Electric Flight

[sarongsong]

July 16, 2006
The world's first manned plane powered by conventional dry-cell batteries soared five metres above the ground...In the second test the plane soared two meters above ground and flew some 400m... FIN24 (http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/business/display_article.aspx?Nav=ns&lvl2=buss&ArticleID=1518-1786_1968470)Pic (http://www.avweb.com/newspics/aa_battery_airplane.jpg)

[ToSeek]

I flew on a commercial flight through a thunderstorm once.... (reminded of this by the thread title).

[mugaliens]

It's a stunt for the battery company. The world's first manned electric flight occurred years ago, by Paul McReady, albeit via a solar-cell powered airplane.

Most rechargeable batteries offer less than 2% of the energy per pound of gasoline. (*Figure 1 compares specific energy and specific power of various advanced battery technologies.) Even after considering the poor conversion efficiency of internal combustion engines of less than 25% (versus over 90% for electric motors), gasoline still has a 20:1 advantage of specific energy and energy density over rechargeable batteries.

Source: http://www.kitplanes.com/magazine/engines/178-1.phtml

[Glom]

Batteries? Huh!

[sarongsong]

Yup:...160 AA "Oxyride" batteries, which last longer and are more powerful than regular alkalines... AvWeb (http://www.avweb.com/cgi-bin/texis/scripts/avweb-search/search.html?query=oxyride&x=42&y=10)

[Frog march]

did they test it on a long circuit or a short circuit?

[sarongsong]

Road circuit (http://xo.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/panasonic_devel.html)

[mugaliens]

Whoopie. Next time I need to go 65m in 74 seconds, I'll walk! Further, travelling 1.23 km on my bike I expend far less than the mAhr of the two batteries involved - and get there in much less than half the time. Without the additional weight.