Electric Aircraft

Electraflyer has announced that it has passed crossover, meaning it now sells more battery-electric aircraft than polluting ones. Pipistrel sold over 100 battery-electric aircraft last year as they take over from its traditional offerings. Bye Aerospace does not even make conventional aircraft. With its Tesla-style approach, its order book exceeds 720 battery-electric aircraft evenly split between two and four-seaters. As the IDTechEx report, "Manned Electric Aircraft: Smart City and Regional 2021-2041" points out, this has caught Cessna, Cirrus and Piper by surprise.

Air taxi operators are unfazed by the 200 or so organizations designing vertical take-off electric aircraft. Follow the economics and the orders not the fluid investments from people seeking the next Tesla. Those getting the huge investments often lack significant orders.

The term distributed propulsion (DP) primarily refers to a fundamentally new form of wing that combines aerodynamics with thrust and zero emissions, resulting in numerous benefits.

The replacement of aircraft makers will be brutal - no not Airbus and Boeing, the other big names, starting with those making light aircraft, then those making regional aircraft. Stuck in the past, these cannot make what is now needed.

Wednesday 19 May 2021 - The webinar looks at everything manned going electric from piloted freight to passengers flown without a pilot. From conventional takeoff and landing eCTOL to the glamorous eVTOL projects awash with billions of dollars of investment, there are hybrid, fuel cell and retrofit opportunities.

In 2017, after four years of setbacks and crashes, Alphabet shut its project flying solar-powered fixed-wing drones in the upper atmosphere to beam the internet to those cut-off. They have now ended their upper-atmosphere balloon version as well.

IDTechEx's recent market research report on Drones and their associated technologies predicts the drone market to be over $22Bn by 2041.

In the new IDTechEx report, "Manned Electric Aircraft 2020-2030" the analyst praises manufacturers such as Bye Aerospace for "walking before they try to run". Like Tesla with cars, they started with two-seater pure-electric vehicles and progressed to four - in this case, fixed-wing aircraft. Sales of these as air taxis and pilot trainers are booming with Bye alone attracting $165 million in business in about one year.

It is easy to say that, although small electric aircraft are at last selling, they are a negligible part of the overall aircraft market. Mistake. They will work up from the bottom to be mainstream. Airbus, Boeing and Rolls Royce know this, but many others are sleeping through the future. Some of the successes are from small companies.

Expect seven-times the air traffic in 2050 increasing greenhouse gas X4 unless something radical happens. Elon Musk has made interesting statements about electric aircraft over the years. His Tesla will survive and prosper: if Tesla investors stop investing the Chinese will snap it up. Either way, somewhere down its list of priorities will be reinventing pure electric aircraft, so what does Tesla bring to the table?