Re:The Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew [video]
by tonyarkles on Friday September 04, 2026 @03:55AM
(#49561810)
To that point, the battery capacity they’ve got, rough envelope math, is maybe 10 minutes beyond reserve. They’d likely need at least double, probably triple battery capacity to fly useful routes all-electric with enough reserve stored in batteries. The turbines are a great move.
Re:The Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew [video]
by labcomputer on Friday September 04, 2026 @04:29PM
(#49569850)
> They’d likely need at least double, probably triple battery capacity to fly useful routes all-electric with enough reserve stored in batteries.
Yup. And to bring this point home:
"Only" doubling the battery capacity likely eats well over half of the payload capacity, in terms of mass. So your 38 seat plane is now a 19 seat (or fewer) plane.
Because the required buffer is HUGE and we’re at a point where electric planes barely have enough energy for the actual route. So they’re doing the sensible thing here, flying the actual route electrically and falling back to combustion if the plane needs to divert.