London-Paris electric flight 'in decade'

Currently the shortest LGW-CDG flight is 1h. There is LCY-CDG lasting 1h 20m. For both cities it takes 30 - 60m to get to the airport from central location and you should be there at least 1h before the departure (for a total of 2-3h non-flight time). This makes total travel 3h - 4h30m.<p>For comparison, the fastest train is 2h 25m. I guess you need to travel to and from the train station too, but it&#x27;s definitely more central (2x15 min) and you can easily hop on train even five minutes before the departure - although I usually plan at least another 15 min buffer. That is a total of a little over 3 hours.<p>I don&#x27;t pretend to know enough about economy of future trains vs future electric flights, but it looks like short distances will always be a tough sell for airplanes. Personally I also find trains more comfortable and I was never given a free massage for carrying scissors in my pocket when boarding one.

I&#x27;m not at the forefront of this field so maybe I missed some great advances in battery technology or airplane efficiency, but how could this possible work when the energy density of a battery (.3-.9 MJ&#x2F;kg) is 50x less than that of jet fuel (46 MJ&#x2F;kg)[1]? Or is that simply enough for (very) short haul flights?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Energy_density" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Energy_density</a>

I am really quite confident that no serious development of electric passenger aircraft will take place during the coming decade.<p>And it is not a question of feasibility, but rather of priorities. There is so much low hanging fruit to be collected! By the end of the decade, if all goes well, we will be in the middle of replacing petroleum fuelled cars and busses with electric ones, and maybe turning our attention to other land-based petroleum consumers such as trucks, agricultural equipment, mining machinery etc.<p>Airplanes are so far down the list of things we can easily swap over to batteries that it is not yet worthwhile to work in this field.

TL;DR: If I read things right, the BBC article is highly misleading and the plane still uses jet fuel.<p>Longer version:<p>The article mentions &quot;removing the need for jet fuel&quot; but does not explain how the engines of this &quot;electric&quot; plane work. Propellers run by electric motors, or what?<p>No. Wright Electric&#x27;s own site is scant on technical details and concentrates on praising the great team in its blog. From browsing other sites [0] it appears that the engines are still using conventional jet fuel to generate the thrust; it&#x27;s just that the external systems (pressurization, de-icing, landing gear mechanics, fuel pumps etc) that are powered by electricity are using battery power instead of generator in the current jet engines.<p>This may be a step ahead in energy efficiency but is not that revolutionary, and calling it &quot;electric flight&quot; is simply wrong.<p>I hope I misunderstood, but Wright Electric really should tell how their electric plane is supposed to work if it is really electric.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;electric-plane-startup-150-seat-battery-powered-plane&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;22&#x2F;electric-plane-startup-150-se...</a>

It&#x27;s good to see YCombinator funding some ambitious and really hard projects, but I&#x27;ll believe the &quot;in a decade&quot; when I see it. Even if a decade&#x27;s worth of battery technology improvements allows it to get off the ground, there&#x27;s still a lot of painful certification processes to work through (and certification authorities likely to be less-receptive than average due to it being a new entity and having less commonality with previous generation aircraft)<p>A little surprised they seem to be going after the ultracompetitive A320&#x2F;737 market rather than the shorter-haul, lower-speed, turboprop market as well (closer to their starting point, less competition, even more fuel price-sensitive, airline customers less conservative etc.)

Okay, I had to stop reading and chuckle for a moment at this bit of logic:<p>&gt;<i>Wright Electric said by removing the need for jet fuel, the price of travel could drop dramatically.</i><p>Note to self: Bring back Zeppelin travel.

What&#x27;s the point if you can just take an electric train? Isn&#x27;t it basically &#x27;a flight&#x27; on rails?<p>They should have chosen a better city pair.

&gt;A new start-up says that it intends to offer an electric-powered commercial flight from London to Paris in 10 years.<p>There is no way a startup without any experience in aviation will design, build, certify and sell a commercial 150-seat airplane in 10 years. Not even mention the immense R&amp;D groundwork required to even prove the concept of using batteries to power short haul flights.<p>Why do they put out bullshit like this? It just hurts their credibility.

Maybe I don&#x27;t understand combustion well enough but why isn&#x27;t there more hype about fuel cells? They seem so much more compelling, in cars or otherwise. Just seems like if Elon Musk decided to pursue fuel cell cars rather than electric cars that those might be more dominant on the market today.

I appreciate Y Combinator at grabbing ppl attention. We need to do more of this ambitious projects.<p>However, I&#x27;m rather disappointed lack of even fundamental technical vision. I get that if you shoot to fly in a decade you can optimistically base your model on other technical advances (e.g. better batteries), but too much short-term hype can be deceiving.<p>It will take many years to get there and probably it would be easier to create first small turboprope electric plane. Something like: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bombardier_Dash_8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bombardier_Dash_8</a>

Why not hydrogen? Stuffing a Mirai&#x27;s guts into a turboprop is a project we could do today. Solves the waiting&#x2F;hoping for battery technology problem and saves Toyota&#x27;s $billions invested in r&amp;d from the toilet.

Airlines that switch to electrics will have to resolve a logistical issue -- do you switch batteries between flights, or do you need to buy twice as many aircraft, so half are flying and half are charging? I suspect that battery-switching will be the answer, even though the batteries will be a significant percentage of the aircraft&#x27;s volume.

I wonder if any company is seriously considering nuclear-powered planes? The energy density alone would make it extremely competitive.<p>And, let&#x27;s be honest, in case of a crash, I&#x27;d rather walk away (or be hauled away without a limb or two) to die of cancer ten years later, than be burned to crisp in a huge fireball. Fear of radiation is overrated.

I see some back of the napkin calcs happening here, and feel compelled to point out that in addition to in-flight fuel, current regs require planes to have reserves sufficient to:<p>* maintain a holding pattern for 30 minutes (45 for recip. engines) PLUS<p>* perform a missed approach at destination, climb out again, and perform a landing at an alternate PLUS<p>* contingency fuel (5% of trip fuel)

Add it to the list of 10 years from now<p>1) Dozens of new battery technology<p>2) Graphine will change our world<p>3) Genetic cures for thousands of diseases and birth defects<p>4) Linux Desktop :(

Why not, a jet powered plane can fly 17,300km, electric plane must have about 2x energy efficiency (70-80% vs 35-40% overall) because it&#x27;s not a heat machine, so with 50x less energy density it translates to 700km. Actually it can be more because batteries are a lot denser than jet fuel so plane will be thinner, thus having a lot less air resistance, so 800km is possible. As you can see they are shooting for 500km, must be easily possible.<p>Airbus works on a 1000km battery powered regional plane (catch is, it&#x27;s probably a turboprop) by 2030, by the way.

we could save a lot on fuel if they reordered flight plans into a grid, you might not be going direct to somewhere far and popular but they overall impact or the environment would be huge.

&quot;Second flight will be after the battery recharges, approximately 10 years after the first flight&quot;

what about passenger gliders?

They picked the one city pair already served well by rail??? One where there will be substantial time lost to immigration queues anyway, thus reducing the relative benefit of high speed travel?<p>SF-LA, London-Dublin, etc would have made a lot more sense.