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Carbon-zero flying

While many of the world's best engineers, technicians and scientists spend huge amounts of time and money trying to produce more practical electric cars, some are working on electric aircraft.

The interesting thing is that while electrically powered aircraft (EA) are still a "non event", RC models have been successfully electric-powered for a number of years now and are already delivering performance levels that far exceed their IC-powered equivalents.

In "the olden days", a pretty average RC model aircraft had a 7.5cc engine up front which ran on methanol (plus a little oil and maybe some nitromethane). That engine produced about 1KW of power and most of the time would deliver between 10 and 15 minutes of endurance.

Just a couple of decades ago, electric power was just too heavy, too inefficient, too wimpy and too expensive to consider for any form of flying craft -- but today -- well now we find a whole different story.

The average RC model aircraft today has no internal combustion engine (ICE) -- that has been replaced with a brushless AC electric motor that uses rare-earth magnets to deliver incredibly high levels of power with far greater reliability and efficiency.

Both the electric and ICE power systems weigh in at about the same when dry, although the ICE's fuel burden can end up making it a heavier proposition.

As for endurance -- well many of today's electric models can fly for 30 minutes or more on a single charge of their lithium batteries, more than twice the endurance of their ICE equivalents.

If you want maximum speed then electric is the way to go. High performance ICEs tend to be incredibly "fussy", difficult to tune and unreliable. By comparison, high-power electric systems are simple, effective and can be very reliable.

So when will all the benefits of electric power make it to the full-sized aviation marketplace?

Well, as many of us already know, general aviation (GA) is woefully behind the times. The fact that a significant proportion of our GA fleet consists of C172s, a plane that first rolled off the production line nearly 60 years ago is testament to that.

There's far more chance that commercially viable EAs will appear in the microlight marketplace first and indeed, that's just what appears to be happening overseas.

Wired magazine has a small feature on the GreenWing eSpyder, which looks like a step in the right direction.

Before this, the tiny French aircraft called the CriCri was one of the few EAs to catch the public eye, mainly due to its rather impressive 283Km/H top speed, significantly faster than the conventional ICE powered version.

I suspect we'll see a significantly increased number of EAs appearing on the market over the next few years and it will be interesting to follow their development.

Now if Boeing could just fix the electrical issues with their Dreamliner...

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