First electric passenger plane lands at JFK in milestone flight. Travels 110 km costing $8 in fuel.

a year ago by Futurologist to c/futurology

A historic electric airplane flight landed at JFK with passengers, marking a milestone as Beta Technologies demonstrates the practicality and efficiency of electric air travel.

load all comments

Scubus 15 points a year ago

Havent read the article yet, but I recall reading that with modern battery architecture electric planes were physically impossible. Is this plane not using lithium ion, or was I mistaken? It wasnt an issue of the tech not being ready yet, moreso that lithium ion simply could not achieve an energy density to weight ratio that was needed.

Edit: the article does not say.

Second edit: how far off are we from either not having power storage or only minimal power storage and then we just beam energy to the plane?

save

path: 0 17960326, hotness: undefined, score: 15, children: 23

chonkyninja 7 points a year ago

Assuming $8 for energy, let’s say $0.12/kWh you’re looking at 64kWH. That’s like 1kWh/mi, which is pretty fucking bad. There’s no way they’re scaling this up, because the battery has to weigh at least 1 Ton. So to double the distance you’d need to initially add double the battery, but that’s equivalent of adding 8 fat fucking Americanos to the payload, there by reducing the distance you can travel.

Meanwhile a Cessna Jet gets like 27/mi per gallon. So 2.5 gallons of fuel gets the same travel distance, and that only weighs like 20lbs.

Also, haven’t looked lately, but last I remembered, jet fuel was like $11/gal.

save

path: 0 17960326 17960510, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 7

Corn 3 points a year ago

Where do you pay .12/KWH?

save

path: 0 17960326 17960510 17964872, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 4

Xey 5 points a year ago

Right? I pay more than three times that at 0.38€/kWh or 0.45$/kWh. Must be somewhere with tons of hydro.

save

path: 0 17960326 17960510 17964872 17965216, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1

dubyakay 3 points a year ago

Ontario is mostly nuclear with some hydro and lastly some fossil sprinkled in. But I suspect a lot also comes from 100% hydro Quebec.

save

path: 0 17960326 17960510 17964872 17965216 17966151, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0