazzy booth. It's entirely another to actually show your hardware in the air in front of a crowd.

AirBear

More news on electric powered aircraft, this time from EAA Airventure:

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-n..._hsmi=74970306

From what they say we won't be seeing larger electric jets anytime soon, here's a key paragraph:

“There are limitations as to what we can do with batteries,” she said. “If you took the best battery today and made it five times more efficient and you wanted to make an [all electric] airliner the size of an [Airbus] A320 [passenger jet], it would weigh six times as much as the aircraft of today without even putting any passengers or cargo on board. The [UAM prototype] vehicles that are out there have a range of about 30 miles. Try to get more than 30 minutes to an hour out of a vehicle the size [of the Vahana] is very challenging today. And the battery technology is going to have to come along much further if we are going to have 100 percent electric vehicles.” She added that Airbus is continuing its exploration into improved battery technology.

Another problem is charge times, she said there's only so much charging you can do in a certain amount of time.

rickair7777

Making batteries five times more efficient (ie specific energy) than today's commercially available batteries equates to the absolute theoretical chemical max of about 1,000 Wh/Kg.

Kerosene specific energy is 12,000 Wh/Kg.

If you have an interest in electric planes, you need to understand that 12 to 1 specific energy advantage of jet fuel. And that's only with a 500% improvement in current batteries (theoretical max).

rickair7777

I'd rather just drop in somewhere and stretch my legs haha.