Rolls-Royce's All-Electric Airplane Reached a Record 387.4 MPH Top Speed (gizmodo.com) 82
Rolls-Royce has announced that its all-electric plane, dubbed the "Spirit of Innovation," is the fastest of its kind in the world after it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 k/h) in recent flight tests. Gizmodo reports: In a recent news release, the company, not to be mistaken for the car company owned by BMW, claimed that the Spirit of Innovation set three new world records earlier this week. On flight tests carried out on Nov. 16, Rolls-Royce said its aircraft reached a top speed of 345.4 mph (555.9 km/h) over 1.8 miles (3 kilometers), exceeding the current record by 132 mph (213 k/h). It broke another record in a subsequent 9.3-mile (15 kilometer) flight, during which it reached 330 mph (532.1 km/h), surpassing the current record by 182 mph (292.8 km/h).
The Spirit of Innovation didn't stop there, though. Rolls-Royce affirms that it smashed another record when it reached 9,842.5 feet (3,000 meters) in 202 seconds, beating the current record by 60 seconds. In the company's view, it also took the title of the world's fastest all-electric vehicle when it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 km/h) during its flight tests. The company's aircraft is powered by a 400kW electric powertrain and "the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace." "Following the world's focus on the need for action at COP26, this is another milestone that will help make 'jet zero' a reality and supports our ambitions to deliver the technology breakthroughs society needs to decarbonize transport across air, land and sea," CEO Warren East said in the news release.
The Spirit of Innovation didn't stop there, though. Rolls-Royce affirms that it smashed another record when it reached 9,842.5 feet (3,000 meters) in 202 seconds, beating the current record by 60 seconds. In the company's view, it also took the title of the world's fastest all-electric vehicle when it reached a maximum speed of 387.4 mph (623 km/h) during its flight tests. The company's aircraft is powered by a 400kW electric powertrain and "the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace." "Following the world's focus on the need for action at COP26, this is another milestone that will help make 'jet zero' a reality and supports our ambitions to deliver the technology breakthroughs society needs to decarbonize transport across air, land and sea," CEO Warren East said in the news release.
How far will it go ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Little point in having a plane that can do almost 400 mph if it can only fly 10 miles. To be useful it will have to be able to fly between cities that are, say, 200 miles apart, preferably much further.
Re:How far will it go ? (Score:5, Funny)
Tbey haven't made the extension cord that long yet.
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The Eviation Alice will have a range of up to 440 nm [flightglobal.com]. Wendover Productions had a great video recently about why electric planes are inevitably coming [youtube.com].
Re: How far will it go ? (Score:3)
Re:How far will it go ? (Score:5, Funny)
The Eviation Alice will have a range of up to 440 nm [flightglobal.com]. Wendover Productions had a great video recently about why electric planes are inevitably coming [youtube.com].
That's not too bad if it's 440 nautical miles. But it's terrible if it's 440 nanometers.
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The article I cited used the non-standard abbreviation nm for nautical miles instead of the more common NM or nmi, and I failed to notice that. The idea of a plane with a range measured in nanometers is rather amusing, though!
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Eviation Alice : 2500lbs
Cessna 402c : 7200lbs
Plus voltage sag means your plane will lose power as it flies.
And my god, how long does it take to charge an 820kwh battery?
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So far it seems to go 15km (Score:2)
How far will it go ?
So far it seems to go 15km. From the summary: "On flight tests carried out on Nov. 16, Rolls-Royce said its aircraft reached a top speed of 345.4 mph (555.9 km/h) over 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) ... It broke another record in a subsequent 9.3-mile (15 kilometer) flight, during which it reached 330 mph (532.1 km/h), surpassing the current record by 182 mph (292.8 km/h)"
To be fair these are speed trials. Cruising speed should get better range.
Re: So far it seems to go 15km (Score:1)
Re:How far will it go ? (Score:4, Informative)
Eviation Alice doesn't exist yet. Eviation are a new startup that were "promising" those ranges as a part of their funding round. Their primary promise of actual scalable ER model is based on hopes and prayers that they will be able to make aluminium-air batteries be rechargeable in some kind of an economic fashion. Currently, the "recharging of those batteries" includes ripping the damn thing open, removing the anode, reflowing the electrolyte to clean out the impurities, inserting a new anode and closing it all up. If that sounds hilariously expensive, that's because it is. This battery technology is well understood and while there are a lot of hopes and prayers for it "working in remote future" just like with lithium-air, it's not actually workable as a rechargeable battery for aforementioned reasons.
Their currently being constructed prototype aircraft sits on the absolute pinnacle of laminar flow fuselage size, and sacrifices everything it can, from speed to controllability just to absolutely minimize drag through utilizing natural laminar flow over the fuselage. Hence the shape. It's not scalable, because effective management of laminar flow puts an effective cap on aircraft size go beyond and air drag coefficient crashes to what we're used to seeing in aircraft with elongated tube style fuselages. We know this because we already built laminar flow based aircraft. The first aircraft to use the concept was a WW2 fighter, which used it for its airfoils, a common usage to this day in wing construction. Laminar flow over entire fuselage has also been built in executive private aviation for aircraft similar to planned Alice prototype. It doesn't scale well on fuselage with size. That is, it doesn't scale at all. This is not future of aviation. This is history of aviation we're past, of slow, small aircraft that accommodate a handful of people. Slow because going fast disrupts laminar flow over fuselage. Small because fuselage is constrained by maximum potential fuselage size that can maintain undisrupted laminar flow over entirety of it. The only company making the only flying aircraft on this fuselage model (Avanti) is bankrupt and on life support of Italian government.
And it's generally very difficult to get right because you cannot have any propulsion products go over the wings or the fuselage. Hence the engines are typically propellers mounted in the rear of the aircraft, or on the main wings facing backwards. Avanti had a lot of setbacks and even crashed test aircraft because of how difficult it is to get it right. Otto Aviation, another new startup trying to make those kinds of aircraft a thing are having similar problems with their more modern single engine design.
So this "inevitably coming" aircraft like the rest of "inevitably coming electric aviation" will generate nothing new but low hanging fruit that is youtube clickbait for a channel that has a wide subscriber base interested in informative aviation videos, but that has ran out of aviation topics within the scope of their knowledge and are going for shooting videos based on financing rounds of new startups instead.
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Thank you! Very informative & insightful there. TIL.
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Gimli Glider (Score:2)
Little point in having a plane that can do almost 400 mph if it can only fly 10 miles.
Indeed, existing commercial aircraft can fly considerably further than that without any power at all [wikipedia.org].
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Existing aircraft can also fly considerably *faster* than that without any power at all [youtube.com].
Not quite *commercial*, however ...
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Funny, in the year after that happened, I used that example to show what happens when you use the wrong units and corrected an engineer who wrote to a customer that transferring a 45GB file over a 5mbs link would take 2 to 3 hours, mixing up MB and mb in the process.
I had to forward it to management since this was part of a business solution proposal and management laughed quite a bit because of my example. Title of my email was "when you use the wrong units, planes fall out of the sky" and I included a lin
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Little point in having a plane that can do almost 400 mph if it can only fly 10 miles.
You only see the faults. I see a great reason to live 10 miles from work!
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Maybe they can start converting the short scheduled flghts first and slowly expand from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Thats a flight with a flying time of literally around 1 minute. Maybe start with those with a flying time of 1 minute to 15 minutes. After some experience and figuring out what works best, expan to 30 minutes, etc, as the tech improves.
Nobody says you have to cross the ocean on your very first electric flight. After all the very first powered flight by humans(Wright brothers) lasted
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The very first powered flight was not by the Wright brothers. Others before them managed to lift off and fly short distances in a more-or-less straight line, sometimes disastrously. The Wright brothers were the first to successfully steer their plane around a course.
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Looks to me like it has about an hour flight time, plus 30 minutes reserve.
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It's a single (or maybe two) seater demonstration aircraft designed to prove the high power motor.
They do say something about the battery pack being very energy dense, but don't give numbers. I guess we will have to wait for any endurance records.
Schneider Trophy (Score:5, Insightful)
And the cash prize (Score:3)
the plane is reminiscent of the old air racers, there should be a new trophy race for electric planes.
Don't forget the cash prize that accompanies the trophy. That opens the field to those beyond traditional aerospace.
Obligatory Elon Musk (Score:2)
This would actually be a pretty interesting competition. One thing about electric propulsion is that you don't need air to burn in the engine which means you can potentially fly higher. In an aircraft, both drag and lift increase with velocity. This means, if you fly higher you can essentially fly faster for the same a similar amount of thrust, increasing efficiency quite substantially.
In a jet engine, the problem is that the higher you go the more compression must be done to the intake air to ensure engine
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First time I have heard of a staging idea for aircraft - but it does sound like an ingenious solution. Most of the energy and power an aircraft needs is for takeoff - and for a VTOL craft the peak energy and motor sizes needed are even more extreme
Having all that in a detachable module that can return to ground after liftoff would save a whole lot of excess weight.
This could definitely be a good solution for cargo.
Still don't know if I'd like to fly as a passenger in an aircraft that can't pour on the power
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One problem with takeoffs is that jet engines (and props and rockets) are inefficient at low speeds (in terms of energy imparted, not thrust). In fact, they're 0% efficient at a start from a standstill.
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Modern jet planes are alread
Re: Obligatory Elon Musk (Score:2)
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Not as fast as you might think (Score:3)
It's interesting that in the same week, the world record for an electric-powered RC model was also broken.
Rupert White of the UK set a new record with 509Km/H... not really that far short of the RR top speed.
The RR plane is also still a long-way short of the old Sptfire Mk24 which (from memory) was good for about 735Km/H.
Good work Rolls Royce but it's still going to be a while before batteries have sufficient energy density to make electric-powered aircraft practical for anything but edge cases.
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Perhaps the news story should focus more on the battery than the plane then. It seems to me that the plane designs aren't revolutionary, but new battery tech is the enabler.
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I don't think the batteries are anything special or super-tech. The Rolls-Royce plane's engineering design and integration of the motors, control systems, cooling etc. are what make it fast and with sufficient endurance to attempt to take these records.
It's very clearly a racing plane, not a prototype of a commercial freight or passenger-carrying aircraft but there will be lessons learned for engineers working on the problems of range, reliability etc. for future real-world electric and hybrid aircraft.
Roll
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It's interesting that in the same week, the world record for an electric-powered RC model was also broken.
... and yet the R/C glider speed record is even faster, at 548 mph [avweb.com].
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Yep, although in the case of the glider we're talking ground-speed. Dynamic soaring requires a decent wind and the fasteste (record-setting) speeds are performed when flying downwind so the actual air-speed is quite a bit lower. Most officially recognised records require flying both ways over a measured course and averaging the result so as to eliminate the effect of wind so if that's done, dynamic soaring records would be quite a bit lower than the "peak ground speed" normally measured.
It's all pretty i
power vs energy density (Score:3)
"the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace."
Who cares? Power density is not the problem. Energy density is the reason that battery-powered aircraft are mostly useless. And that is not going to change any time soon, which makes this look like a PR exercise.
Similarly with electric cars, power is never the issue, but range. And that is limited by cost, not so much by weight.
I guess battery aircraft might make sense for short island hops, by reducing maintenance costs compared to piston or jet powered aircraft. But the fuel savings and greenhouse emission reductions in such a case would not add up to much.
If you want carbon-free flights of any distance, synthetic fuel could to it. Just don't use subsidised soy/corn/etc please. Maybe one day we will have solar-electric powered fuel synthesis, instead of biofuels that compete with food for resources.
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I suspect their being less specific with their wording than you are.
Maybe but maybe not. Energy density and power density are both things that people talk about. High power density may be needed to take off or after a last minute rejected landing. Range will be determined by total energy stored on the plane. Power density is about removing energy from the battery rapidly, and energy density, of course, is about how much energy is contained in the battery. For a speed trial, it is actually likely that they focused on power density, since they would want to fly flat-out for
Celebrate the Win, Don't Dis the Approach (Score:2)
Right now there are three major contenders for zero emission flight:
- Electric
- Fuel Cell/Hydrogen
- Synthetic Fuels
Each one has its advantages and disadvantages and are at least a couple of major innovations away from being commercially viable. The first two need very high output motors with very high efficiency (which is the primary reason why Rolls Royce is doing this; they're looking to sell motors in the future). Regardless, it's much to early to tell which of these technologies will be the most su
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You're right but there's a huge caveat that currently bio-fuel requires quite a bit of energy to process the biomass into SAF (Synthetic Alternative Fuel) and that energy is often produced by burning something.
So the carbon in the SAF is being taken out of the atmosphere, but often additional carbon is used to make the fuel so it's really not carbon neutral.
Hopefully in a few years there will be sufficient renewable energy available and more efficient processes to make SAF truly carbon neutral.
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Of course both is carbon neutral.
The question is: is the industry around it, or not. Consider you farm wood, but use CO2 producing machinery. Consider you use synthetic fuel for that machinery. Consider you plant oil plants for that, to make the fuel, and you have to make sure that all machinery - and workers travel etc. - is run on that synth fuel.
Lots to do :D probably most simplest is to convert all machinery to run on methane/nat gas - and make sure all organic waste is transformed into bio gas.
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US Navy flew an F-18 on biofuel (Score:2)
Regarding other non-foods, the US Navy flew an F-18 on biofuel: "Pond scum, grass clippings and old T-shirts may not seem to be terribly appetizing topics, but they are providing food for thought as alternative energy sources that can power today’s United States military aircraft and support broader military strategy aimed at fuel independence. GE F414 engines are at the front line, having powe
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Biofuels do not necessarily compete with food resource.
Biomass fuels will always compete with food for something. It might be fresh water, fertilizers, sunlight, or even more mundane limited resources like labor and steel.
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Biofuels do not necessarily compete with food resource.
Biomass fuels will always compete with food for something. It might be fresh water, fertilizers, sunlight, or even more mundane limited resources like labor and steel.
Not really. A bioreactor may be located in an area without farming, not conducive to farming. So water, sunlight and labor are out. Fertilizer and steel don't seem to be in short supply so there is no real competition their either.
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I believe you are not thinking big enough. The US military uses a lot of fuel and so scaling this up while keeping it from competing with food will be difficult. Your claim was lacking any evidence to support it and so I can dismiss it without evidence.
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LOL - Your claim that there will be competition for resources was not exactly brimming with evidence. And not exactly brimming with logic either, competing for sunlight, seriously?
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As you know nothing about the topic, it is pretty unclear which "evidence" would convince you that you are wrong.
E.g. UEA, Saudi Arabia are mostly desert and surrounded by water, setting up bio reactors creating bio fuel from algae is trivially simple there. Same in Texas ...
But well, you told us you can not google. That is sad ...
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Terminal Velocity (Score:2)
Not the fastest electric vehicle (Score:2)
The honour for the fastest electric vehicle probably goes to spacecraft using ion thrusters, such as Deep Space 1 and Dawn, which have achieved delta-Vs in the kilometres per second.
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The claim was fasted in the world. Spacecraft don't count.
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Railgun projectiles are electrically-propelled and have reached speeds of ca. 9000 km/h at sea-level on Earth. No crew or passengers though.
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> The claim was fasted in the world. Spacecraft don't count.
Your world is too small.
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The Rolls-Royce aircraft has taken the fastest MANNED electric vehicle record, if the FAI confirms the results of the speed trials. The previous record was held by a experimental Japanese maglev train at about 603km/h back in 2015. It carried a lot more passengers but it only flew a cm or two above the test track in Yamanashi prefecture.
Biofuels? (Score:3)
Airplanes will eventually be battery powered but for now it seems like a better approach would be to work on developing a biofuel that would work in airplanes. When you know what you need to make then you can modify some plant to produce a large quantity of it and turn it into a farming problem.
I wonder why nobody didn't think of this before. (Score:2)
I guess you don't realize that this has been an area of study since the 1950s.
The search for an appropriate biomass feedstock (ie plankton, bacteria as well as plants) has been going on for literally decades and for about the last fifteen years the effort has included trying to genetically engineer different species to make the process more cost efficient. The ideal is a lifeform that produces raw fuel as a byproduct, minimizing the need for processing.
Bio fuels are currently about 4x the price of foss
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I guess you don't realize that this has been an area of study since the 1950s.
I knew they were being researched but I didn't realize it went back that far.
The search for an appropriate biomass feedstock (ie plankton, bacteria as well as plants) has been going on for literally decades and for about the last fifteen years the effort has included trying to genetically engineer different species to make the process more cost efficient.
It seems to be that a heavily modified palm oil plant could be made part of an automated hydroponic vertical farming operation, only producing the desired components. Monanto/Bayer could make a new cash cow but they are stuck in the pesticides business mindset.
The ideal is a lifeform that produces raw fuel as a byproduct, minimizing the need for processing.
Of course but perfect is the enemy of good.
Bio fuels are currently about 4x the price of fossil fuels so there's still a lot of room for improvement.
That seems within the realm of reason. An annually increasing percentage of airplane fuel should be mandated to be biofuels lest
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We already have bio fuels that work in air planes.
The problem is scaling production and downscaling costs. (And avoiding the typical agricultural problems)
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Then annually increasing taxation on the fossil fuels should incentivize it's development and deployment.
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We are talking about a factor of 4 atm ... so just taxing the evil part is not enough - yet.
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Sure it is. All you have to do is tax it 400% and it's suddenly cheaper to use biofuels. Math is fun like that but there are many different schemes that can be taken like one where biofuels have to make up x% of fuel used or you get to pay the 400% tax.
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With factor of 4 we mostly mean: availability. It does not help to tax ordinary fuel when a "desired replacement" is impossible to come by.
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Sure it does. It's basic supply and demand. If there is a great demand then there will be more effort into creating a supply. Even if it meant doubling the amount of farmland used in the US, if there is a large demand, it would be supplied. Corporations aren't going to lose money when there is a way to avoid it.
Yes, I did RTFA, (Score:2)
and nowhere therein does it state that the plane was either in level flight or climbing when it broke those records.
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I'm sure that somewhere in the requirements (https://www.fai.org/gac-documents) you'd find that there are rules about such things.
Nuclear fission power and synthesized hydrocarbons (Score:1)
The answer to carbon neutral flights will be nuclear fission power and synthesized hydrocarbons. Nuclear fission power is a technology that's been under development for nearly 100 years. WE saw considerable success in the 1950s to 1990 with nuclear fission in the US Navy. Politics killed that though. Three Mile Island meant no new nuclear powered frigates, destroyers, or cruisers would be built. When Chernobyl blow it's top that drove an early retirement of these vessels. Nuclear power for aircraft ca
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Fuck youre boring, repeating the same drivel over and over, ignoring the simple reality, nobody wants nukes and its never going to happen, they are to expensive too slow and create radioactive waste. Last century man pushing last century technology, sad.
Re: Nuclear fission power and synthesized hydrocar (Score:2)
Informative video on electric planes (Score:2)
Good watch from Wendover Productions about electric planes.
Wow (Score:1)