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Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by mannykannot on Friday June 21, 2019 @10:34AM (#20242813)
A battery fire is a scary prospect unless the fire can be effectively contained and the hot gases vented (I don't suppose extinguishing one is likely to be an option.) There has been at least one crash involving fire, though I have not been able to find out if it was a propulsion battery fire. [1]

In Eviation's Alice, the failure or shutdown of one of the wingtip's motors would require the shutdown of the other, on account of asymmetric thrust. It can be flown on the rear motor alone, but I do not know how well it would climb in the case of a motor failure on takeoff. Maybe an EE can step in and say whether electric motors can be over-powered for relatively short durations (in this case, a few minutes to return to the airfield) without much increase in the risk of it failing?

BTW, I see that this prototype is a tail-dragger, though rendered images show a tricycle gear.

[1] https://electrek.co/2018/06/04/siemens-electric-plane-protot...

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by Tade0 on Friday June 21, 2019 @10:49AM (#20242942)
Electric motors in their specs usually have an entry specifying a 30s or one minute window during which the motor can operate at around twice the power without damage.

In this state the motor cannot maintain temperature, so going beyond that time window will shorten its lifespan or cause damage if continued.

Hobbyst EVs often take advantage of this by having a small motor and overloading it when accelerating.

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by mannykannot on Friday June 21, 2019 @12:11PM (#20243807)
That's probably OK: having to replace a motor would be a small cost compared to that of an off-field forced landing that went badly.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by sandworm101 on Friday June 21, 2019 @01:11PM (#20244434)
>> off-field forced landing that went badly.

Parachutes. They are now a very practical option for GA aircraft. More than a few cessnas have been saved. The concept of "off-field forced landing" should too be going away.

https://brsaerospace.com/cessna-faqs/

" Q. How many aircraft saves are credited to a BRS Whole Aircraft Rescue Parachute System? A. As of August 2017, 376."

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by verelo on Friday June 21, 2019 @01:54PM (#20244830)
"Q. How much damage will be done to my plane if I land it with a parachute? A. In all likelihood the aircraft will suffer some significant damage. The terrain where you land will affect this greatly. Though the extent of damage has varied from plane to plane, most GA aircraft that have come down under a BRS deployment have eventually (or will soon) fly again."

Call me a skeptic until they provide hard numbers and details of what planes make it back into the sky v's scrapped, and those planes have a year or two of a service history showing they make it back into a reasonable service lifestyle, I'd be shocked to hear this is great at saving planes. I find a lot of the old 172's i fly have plenty of bumps and scratches, but wouldn't be super excited to trust the frame of a plane that went through an experience like this.

I like it from a safety perspective, but in my mind, the reward you get out of a system like this should be your life...I have zero expectations the plane will ever fly again.

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by codeduck on Friday June 21, 2019 @02:39PM (#20245218)
If the plane is designed to take a BRS then there is a good chance that after some (admittedly costly) repairs it will take to the air again.

A 172 or similar that has been retrofitted with a BRS? Yeah, not so much.

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by mannykannot on Friday June 21, 2019 @02:49PM (#20245304)
It seems that, at least until fairly recently, most Cirrus aircraft that used their parachute were written off, and that is still the most likely outcome.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/1122

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by sandworm101 on Friday June 21, 2019 @08:01PM (#20247205)
How many are written off is irrelevant. What matters is passenger lives. Success is measured in total number of not-dead people because of not crashing as violently.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by verelo on Saturday June 22, 2019 @12:55PM (#20250536)
Agreed.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by mannykannot on Friday June 21, 2019 @02:42PM (#20245244)
In addition to the point verelo raised about the repair/replacement cost of having used a parachute (vs. replacing a motor), I was thinking specifically of a wingtip-motor failure at takeoff (typically the worst-case scenario), possibly too low for a parachute (some figures here: [1]).

This is a 9-passenger airplane, maybe too large for current recovery parachutes? (though I imagine that will change.)

[1] https://www.cirruspilots.org/copa/safety_programs/b/pull_ear...

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by sandworm101 on Saturday June 22, 2019 @04:25PM (#20251552)
2 parachutes.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by mannykannot on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:32PM (#20253146)
Maybe, but that does not solve low-altitude problems, if indeed there is one. It is possible that two small-airplane sized parachutes will inflate faster than a single larger-airplane parachute, but apparently current small-airplane parachutes do not inflate fast enough to save you at low altitude.

Actually, this has me thinking: not all low-altitude situations are the same - an airplane with a downwards trajectory, such as one in a spiral dive, will need more height to save than one that is in a glide, such as after a power failure. This is why even a zero-zero ejector seat will not always save you, if you are descending rapidly at low altitude.

Even so, replacing a motor, if that is all it takes, is going to be cheaper than repairing or replacing an airframe that has undergone a parachute recovery.

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by sandworm101 on Sunday June 23, 2019 @09:23PM (#20259848)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgfG2DfPB6I

(Action starts at about 02:05)

I guess it depends on one's definition of low altitude. Rocket-deployed parachutes open very fast.

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by mannykannot on Monday June 24, 2019 @07:45AM (#20262498)
With respect to engine failure at takeoff, low altitude begins at the point where, if the engine fails, you will not be able complete a landing on a runway (or overrun area, if there is one.) With respect to my original question, if the remaining engines give sufficient performance, using a parachute would not be the standard response even if you had the height and speed for it to work.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by newsoul2019 on Friday June 21, 2019 @01:56PM (#20244842)
Wait, that's an astonishing number of would-be crashes.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by rootusrootus on Friday June 21, 2019 @02:54PM (#20245336)
A quick google search shows a page from the FAA saying that typically a couple hundred planes crash each year, and a few hundred people die. There's an order of magnitude more GA planes than commercial airliners.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by peteretep on Friday June 21, 2019 @02:44PM (#20245263)
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by jacquesm on Friday June 21, 2019 @05:12PM (#20246340)
That was so quick it was incredible. One hell of an accident and without that parachute the pilot would surely be dead.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by abeld on Saturday June 22, 2019 @12:15PM (#20250341)
About the accident in Hungary: the police investigation has been apparently closed, and the cause was ruled to be pilot error (If I understand it correctly, they did a too severe turn too low). There was no sign of a fire before the crash, so even though the wreckage burned out, the crash was not due to electrical issues or fire. A hungarian news article: https://hvg.hu/itthon/20190401_magnus_aircraft_elektromos_ki... (Unfortunately I couldn't find an English article, and the accident investigation of the transportation safety organization might not be finished yet, since they only issued a preliminary report for now.)
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by erobbins on Friday June 21, 2019 @07:49PM (#20247169)
Assuming battery swaps are the aviation "norm", it might be possible to design the aircraft so that the batteries could be jettisoned in an emergency. This would also give much better glide performance for the emergency, and make the possibility of parachute recovery a lot higher since suddenly there's half as much weight to bring down.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by marcosdumay on Friday June 21, 2019 @12:08PM (#20243770)
Why so few motors? Electric motors have low cost and low maintenance, so I would expect electrical planes to have many of them.

Overpowering the motor during the entire take-off would bring a high risk of having it fail too. But overpowering it to overcome the most common obstacles is perfectly viable in an emergency.

Anyway, about fires, they are a reasonably easy problem to deal with. Fires on liquid are much more dangerous than fires on solid, and batteries have a lower tendency of exploding and creating fumes than the gasoline that propels smaller planes. I imagine the largest problem of a fire would be on losing power. You can mitigate this by creating many independent battery banks, but this adds weight.

Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by mannykannot on Friday June 21, 2019 @12:29PM (#20243985)
A fire in an airplane is a lot more scary than a loss of power (proportionally more so in a small airplane, where an off-field landing is feasible, and increasingly they have ballistic parachutes), while there is currently a well-known problem of fires (that can't be extinguished) in high-power-density batteries. Gasoline is dangerous, but we have learned how to handle it safely.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by rbanffy on Friday June 21, 2019 @01:32PM (#20244637)
You could mount batteries on pods that could be released if needed. Additional benefit would be that the pods could be replaced on the ground by fully charged ones for faster turnaround.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by vosper on Friday June 21, 2019 @01:53PM (#20244822)
You can't really rain burning battery pods down on the landscape, though. What if the plane is over a populated area?
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by Gracana on Friday June 21, 2019 @03:19PM (#20245545)
You're not supposed to drop burning planes out of the sky either, but sometimes it happens.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by zdragnar on Friday June 21, 2019 @02:27PM (#20245113)
Or a dry forest, or grassland. Burning lithium probably can't be all that good for ponds, rivers or lakes either.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by frenchyatwork on Friday June 21, 2019 @03:03PM (#20245403)
Burning lithium in a pond sounds awfully spectacular, with an emphasis on the awful.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by _ph_ on Friday June 21, 2019 @04:31PM (#20246075)
One is actually supposed to use water for large lithium battery fires, Tesla recommends this. The lithium in batteries isn't elemental and thus does not react strongly with the water.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by jandrese on Friday June 21, 2019 @03:08PM (#20245439)
Interestingly most of the electric aircraft proposals and prototypes I've seen are basically scaled up quadcopters with multiple motors with directly attached props. Range is of course the big issue so the proposed companies are usually something like "fully autonomous aerial Uber", where you set a destination with an app on your phone and one of these big quadcopters flies over and lands near you. You get in and hit go and the thing flies to your destination, then back to a recharge pad. Only good for in-city trips, but potentially a quick (if expensive) way around traffic.
Re:The age of electric flight is finally upon us by 7952 on Friday June 21, 2019 @03:45PM (#20245733)
Larger propellers are more efficient than smaller which could make a difference if each motor drives its own propeller.