I see a lot of potential for electric aircraft for short haul flights between regional airports, or for distribution of cargo between hubs, but not in any sort of dispersed capacity. Hub to warehouse cargo? Sure! Delivery to doorsteps or air taxi? hell no.
Anything that isn’t flying along a designate air route between already establish large volume facilities is just fundamentally impractical due to the safety issues with aircraft. No amount of new tech will solve how fundamentally dangerous a 4 ton hunk of metal going at 160MPH going anywhere but a designated route away from populated areas is.
Yeah, especially since even self-driving cars prove to be a much bigger headache to accomplish than anticipated. If we cannot even figure those out in so many years, it will take even longer to add a whole other dimension to all the variability.
I’ve always been curious how electric planes will address MLW as they scale up. Even if you get similar energy densities and can cover MTOW, you generally count on reducing weight as you use up fuel and are lighter when you land. But with a battery your weight is going to be roughly the same. Will that mean you have to take into account the increased weight and will have less room for cargo/passengers?
Maximum Landing Weight and Maximum Takeoff Weight. Because of the stress put on the airframe when landing you don’t want a heavy plane. It’s easier to control when taking off because it’s smoother. So having the same weight on landing means the airframe will need to be beefed up, or you fly with less overall since more goes to the plane.
Flying a VTOL aircraft seems out of reach for me as most are either helicopters or military, but an EVTOL seems like something that could be in reach for me within my lifetime.
Flying cars exist, you just need a pilot license to operate one, that is not something that will go away any time soon, and for good reason.
Everyone driving at 60MPH in 2D is dangerous enough as it is, 160MPH in 3D is way more dangerous. It’s not an issue of technology, it is an issue of the fundamental impracticality of the concept.
But we could have an average of 684 9/11’s a hour, the actual number of car crashes per hour in the US, driven purely by the piloting skills of the average Amarican driver given command of an aircraft, who wouldn’t want to live in that future?
Fascinating interview around the technology. As someone who is generally skeptical of wild "zero carbon" claims, this was interesting enough that I would definitely go out of my way to see the process in person, just to learn more about it.
Funny - I'm going to be in Boston in three weeks. Unfortunately I think all my time is booked from the time my plane touches down to the time I head back to BOS.
David Roberts is EXTREMELY practical, politically. He's very no-nonsense, but gives clear and simple reasons for why he categorizes stuff as nonsense when he does. He's not some techno-wizard optimist, but he's also clear about how much tech we DO have and how much is achievable on realistic timelines if we just commit. He's also clear about what the obstacles are, and even sometimes gives useful calls to action.
His most recent episode on nuclear is an almost perfect example of this. A lot of people are VERY enthusiastic about nuclear. He had Jigar Shah from the DOE on to talk about the field extensively -- the upsides and downsides, what technologies work and make sense, what technologies are just mis-advertised, what technologies are total vaporware, why it's so hard to build nuclear in the US (hint: it's not the anti-nuke environmental lobby), and all that. Fabulous interview.
I definitely trend towards doomerism on all this stuff, but it's good to be reminder the tech really is there decarbonize a LOT and VERY FAST, and probably even achieve planetary net zero or even net negative within my lifetime. Just have to convince people the juice is worth the squeeze -- which it undeniably is when the entire ecosystem is at stake.
Now that I've found a neat community here in beehaw, I plan to share and David Roberts work extensively because the stuff he puts out is what gives me hope
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