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.
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.