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A comment on Quantum Air buys Bye's electric airplanes. Parent comment

Re:Quantum Air buys Bye's electric airplanes by rbanffy on Sunday August 25, 2019 @12:10PM (#20793718)
That's right - the "non-stop" part is usually an hour at the terminal at least between landing and next takeoff. It's still a non-trivial amount of energy (the total expenditure of the flight) to be loaded into the battery. For the kind of range we are talking these days, that's more or less the same average rate the battery gets discharged during flight.

Swapping batteries would make more sense if we get to the point a full charge could allow a passenger plane to fly for many hours and charge speed would be limited by the total amount of power a terminal full of recharging planes would be requiring.

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Re:Quantum Air buys Bye's electric airplanes by jillesvangurp on Sunday August 25, 2019 @06:17PM (#20795978)
It depends. A lot of flights are around or below an hour and these include some of the busiest routes in the world. E.g. London - Dublin, all domestic flights in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and other European countries and quite a few flights between those countries. Same for states in the US.

The Eviation Alice has a maximum range of around 600 miles. That's only a nine seater but it is going to be very disruptive in servicing anything between 100-400 miles. This kind of range you could take off with 80% charge and land with enough left for legal requirements and then top up back to 80% in about 45 minutes and maybe charge it to 100% overnight. That sounds like the sweetspot for this type of plane. It would likely be cheap enough to compete with e.g. cars on that distance and be way faster and possibly even be price competitive or close enough to make it interesting as an alternative to driving (at least from a cost perspective).

The Bye planes make more sense for smaller distances; perhaps as an air taxi in metropolitan areas. I don't think they are designed for longer distance commercial usage. Though obviously this is fine for GA type recreational flying. If you are flying those kind of routes commercially, you'd want to be able to do several flights between charging.

Over time, battery capacity, charging times, and ranges will improve. Also electricity cost is likely to benefit from on/near airport solar/wind as more planes are going to be flying electrical.

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