Man, I sure am getting a lot of mileage lately from that old ad slogan, ain’t I?
It seems like a really bad idea, yet it’s one United Airlines reportedly just bought into – probably for many millions of dollars (the actual sum hasn’t been disclosed). It will “invest” in the development – italics to emphasize the nonexistence at present – of the ES-19, an electric aircraft that exists on the drawing board only. This hypothetical aircraft is being developed by a Swedish company with the cloying name, Heart Aerospace – which summons images of kumba-ya’ing around the campfire in a collective hug.

But will it fly?
Not with me in it, it won’t. Not ever, not one single time.
It is claimed that the ES-19 will have a range of about 250 miles – which is just barely enough to make the short hop from DC Dulles to a regional airport such as Roanoke, in SW Virginia. With very little margin to spare. What happens if the plane needs to circle, as because of traffic or weather?
Maybe it would be a good idea to equip this one with parachutes rather than flotation devices.
People who know airplanes raise other pertinent questions, such as the drain on the electric airplane’s batteries during taxiing from the terminal to the runway, which as anyone who flies commercially knows sometimes takes half an hour or more. All the while, the heat or AC must be running, in addition to the lights and all the plane’s electrical systems. Does the advertised 250 mile range factor these considerations in?

The FAA nominally requires redundancies and margins-of-error for commercial aircraft especially. It is why, for instance, commercial aircraft that fly over the ocean must be able to remain in the air if one or more engines cut out.What if the batteries cut out?
Which – it bears repeating – it is more likely to because an electric airplane will necessarily be heavier than a jet-powered airplane because of the massive weight of the batteries that will be necessary to drive electric props sufficiently powerful to get it in the air. But the weight of all those batteries will necessarily reduce the amount of time it can remain in the air.

If it smells of unicorn farts, your nose is working.
Astute commenter Baxter raises a glaringly obvious potential-failure-point issue that leaves one totally mystified as to what the everlasting fuck the Supergenii™ skull-sweating over this fever-dream could possibly be thinking—besides MUH GAIA!!!, that is.
Other things to think about: Batteries suck when it gets cold. Forget an electric car in the winter when it’s 20 degrees F. Planes need to fly high where there is less air friction. Think about a plane (summer or winter, doesn’t matter) at 35,000 feet where it’s 65 degrees below zero F. Plane batteries will obviously need to be heated. Where does that heat come from? The batteries, limiting range even more so.
Obviously, as with the Goobermint-decreed transition from ICE cars to useless, unreliable, and unsafe coal-powered ones, the hidden agenda here is to eventually eliminate flying altogether. Except for the Kommissars, natch. They’ll still carry on as before, just without having to sully themselves with any unpleasant physical proximity to us beastly, smelly serfs in the airport cocktail lounge anymore. The vlasti won’t be replacing their in-flight steak or burger with the new bug-beef they’re foisting off on us proles either, you betcher.
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Technically unfeasible, of course. But also commercially unfeasible. Given how long it takes to recharge the batteries, how many flights per day will these sure-to-be-expensive planes be able to make? Commerical airliners are expensive capital assets, and airlines keep them flying from one stop to the next for very good reason. Having your very expensive asset spend the majority of its time sitting on the ground charging the batteries is not a viable business plan.
Yes, there would be time during unloading, cleaning, re-loading, etc. to do some charging. But that is not going to be enough, unless they can come up with a way to charge the batteries really quickly. And if they could do that, we would already see it in use with electric cars.
This is pure virtue signalling vapor ware, a scam to fleece ignorant green “investors” of their money. Nothing more.
Similar objections exist to the concept of the electric 18-wheeler. Personal electric cars sort of, kind of, vaguely work (at least in theory) because most people have long stretches of time while they are at work or home asleep during which the batteries can be charged. Note that the electric 18-wheeler Tesla announced some time back to much hype still has not actually appeared as a real working vehicle. Musk is quite the hypester/con man, but he isn’t stupid.
“Similar objections exist to the concept of the electric 18-wheeler.”
Particularly when you factor in a driver-less tractor. The tractor pulls the load and attaches to another trailer load going somewhere else. It can run nearly 100% of the time. Diesel will be in use for a long time.
Battery technology is almost there for cars. For air travel, don’t make me laugh.
I am skeptical about electric cars, at least with current battery tech. You can make one that is kind of, sort of, vaguely OK for some purposes. But it can not match an ICE car for flexibility, range, and several other factors.
Electric planes? No way that will work with current battery tech, at least not for what most people think of when they hear the word ‘airplane.’ The energy density of the battery simply is not enough.
The problem with large scale switch to electric cars is we quickly run out of generating capacity.
CA had to ask for restricting charging EVs at night. Their “excess” capacity at night has now been all taken up. They’ll probably go to mandated non-charging at night if they don’t get compliance.
The other issue, highlighted by the TX winter storms, is that the “excess’ generating capacity we all think we have is often now Solar and Wind and (a) doesn’t work at night and (b) is unreliable in any kind of inclement weather.
As Mike noted in another post, our infrastructure system as it stands now has nodes of vulnerability that make is susceptible to “going down” and we don’t have the alternative redundancy built in to address that.
So the major problem with EVs is that any appreciable switch to them even in passenger vehicles overwhelms an already vulnerable infrastructure and we all know actual addition of meaningful reliable generating capacity (fossil fuel or nuclear plants) will not be allowed to be built by the Green Mafia and the DC Junta. Alternative generating capacity, Solar and Wind, simply cannot meet the expected increase in demand. Hydroelectric has been pretty much utilized as well, is also subject to green Mafia blocks, and could not be meaningfully expanded either.
The push for EVs appears to be a Designed to Fail Socialist Scam. They WANT Failure.
I agree with all of that, kennycan. The scaling and infrastructure don’t work, even if the battery tech to make an individual car does work. And there are plenty of problems still at the individual car level, too.
Those are the biggest issues I see, but there are others (fire safety when the battery packs get damaged, etc.). Improved battery tech could solve most of these, and there are a lot of people working on such tech. But it isn’t available now and who knows when it might be. Too many EV enthusiasts just assume that better battery tech is a couple years out, like the next generation of computer chips. It might be, but it would be a huge breakthrough and those can not be predicted.
We have not gotten into the problems with raw materials yet, either. Designed to Fail Socialist Scam is 100% correct. Our green overlords intend for the masses to ride public transport, not have individual vehicles.
Humans are resourceful at solving problems, but people assume that one narrow path to solving a problem ALWAYS result in a fix along that path.
The problem: At some point we run out of fossil fuels. Excluding those that say there may be 100x what we have already extracted out of the earth and we will have enough for a thousand years (the theory that the earth’s volcanic past and heat actually created fossil fuels, not compressed organic matter), that is a fact.
We will probably find some way to fix that problem. Nuclear, and specifically Nuclear Fission, may be the best answer to that. Battery stored energy is another path some believe will work. Then there’s the old “something we haven’t thought of yet” solution.
Any individual one may fail. Fusion may never come about. Fission generates waste materials and we may run out of room to store it safely. Batteries may never progress much beyond what we have now.
So, even though I am confident that eventually we’ll solve the problem, it’s not a given any one of people’s fave path will ever come about.
Maybe the answer is a combination. Or maybe we learn to synthesize a fossil fuel. Or maybe there is 100x more fossil fuels just waiting to be found. Maybe we get out in space and find some. There’s so many possibilities…
However, the idea that Battery Tech, given all the effort we are putting into it, will inevitably produce a breakthrough is not real science. It’s laced with hopium. Maybe the natural limit has been reached. Therefore, the tech will never be ready.
Also note, battery storage merely makes fossil fuel use more efficient. Instead of converting fossil fuels to gasoline, distributing it and using it in vehicles (which naturally loses some of the energy stored in the fossil fuels in the process) we generate electricity to store in batteries by converting fossil fuels into battery energy at a more efficient way. That process STILL largely uses fossil fuels for the energy SOURCE at this time.
My reference follows my earlier commenting regarding the viability of electric cars with improved battery technology. That battery tech is more likely than not based upon the zillions of dollars being spent. There is no reason to believe we are at the zenith of battery technology rather than the early stage. Improved batteries allow for the car to use batteries and solve much of the grid/electric production problems, but not all. My take has nothing to do with the fake green shit.
Electric cars beat the living snot out of ICE vehicles for personal use if you get the range to 600 miles allowing for 99% of charging to take place in the evening*. States that make poor electric and distribution decisions will just be states with poor electric and distribution. The ICE vehicle will be with us for a long time regardless of battery technology just because we cannot ramp up the production of electricity to replace fossil fuel quickly.
*for most people the capacity already exists in the evening because you use the vast majority of your power capacity during the day. The same is true for electric generation. There is not enough capacity to supply electric vehicle charging for a 100% vehicle level, not even 50% (a guess) currently.