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The Achilles heel of electric aviation is that batteries don’t shed weight as they discharge. A fundamental aspect of Aerospace engineering is that rockets/plan
by code4tee 7y ago
The Achilles heel of electric aviation is that batteries don’t shed weight as they discharge. A fundamental aspect of Aerospace engineering is that rockets/planes shed a lot of weight during flight by by burning fuel. Many big jets take off at weights far too heavy to land and long ranges are only possible because of all the weight shed in flight.
Until that issue can be addressed with electric aviation, electric planes will be a concept limited to very short range flying.
Rockets solve this problem by dumping the dead weight overboard but not sure a bunch of dead airplane batteries parachuting back to earth is a viable approach.
- repiret 7y agoDon’t conflate rockets and airplanes. Most of the energy an airplane uses is to overcome parasitic drag – to overcome the air resistance caused by moving forward through the air mass. While some of the energy is used to keep the plane in the air, that is not dominant. Yes, planes have a higher maximum takeoff weight then maximum landing weight, but that has to do with the design of the landing gear, in some hypothetical world where jet fuel did not shed weight, planes would only have slightly worse range. The real problem with electric aviation is that batteries have terrible weight to energy ratios compared to fossil fuels.