Re:The Lilium Jet
by pvorb on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @05:33PM
(#33087304)
Perhaps it has to do with being failure-safe?
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Re:The Lilium Jet
by mikepurvis on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @05:37PM
(#33087354)
With a conventional turbofan (or basically gas-anything) the bigger it is the more efficiency gains can be realised. So I'd expect that conventional jets would really ideally have just one engine, and they typically have 2 or 4 for reasons of fault tolerance and isolating noise from the fuselage.
None of this applies with electric, particularly a cleansheet design.
Re:The Lilium Jet
by UncleOxidant on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @05:39PM
(#33087374)
But then they would've been using many smaller ICE or jet engines already to get redundancy. I suspect the reason is that it's easier to get that kind of redundancy with electric motors - they're more compact, lighter weight, less overhead for each.
Re:The Lilium Jet
by jasonwatkinspdx on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @08:16PM
(#33089161)
We do. It wasn't until the 80s that twin engine airliners were certified for long flights. Before then it was 3 or 4 engine only. It took a lot of effort to get jet engines that reliable too.
Single vs dual engine helicopter is a big safety distinction. There's heavy lift and military helicopters with 3 engines.