@@_blank-_ dude, the video literally explains how short-range electric flights make economic sense how the hell are you calling it a scam and elon doesn't produce airplanes
Electric planes like this may make sense in the remote parts of the US, where public transport is poor. For densely interconnected countries like France, it wouldn't make much sense, when an electric train can carry more passengers
True, which is probably why he moved away from France. I believe the point there was to show that there are countries that will apply costs or outright ban flights to certain routes if they aren't green enough. Will the U.S. do anything similar? Probably not, but it could push via economic incentives for the adoption of such aircrafts and he showed why it would make sense in a mostly U.S.-centric scenario that could also be applied to other specific places, such as northern Norway. Since France and many other places in Europe and elsewhere have the transportation infrastructure to do what it did or rather will (since I think the French Senate still hasn't voted on this measure), this whole thing doesn't much matter over there, but airline companies are still paying attention and will do anything to not be as strongly regulated as the French example.
WP focused on one particular French law, but much aviation policy in Europe is handled at the EU level, rather than member states, and within Europe, there is a lot favouring electric aviation. Firstly, Airbus (a pan-EU company) is heavily invested in electric flight research, much more so than Boeing. Secondly, the EU is very interested in supporting outlying and remote regions, and within Europe there are a lot of routes where electric aviation could have a transformative effect on making lifeline routes cheaper and therefore more accessible. The most obvious case for this is in Tahiti, which is a French territory, and recieves a lot of help from EU funds. If you look at the inter-island route network out of PPT, it's incredibly dense with short island-hopper flights, especially around the Tuamotus. All of these are currently run on ATRs. A few do carry enough passengers to fill these planes (especially to the most touristic islands), but most don't, and so frequency is extremely low (sometimes only a few flights a week), and some islands have no air service at all and rely on a ferry to the nearest island with air service. Small, efficient electric aircraft could allow for higher frequencies, and France has been very interested in this option. There are numerous similar cases accross the EU - The Ushant islands off mainland NW France, the innumerable islands of Croatia, as WP mentioned with Wideroe in Norway (not part of the EU, but enjoying a very close relationship with it through the EEA, which means most EU aviation rules apply). There's also Greece, which between mountains and islands is very air reliant, while Sweden and Finland are just big and sparsely populated, with lots of remote, isolated settlements, while Denmark supports an absolutely massive lifeline air network in Greenland, and a smaller one in the Faroes. In most of these cases, as well as the cost savings of electric, there is also the sizable benefit of reliability. The simplicity, reliability and minimal maintenance requires of electric motors (and the modular nature possible with battery arrays), could make for a compelling use case in the remote areas where a lot of these routes are happening. Waiting on a replacement part for an aircraft suck in a remote settlement in eastern Greenland, or an atoll in the Tuamotus isn't a great situation for an airline to be in.
I think it's probably best in the most remote parts of the US and Canada, particularly Alaska and the far north, where cheaper and more frequent short distance flights are critical to transport where roads and rails are impossible
True, but for now at least, taking a train in France is many times more expensive than flying, if electric planes can make flying even cheaper, no one will use trains.
As an Aeronautical Engineering student, I feel I need to make people aware that some information given in this video is not complete. Large scale commercial electric aviation is definitely not possible with the coming 30 years or so. Firstly, there are the energy density issues that come with both lithium and hydrogen fuel cells. Given the current energy density of these type of "fuels", a plane will be unable to complete a flight with payload. The amount of development needed to get anywhere close to the energy density of traditional fuels is enormous and cannot be simply overlooked as done in this video. Secondly, the regulatory and safety bit which is always part of aviation has significant influences. Current regulations are not yet ready commercial electric flight and will need significant revisions and additions in order to guarantee safety. The last issue I want to mention is that the impact of electric flight on airports is completely overlooked. Current airports are nowhere near ready for the transition to alternative fuels. The infrastructure required to accommodate large scale electric charging or hydrogen transport is significant and will need to be widespread to make commercial electric aviation possible and profitable. At my college, we do not even cover other forms of propulsion other than combustion engines as these new forms will not be viable in the coming 30 years or so. In this comment I have only pointed out some of the issues related to commercial electric flight. But I hope this gives a bit more context on the matter.
As an airline equity research analyst, this. The long term and more economical solution for the airline industry to reach carbon neutrality will likely involve carbon capture plants and carbon storage.
Each youtuber has their own way of generating content and most of them have something that makes them be like they are. Another example is SovietWomble which puts moving subtitles under game characters. He does them frame by frame and different colour for each person speaking.
@@ShadowsOfTheSky Because I've been watching his content For. A few. Years. And I generally enjoy his videos except for This. Single. Habit. Which really disrupts the Flow. Of the. Narration. Isn't this Really. Annoying. To read? He didn't used to Do this. As. Much. I see comments like OP's on almost every one Of. His. Videos. I know I'm exaggerating, but it really brings the video's overall presentation down. That's why.
Counting the therefores: 0:31 0:52 1:28 8:45 11:47 Total: 5 (Will be edited) Result (assuming 40 mL of 40% shots for 175 cm 75 kg 25 yo female (have to specify): 0.131% Tell me if I miss one please The transcript shows that that's all.
Or everytime he tries to greenwash a dying industry, completely ignoring that lithium and other elements used in batteries are in finite quantity, that their exploitation is often tied with pollution and child slavery. Or don't, alcohol poisoning isn't a nice way to die.
Great video but you ignored that most of the income from the routes discussed was mainly from subsidies and not tickets. This means that if the operating cost fell sharply then a large part of the subsidies would disappear and thus there would be little change in the profit margins
On the other hand, a lot of governments are increasing subsidies for environmentally sustainable development. While it might not always be the case, there could be a shift from one kind of subsidy to another
This doesn't really matter. The profit margin will go down to being tight anyway, simply because the market is very competitive, so other airlines using the same concept will of course price match them. In the end, the value for this company isn't extra profit which they won't have either way; but instead an increase in market share as they can outbid everyone else with their lower costs (and thus lower need for subsidies).
He's using the subsidized route because that's the one we have hard numbers for, but he's generalizing to non-subsidized routes. Those would theoretically see that kind of increase in profits, until competition brings down the prices. But I agree he should have been clearer, as a $100 profit per passenger on $86 ticket per passenger is pretty silly.
For saying BS...? The whole video is simply garbage because what said at 12:55 A good turboprop aircraft engine has at least 50% or even higher efficiency. Jet A fuel cost. 1.75 USD/USG = 0.46 USD / liter = 0.575 USD/kg 1 kg jet A means 43.6 MJ/kg = 12.77 kWh 50% efficiency 6.38 kWh This means 0.575 USD for 6.38 kWh ---> 1 kWh = 0.09 USD Aham... Lets assume just 90% charging and discharging and 90% engine efficiency for electric plane. The average electricity rate is 13.19 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the US. So it means 13.19/0.81 for 1 kWh USED energy 0.165 USD The electric fuel cost is not 0. In fact it makes more expensive the flying.
@@molnibalage83 bruh.... General ICE engines come at a efficiency of 40%. And aircraft engines push through air which is less dense and require more energy to move for locomotion. Where did you pull out the over 50% stats from?
@@nicedurians It does not matter that 30% or 50%. You missed the point of the comment. Counting ZERO the electric fuel cost is simply laughably stupid. I expected much better quality from the channel... If you count only 25% engine eff. only about parity can be achieved with jet fuel even if you consider quite a cheap electricity...
But, that $2 million profit becomes a loss/near loss when the gov't pulls the support funding because the airline technically no longer needs it because they're turning such a huge profit. Maybe only a portion is pulled, but either way, I would predict that the funding will get pulled/reduced and the equation will look much different.
Happened in the SF Bay area. After a certain number of hybrid and electric cars hit the road, SF bridge authority started charging them the going rate for crossing the bridges.
Considering the estimated profit margin is larger than the ticket cost, it's almost certain that the subsidy will get pulled unless the politicians get a cut
Still a positive for the airline, because non-electric planes will not be remotely able to turn a profit on the route. The airline with electric aircraft still beats its conventional fuel competitors
That doesn't seem general enough to be stock footage. Imagine the day they were filming these. Probably cranked out a bunch. "Okay, Carl, we need businessmen shaking hands. Got it, great. Next we'll do 'Man in a tie, pointing at graphs in a conference room.' Perfect. Okay, now hop in this flower-filled bathtub while wearing nothing but a face full of scowl, and act pissed off at this laptop."
@@frigginjerk it might have been commissioned for a specific clip. And now its available as stock footage cause bruh, why else would he have that clip? I doubt he made it himself xD you can find stock footage or pics of most things you can think of, there's big databases of the stuff out there.
Two things from an aircraft mechanic: Swap out the numbers on decreased maintenance cost with those for battery replacement. The first registered 777 was retired after 24 years with 50,000 flight hours - the equivalent of nearly six years of continuous flying. That's the norm. Airlines don't lease planes for them to sit around and incur storage fees. Electric airplanes will kill batteries faster than typical TBO on most turbine engines. Batteries still have pathetic specific energy. You are talking about taking a 4,000 lbs aircraft that normally carries 1,200 lbs of fuel and now requiring it to carry 20,000 lbs to cover the same range. The cutoff for certification as a part 23 commuter plane is 19,000 pounds MTOW. Now your little ten passenger plane will be part 25 transport category and have to comply with big boy rules, which only add more weight and cost. I also suspect many of the airports that would benefit from cheap short haul flights don't have the runway length to accommodate 50,000 lbs planes. Is it possible? Sure. Does it make any financial sense? Only if you believe the guesstimates of something that's never been done for. I mean, aircraft engineering is famous for sticking to original cost estimates. Does it make any engineering sense? Of course not.
Another thing to be aware of is that you can't use cars to compare the cost and efficiency of electricity to conventional fuels when it comes to planes. One big reason why EVs are cheaper to run than ICE vehicles is because of their regenerative braking, recovering and reusing the energy that ICE vehicles burn off as heat when slowing down and coming to a stop. While this does make electric cars more efficient, an aircraft is not going to be doing much braking during a flight, so this big part of what makes EVs cheaper to run just won't apply to aircraft.
@@Berkeloid0 The big thing that makes EV cheper to run then ICE is more of the power gets from the fuel to the wheels. Sure it can regenerate more but if that was the main case then on highways ICE and EVs would cost about the same to run due to the no breaking.
I'd imagine that the extra weight of the batteries could be compensated due to the elimination of the engines. Think about it: Electric aircraft would have motors, but no engines, and engines account for a considerable amount of weight on an airplane. Also, there are probably many cases where an airline operates an aircraft with more range than it actually needs, in which case the reduced range of an electric aircraft would be negligible. Furthermore, the problem with extra weight could easily be solved with extra wheels and/or low-pressure tires, which are used in planes landing and taking off from unpaved or unimproved surfaces. Finally, I don't think it's fair to say that something doesn't make engineering sense, when that argument has been proven wrong on many occasions with innovations that once seemed outlandish, but which are now commonplace. For example: Jetliners. Early on, airlines claimed that jet airliners would be unprofitable to operate. Now, it's hard to think of a major airline without them. Widebody and long-range twinjets. FAA administrator Lyn Helms once said, "It'll be a cold day in h*** before I let twins fly long-haul, overwater routes." Now, twin-engined airliners do just that every single day. Besides, I don't think it's fair to judge an aircraft that doesn't exist yet, simply because, it doesn't exist yet! Maybe electric aircraft are the future, and maybe they aren't. I do respect your expert opinion as a mechanic. I really do. I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that conditions, say, 10 years from now, are likely going to be a LOT different than they are today, and, while your insight IS a good argument, and an important one, it's just one piece of a much larger and hard-to-predict puzzle.
@@catprog the ONLY thing that makes an EV cheaper to run is government subsidies, once the majority are on EVs the government will pull the rug out and EVs will be as expensive to operate as regular cars, and still cost 2x as much up front. Then the final step is banning all ICE cars so youre stuck with their overpriced overtaxed EVs, and the poors just can’t drive anymore.
Reality wins ! A 737 would require about a 100-200 tonne battery pack (depending on range), requiring a full recharge after every flight. Aside from the fact you can't turn one around in 30 mins as a result and that multi-megawatt chargers are rare, with say 5 flights a day, the battery will need replacement before a year is up. Also, as a 50 or so tonne aircraft, you can't fit a 100-200 tonne battery anyway !
a lot of state capitals are in smaller cities, the thinking is that having the capital in a smaller city with less commerce would reduce the risk of corruption among the state's politicians and elected officials, because it's harder for wealthy people to push them around if they live a few hours apart from each other. obviously there's exceptions, and obviously there's still corruption all over, but that's the general idea
When talking about electric and battery tech, can Wendover make a video about recycling current batteries, like EV cars' batteries? Because if we don't address this recycling issue now, soon it will be too late to ignore and create another environment problem.
It is not just the recycling. Though, an electric car is cheaper to fuel (For the moment) if you use your own electric supply. Yet the electric energy that arrives at your house is on average 35% of the energy used to create the electricity so then factoring in the transformer to charge the car, the battery charge to discharge efficiency and the motor efficiency you are more efficient running petrol let alone Diesel. This genius film is talking about flying a battery powered plane way beyond the distance a battery powered plane has ever flown. Don't hold your breath waiting for this.
@@COIcultist because it seems like you’re comparing full footprint efficiency of an EV to just the efficiency of the ICE itself and ignoring the inefficiencies and energy cost of fuel production
I think you ignored a few basic points: 1) How much actual weight would they be adding for these batteries? I'm certain it would be a non-negligible amount, therefore reduced occupancy/cargo. 2) Batteries don't like going from 100% to 0% repeatedly - which causes premature wear. So in order to have longer lasting batteries, you'd need to oversize the capacity (see 1) 2) What's the turnaround time for the next flight given that charging is much slower than refueling (note repeated high current fast charging also degrades the battery)? You could do battery swapping but that would probably be more work than refueling too.
Plane takes off with loaded full weight. Plane lands with loaded fuel weight. One of the reasons why planes won't fly with full wing tanks when their destination is closer than the range of the plane is - wait for it ...
1) to be practical they want a battery mass the same as a loaded fuel mass, but that in itself demands design changes to the aircraft. 2) Depth of discharge is a function of the chemistry of the battery, it's not a hard and fast rule for them all. 3) Recharge will always be slower than refuel. The trade off is the down time for maintenance will be less. In short battery power density has a way to go before making anything other than short range small aircraft possible.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom Max take off weight and Max landing weight is different, batteries will dramaticly increase the landing weight thus limits passanger and cargo.
Also, in terms of the economics involved, the small-distance flights are competing with trains (tracks much more ubiquitous in Europe), buses and cars. It really is not that clear that electric planes will be competitive on short distances.
There is one issue I am wondering about, the de-icing/anti-icing system. Without jet engines to provide bleed air for a heat source and generators/alternators to provide electricity to run the pumps for de-icig boots, the electric aircraft will need to find a way to prevent icing in flight. The electrical de-icing/anti-icing systems are massive power drains on the elctrical systems and would greatly shorten the aircraft's range if they used the main batteries. I am sure they will have a work around but it is just food for thought.
That will probably just need to be accounted for when choosing the battery size for the route. And if there's any new technology discovered to de-ice using less energy, it'll be great for all aircraft, not just electric.
@@rkan2 Wet wings require large tanks of glycol and have a time limit (old tech) and boots eat a lot of power as do the electrically heated props. Sustained icing is the 800 pound gorilla in the room (think Roselawn IL crash or Air France 447). It is not the only hurdle but it must be met and as of yet it has not even been mentioned (too many other hurdles right now).
There's another issue: cabin heating. Turbine aircraft typically use the engine exhaust as a source of heat that can then be used for the cabin climate control system, which means it is, basically, free, as it is using the otherwise waste heat from the propulsion system. An all-electric aircraft would be required to power the heaters from its battery, which adds yet another drain, even if a smaller one. Someone sitting sweating while waiting on the tarmac might not consider this. Those of us who live in places like Northern Canada and fly in winter have it very much on our minds.
@@hyri3188 Eject the batteries and the heaviest dude, stall corrected. Also... with the push configuration the thing can kind of gliding backwards as well.
@@geogeo3644 Gliding to an airport with a transport category aircraft is very hard. Every one that made it after they ran out of fuel is considered a miracle. Take a look at this list to see how many didn't make it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_flights_that_required_gliding
One thing overlooked is that batteries have a lifespan and will have to be replaced. That will need to be amortized into the operational maintenance costs and this will not be insignificant.
Electricity is significantly cheaper than fuel in many places, and aircraft are required to regularly replace and overhaul parts already. If fuel cost continue to rise and battery technology improves, it might become economically feasible.
That's true, but i'd also expect battery prices to come down in price as the techology matures. And as the guy above me said, regular planes also needs to regularly replace parts, some of which won't need to be swapped out as often in an electric plane.
The technology cost almost never influences the actual price of spare parts in aviation. Titanium fanblads sometimes are hollow to reduce the moving mass and are incredibly hard to manufacture. But they cost the same as an oil differential pressure switch. Fanblade cfm56 ~ 60k, 131-9 oil pump 400k. The price to produce a battery is not the issue, the cost of licensing it for aviation is.
they do, but again, when compared to IC propulsion, these costs are almost negligible. Also, battery recycling is going to be a big thing, so the costs of replacing batteries will soon be replaced by the costs of recycling them....very low.
A 777 carries 171,175 liters of fuel at approximately 35 Mega Joules per Liter. A lithium battery has an energy density of about 0.3 MJ per Kg. So, a 777 would need 19,970,417 Kg of batteries for maximum range. So, while there may be niche case for electric airplanes (especially given the dubious assumptions in the video), there will need to be several orders of magnitude improvement in energy density before anything but the shortest flights are electric. The other things that videos like this seem to ignore is that the cost of electricity will go up dramatically with transportation electrification. If we really want an electric future, we need to start building giant nuclear plants today. There is no other currently proven technology that can provide enough energy for transportation electrification on the timelines governments have been pushing.
Wendover doesn't have a fuckin clue. He has mentioned in another video that the future of aviation is human carrying electric quadcopters flying into city rooftop helipads. Anyone who knows a thing about vertical aviation knows that that sort of thing is not a scalable technology let alone the idea of rooftop helipad coming back en masse
Actually, out of the numbers you gave, jet engine effectively only can extract only about 40% so all your numbers needs to go down.. haven't seen electric jet engine but I imagine it will be pretty efficient
@@matejbludsky8410 cutting down the required energy by half for a best case scenario for electric planes you‘d still need 10 million kg of batteries. The highest maximum takeoff weight of a 777 that takes 171,175L of fuel is just below 300,000kg so the batteries alone would come in at more 30 times the maximum takeoff weigh. You simply cannot even come close to traditional aircraft designs with electric planes until someone figures out a way to revolutionize electric energy storage.
@@skirata3144 I agree. You always have to run the numbers. The numbers will tell you if you are living in fantasyland or not. These numbers say that electric flight is a long way from being ready for prime time. 🤦♂️🙄
It's all going to depend on battery power density in the future. If it goes the way of compute storage then yes, think back to how much storage space was in a floppy disk in 1990 and compared to today (kb and mb to tb). If some major discovery or breakthrough occurs then it's not unreasonable to expect power density changes of 10x or 100x in the next 30 years
According to a recent AOPA article, jet fuel is 50 times more energy dense than batteries. Until batteries make a quantum leap in technology there’s no overcoming that.
if only you guys didnt shut down your massive producers of no CO2 energy, nuclear plants. Germany is proving that nuclear is the future. They act "green" and shut down the most green source of energy there is
@@joshdoeseverything4575 But you see, nuclear is *Scary*. (meanwhile coal ash damns continue to leak, and coal mines devastate landscapes) Luckily Gas Turbine - Steam Turbine Combined Cycle plants seem to be filling the baseload/peaking plant role (at least in the USA) and are adaptable to e-fuel/biofuel (methane, hydrogen etc)
Most of that cost is in the grid upgrades (24/25%), you're paying the most now, will come down now and by 2030 should drop substantially. The renewable portion is already falling (from 23% in 2018 to 21% in 2019, 6.79 vs 6.41) and will keep going, you'll probably see a drop to 0.21 or so by 2025, so matching Portugal, Italy, etc. while allowing for more, cheaper energy to be added so would guess by 2030 will probably have among the cheaper energy prices in Europe. Don't use fixed price, use on-demand if you can, there's a cap on it as well, ends up lowering the electricity price to
What about charging wait times? I’m not sure how the scheduling of these smaller regional airlines like Cape Air works, but I know the bigger airlines need as quick of a turn-around time as possible to get their planes in the air and making money. With current charging technology, electric planes will take way longer to be recharged than it would take a regular turbofan/turboprop/prison plane to refuel. This would significantly extend the time these planes are on the ground, both racking up the service fees at the airport and bringing down the income-per-plane for the airline. Maybe Cape air doesn’t need as quick turn-around times because of their regional timetable, but the charging time of these electric planes should not be ignored.
@@rawvid9065 lets say you have batteries in your plane, and you think to yourself, where best to store said batteries. One would think of the wings, because if you displace fuel for batteries, you may as well put batteries where fuel once was. How are you going to remove batteries from a wing? Fuel is liquid and can thus be drained and filled for the wings Batteries are solid. Also changing batteries out will probably take way longer then filling with fuel, which isn't solving the original problem
@@fluoroantimonictippedcruis1537 I suppose something like a "slot" system would be possible in the wings, where batteries are slotted in and replaced after each flight. But otherwise, charging doesen't necessarily have to be slow.
@@rawvid9065 Na they will probly overlook a need for quick change battery packs. The way woke millennials design things these days don't allow for much serviceability, Use for a very short life cycle and throw it out and go buy another latest and greatest.
As soon as short-range electric aircraft become generally available, the bids for subsidized routes will drop and cut the margins to the razor thin levels they are now.
But if Cape Air does it first, they have a massive advantage in bidding against other airlines until they catch up. That gives them a major short-term profit advantage while setting them up longer-term for the increased environmental regulation
@@quatzecoatlname6296 That's all well and good for cape air but unlike most other airlines that will be using Electric Planes, Cape air has a huge disadvantage that means if they don't bid first and get the advantage, they will go Out of Business. TRAINS, Cape air operates exclusively in the northeast corridor meaning unlike nearly all other airlines like it, trains especially with Amtrak's big upgrade plans and an increase of operating speed on their express trains to 200MPH. If Cape Air doesn't find a way to dramatically cut costs, it's game over Look at United Airlines, an example from the video, of all the destinations they serve within 250 miles of Denver, none of them have a reliable train service making the plane the only option
There is much more to these aircraft than just the engines, cabin pressurization, wing anti ice, cowl anti ice, just to mention a few... I suspect that the cost breakdown you showed is overly optimistic and in reality cost of ownership, as well as cost of maintenance will be significantly north of what you predict.
@@quintiax He skips over the energy density issue of batteries like oh no big deal. Batteries suck as a fuel source for airplanes. Every single airplane that used batteries were slow, lightweight and barely more than one or two people on them. kerosene has an energy density of 43 megajoules per kilogram and the nice thing about fuel like that the longer you travel the lighter you become. Lithium ion batteries the best things we have has an energy density of around 1.8 MJ per kilo and you have to tug all of that weight for the entire flight. That isn't even getting into safety issue of batteries. Does anyone remember when samsung made phone grenades yeah that can still happen in planes and those issues can cause major issues 10,000 feet in the air. Gas is very stable for how energy dense it is and actually requires a lot to get it going.
@@heilmadon Interesting, if batteries would be too risky to properly implement in massive airlines, how would you feel about using hydrogen as an alternative?
2:50 I think this part about trains is the most interesting part of the video. With the cost of running and airline so much higher than running trains and the price of fuel vs electricity, I'm amazed that trains aren't so much cheaper that everyone just takes the train and short haul flying is the more expensive option. I live in a place where flying is by far the cheapest and quickest way to travel short haul (300-1500kms) as the roads are mostly terrible and there are no train options. For a 1500km journey you either: -fly there in 1 hour 45mins -drive in 2 days -take the bus and take 3 days. If a 4 hour train ride was an option and it were cheaper than flying I'd do it in a heart beat.
This is why high speed rail (or just railways in general) are vastly superior to planes and cars in terms of mid-range transportation. Obviously crossing the Atlantic would be impossible in a train, but just imagine if the US had high speed rail connecting all of its major cities lmfao
@@realtissaye It doesn't even need to be high speed rail. Even a regional rail will do, as long it is slightly faster than driving, and better experience than flying (legroom especially).
The big issue is that trains need to pay for infrastructure along the entire route, whereas air travel only needs infrastructure at the origin and destination. Paying for all of that land and maintenance adds up. It's similar to how ocean transport of cargo is an order of magnitude less expensive than even train cargo.
@@haxney Following your logic, should we get rid of highways too? They also require infrastructure along the entire route, and highways are more expensive than railways to maintain.
While trains are vastly superior to planes, they are enourmsly superior in comparison to cars in medium range transportation. Thats why countries with a big automotive industry don't have great rail networks, for example the USA and Germany. The only exception is Japan
2:07 - "...consumers increasingly care about their carbon footprint." Actually, "consumers increasingly care about pretending to care about their carbon footprint". I know sometimes it's hard to parse, but that's closer to the truth.
True. A recent research thingy found that 24% of flying customers were "willing" to pay more to compensate the carbon of their flights, but when faced with the option to actually do so, less than 1% did. Everyone wants the ecological life as long as someone else does all the work and they don't have to change anything about their routines. And God forbid opening their wallets. Unthinkable!
So, aren't hydrogen based planes a much more likely idea of longer haul? Fuel Density is better and refueling times are a lot better. Once you get there, you could used them for short haul flights as well.
the "Energy Density" metric he brought up isn't right per-se. Energy per unit Mass is called Specific Energy, which Hydrogen excels at, whereas Energy per unit Volume is terrible for Hydrogen if they can figure out how to use hydrogen as a fuel, then that would be great energy-wise, but storing it would be a pain
Hydrogen powered aircraft seems more likely, it dumps it's weight as it goes unlike batteries, and it's production is "green". They will at least be used for long distance where diminishing weight is essential.
@@jakinchan3432 Grey hydrogen is made from methane, releasing CO2. Green H2 is electrolyzed from water with renewable energy. Blue H2 is in the middle, but doesn't meet the renewable energy standard. Why bother compressing and chilling hydrogen when fuel does the same thing without needing fancy tanks, preferably just not to leak.
@@georgesbv1 Exactly, hydrogen is far more energy dense until you take into account the containers which then they shoot way down in density. Not to mention, pressurized hydrogen, heck non pressurized hydrogen in an oxygenated environment if any of those canisters leaked or broke during a crash you are getting fireballs like no other
@@heilmadon keeping hydrogen as a liquid could potentially be a comercial use for aerogel, as that material's 2 defining characteristics are 1) being incredibly light and 2) being an incredibly good thermal insulator. As for the fireball, you already get that with kerosene. There was a 747 that exploded above new york city because the fuel tanks heated up too much and the fuel vaporized.
Correct, a battery powered aircraft will have the same landing and takeoff weight which drives a different design case compared to current types. As well as structural factors the wing loading does not decrease as the flight progresses which negatively affects aerodynamic drag. Currently the best batteries are still only 1/24th as energy dense as Jet A1 fuel which presents a fundamental problem for any electric powered aircraft, possibly a Hydrogen fuel cell might be a solution if they can get close to the required energy density. The issue with Green Hydrogen is that it is currently incredibly expensive to produce as the process involved many steps all incurring losses.
I guess we shall see how the economics work out, but I suspect that unless the specific energy of batteries increase by 10x, electric planes might stay niche in the transport industry.
@@Plaufin There are Combustion engines that run in hydrogen, but what fuel cells do is to convert the energy in the hydrogen to electric energy which can then bei used to poerr an electric motor
@@Mitchacho74 hydrogen is a bit of a pickle, great energy density and very green but it's very difficult to store (in gas form, it requires heavy pressure cylinders; in liquid form, it must be kept cryogenically cooled and boils off over time). Plus, hydrogen-oxygen is literally one of the most volatile chemical reactions in existence, and when you have a plane full of people the last thing you want is something violently exploding. I too am looking forward to hydrogen power becoming more common for ground and air vehicles, but I think it will take a long while to figure it out
@@psychoticlime9940 it only takes one mistake and one incident to cause bad PR. I work on the ground on the Ramp for 6 years and with all of the safety procedures my cowokers take, things still can happen. The big 3 Airlines in the US will be very picky and stingy introducing hydrogen
An electric plane is less efficient at the end of the flight than at the start...weighs the same and batteries are depleted. A jet loses weight as it burns fuel, becoming more efficient and better performing as the flight progresses.
You're forgetting that electric motors have a 95+% energy efficiency while turbofans have a 70+% energy efficiency. The weight-loss equation only starts having a significant effect on relatively long medium-haul or long-haul routes.
@@maciejj6152 you're right. With current densities it's not possible to do it with a fairly cheap plane for more than medium-haul even though the comparative energy cost is much cheaper. That explains why Airbus is researching an hydrogen powered narrowbody to launch in around 2030.
While battery-electric may win these short routes, I’d wager that the medium-to-long-term solution for longer routes as they get squeezed by regulation will be H2 fuel. Liquid Hydrogen isn’t as energy dense as jet fuel, but is comparable, and like Jet Fuel works on the same general “burn the fuel to superheat air and toss it out the back” principle that jet fuel does, so tradition tubojet, turbofan, and turboprop engines only need to be redesigned, not completely reimagined to work with H2. And H2 can be produced from water with electricity and only releases one combustion product: water, the same as it was made from. So it’s at least as green as batteries (many would say greener, since batteries aren’t green to manufacture or dispose of), comparable to jet fuel in a lot of other ways (tho COLD, which poses some extra logistical issues), and like battery-electric, it is feasible to manufacture on site at a lot of airports instead of shipping it in.
h2 in combustion engines in a high nitrogen environment (air) produces NOx which is pretty bad. It would also be the same cost to redesign an engine to use h2 as it would be to build an electric engine. The changes to logistical infrastructure, training, storage, etc that comes with hydrogen make shifting to it worse than shifting to electric aircraft even if we ignore the NOx problem. h2 requires tech that we just dont have yet and likely wont for decades to be feasible in aircraft.
Seeing how much Sam likes to talk about airplanes, I think he should rename the channel to "WENDOV-AIR PRODUCTIONS"! :D Orrrrr..... maybe not. But it's an idea!
Not necessarily more aircraft. if the battery can be swapped out quickly you just need more batteries. Obviously that's expensive, but not nearly as bad as extra aircraft.
Not an issue at all huge DC chargers will be installed at airport gates which will charge the batteries ultra fast like in 20-30 minutes (Refueling takes almost same time)tesla rn with their supercharger charges their vehicle for 200miles in just 15 minutes! Imagine what will be technological advancements in the future
@@jamesdinius7769 Batteries are very expensive to buy double qty at lest makes even more expensive with is already it is. Because the video failed to do the math... The whole video is simply garbage because what said at 12:55 A good turboprop aircraft engine has at least 50% or even higher efficiency. Jet A fuel cost. 1.75 USD/USG = 0.46 USD / liter = 0.575 USD/kg 1 kg jet A means 43.6 MJ/kg = 12.77 kWh 50% efficiency 6.38 kWh This means 0.575 USD for 6.38 kWh ---> 1 kWh = 0.09 USD Aham... Lets assume just 90% charging and discharging and 90% engine efficiency for electric plane. The average electricity rate is 13.19 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the US. So it means 13.19/0.81 for 1 kWh USED energy 0.165 USD The electric fuel cost is not 0. In fact it makes more expensive the flying.
"Rockland is a tourist hotspot" - procedes to show footage of Portland Headlight in Cape Elizabeth, 80 miles away and serviced by an entirely different and more accessible airport.
"...without a negative impact to overall trip time" 45 minutes vs 75 minutes would mean an increase of 60% in trip duration. That's a pretty negative impact. There is likely a lot of people taking those flights precisely because it's significantly faster to do so than taking a car, bus, train, etc.
An increase of 60% is costly for the passengers, but it's even more costly for the Airline. For most airlines (especially regionals) to be profitable, they have to be running their planes almost every second of the waking day something like 6:00 AM to 11:00 PM. Increasing trip times by 60% also means that the airline would have to purchase many more planes to fly the same number of routes, and hire many more pilots. Not quite 60% more, because turnaround times at the airport likely aren't increasingly proportionally. But even at 30% more planes/crews, that's a HUGE cost increase.
Did you even watch the video? 45 versus 75 minutes isn't a comparison between fossil fuel and electric aircraft, it is a comparison between two types of fossil fuel powered aircraft that are flying that route right now. An electric airplane would be a drop in replacement for one of those types of fossil fueled airplane. The reason the slower planes are viable right now probably is probably from lower ticket prices and higher rate of flights per day on the smaller craft, going to electric would allow even lower ticket prices making the slightly longer flight even more attractive.
Funny. If the algorithm is hampering with access to videos being over 15 minutes long, it's hardly doing it all that much. This video goes over 15 minutes and it works perfectly well for me. But anyways, you guys have made quite an intriguing insight into the potential future of the airline industry. Keep up the good work over there.
"There are no mom and pop airlines" That's actually false. There are a few, but they're usually in the form on one person with one plane flying a short, niche route for a very limited number of passengers
@@Nooticus A lot of charter prop flights in remote regions where flying is the only convenient way to travel are family founded/run. You can take a look at the airlines for Nunavut listed here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines_of_Nunavut
@@WellBattle6 I dont need to look at that link as I already know the airlines of Nunavut pretty well! None of those are mom and pop airlines, trust me.
@@Nooticus There is an old man who comes by the store I work out now and then and talk about how he used to be a pilot. Outside of working as a pilot proper as his main job, he also owned his own small plane that he would use to occasionally fly people around to local places. I really doubt he did that for free considering how expensive owning and using one is. Idk if that qualifies as mom and pop or not but I dont see why it wouldnt.
I haven’t watched the whole video yet. I’m guessing he’s cutting half of the video off like always. It’s like ea dlc: you get the first bit but must pay for more. EDIT: just reached the end. I was right. No surprise there.
There's one big problem with going to more smaller flights. Especially at busier, hub airports, there are limited landing and takeoff slots. 1 100 passenger jet takes half as many slots as 2 50 passenger prop planes. We'd probably need to build a bunch of new, though shorter, runways, which is expensive, but also politically difficult.
Electric planes have an easier time being made for STOL or even VTOL. We already have companies trying to design "air taxis". If Airbus or Boeing got behind it. I'm sure they could make a decent bus sized plane that could haul passengers with a very short runway. Of course batteries, and super capacitators need to get better. I say capacitators, because I hear they are incredible useful for flight on having extreme power for certain aspects like take off. Anyway that is the way I see it all going forward. Still think we should focus in high speed rails for dense areas.
@@dianapennepacker6854 it doesn't matter if the plane only needs 1/4 of the full length runway to operate, it still takes a full slot in the rotation. Airports and congested flight corridors can't just reconfigure at no cost for smaller flights, especially when they still have to serve the large planes as well.
@@austinhernandez2716 So democrats where all for Trumps regulations? The sad truth is that there is absolutely no shortage of terrible regulation, politicians are, after all, neither wise, nor angels.
Was so nervous as soon as I heard that Sam was going to analyze my employer but I feel better now that I reached the end of the video. Rockland is such a tiny but beautiful place! Thanks for making this video Sam! If you ever decide to visit Rockland I might be your pilot :D
but... the electric plan in your example only holds 9 people, so the extra 11 minutes isn't much, but what about the 10 additional planes required and the time it takes all of them to take off and land and passengers to board etc.
How can people be this simple? How bout I ask it like this? If you travel distance A-B... Do you take the 1 time unit option that costs 100 units or the 2 time unit option which costs... say 30-50 units.. ot maybr even 20?? short haul small electric planes don't suddenly replace everything, but as said at the end - "the business case is just too strong"
Board times are signifficantly reduced for smaller arilines and aircrafts. Maintanence and pre flight checks are also reduced heavily for electric planes due to their being considerably less opportunity for failure. And lastly, for an airline that does less than a dozen round trips over the course of say, a 12 hour work day, 10 additional flights per week is entirely manageable.
This is amazing, because if you look at the history of commercial air travel, this is exactly how many airlines started in the 1920's and 30's with early development of arifoil and ICE power trains. Super cool.
Maybe on a local level.Electric planes can not battle the constant weight to fuel/energy ratio.If they do not figure out how to improve the batteries and store more power on less storage we will never see a way to use these. Hydrogen is the fuel of the future.Electric energy came to us way down the line.
Electric is a dead end, and mining Hydrogen pure enough for fuel is not a green process. Making Jet Fuel burning engines more and more efficient is the answer.
@@mikelp72 yes,but to what level?Where do we hit the wall?Hydrogen is still the element that we can both produce and find in nature in large quantities.
İ'm just an idiot but wouldn't electric planes made using current tech be like 50 to 70% battery? Add to that the dangers, i can atleast run out of a burning EV.... The biggest load in a regular plane are people and luggage, in an electric one it would be mostly battery, incredibly heavy...
@@AC-bg4cs yes,massive amount of batteries have to be there,and in case of fuel,you loose the weight when you burn it.Here 98 percent of weight is still there when it lands.
@@temistogen Doesn't seem feasible for jets... Maybe if we start putting like 20 comercial passengers in jet planes that are just as big or even bigger than normal jet planes, oh wait that isn't feasible either from a cost benefit standpoint...nvm. This would only make sense for like incredibly short flights (like they do in alaska) in single engine propellor planes.
You mean like helicopters and private planes? I mean, they are fun, not the easiest for people to get a license for and by specing into flight they kinda suck as ground vehicles, but they are pretty cool.
@A Z Eh, I get the joke, it's just kinda boring and played out for me. I mean, it's not like we completely failed to pursue working versions of the basic flying car idea. Honestly, we basically achieved the versions of that which we can make work societally. Like, maybe a couple more could be unlocked with cheaper flight, but as best I can tell it'd be a glorified taxi service at best.
Batteries being less energy dense than fuel is actually a big problem. Lithium-ion batteries are very light already, but still not close to kerosene. It’s not just some extra cost, each bit of extra weight increases the energy required to take off, and store that energy you’ll need to use heavy batteries - increasing weights again. Right now the technology just isn’t there for commercial aircraft.
Also, batteries don't get lighter as they're expended, as opposed to fuel tanks. So practical flight endurance is even more skewed in favour of combustion aircraft engines.
It's practical for < 1 hour local flights, but beyond that it doesn't work and it's not going to in the foreseeable future. If you apply current battery tech to the 737, the longest it could possibly fly is 40 minutes. There are applications for EVs and we should use them where they make sense, but air travel is very limited.
disagree....as the piece explains, while we can't replace fossil fuels for long haul fights at this time, for short haul flights it's a virtual no-brainer. As battery technologies improves, electricity as fuel will gradually expand to longer and longer flights.
As always amazing content. Couple issues with the analysis (just for debate) with respect to cape air example: 1. If the outright cost of the electric plane doubles (which I think is what you’re getting at when referencing higher ownership costs), the amortized cost will more than double if electric planes have useful lives shorter than the fuel-powered equivalent because the cost is amortized over the life of the asset. From my understanding of electric vehicles the useful life is significantly shorter than ICE vehicles. 2. I think Passenger capacity matters when it comes to airport economics re landing fees (I.e. economies of scale improves the more passengers you have). Yes electric aircraft will have quicker boarding times as only ~9 people board, but the time/effort/cost to the airport for providing flight services is the same as for a 300 passenger plane. Not sure they are willing to reduce landing fees by that much to make the cost per passenger on par with bigger planes (this is more of a problem at larger airports and not tiny ones like in the video) 3. The argument that electricity costs are negligible is not great - I like the idea of on site renewables but ultimately this is intermittent energy and it’s likely the airport will need to buy power, and as the world electrifies I’m not sure today’s power price will be indicative of future prices, especially when coal/nat gas generation is switched off. 4. Finally the example you picked is heavily subsidized by the government. Can’t generalize this case and apply more broadly. I agree electric flying will eventually happen and first in short haul. I think you nailed it in the earlier part of the video where mentioning the focus on battery development thus far has been on cost/kwh, which suits cars, but the advancement for air needs higher power density. I’m sure it will come but it’s a little concerning not much progress (that I’m aware of) has been made on that front.
Another item we are missing is the general aviation tax charged of over 20cents per gallon which is used to keep all the navigational system outside the plain running. Wich is about 5-10% of the fuel cost. Somebody will have to pay for that.
To your first point; Traditional aircraft need engine maintenance often and need replacement parts all the time. Electric motors almost never fail in comparison. In the case of batteries, having to replace a battery pack every 10 years is still a much lower overall cost than fuel/engine maintenance
I agree with point 4. Most of the subsidy would evaporate when the route is commercially viable, therefore the profit would drop back to close to zero per passenger again. For the idea to take off, it would probably need to make money without route subsidies. However, nothing to stop the government to subsidise the route from environmental perspective.
Point 1 is probably partially addressed by other comments. Additionally, refurbished battery would have great capacity at a fraction of the costs, although more real world data required on the degradation trajectory for a definitive answer. Point 2 is also addressed in the video. Electric plane can focus on routes that has low passenger volume to begin with and already operating (albeit with government subsidies), so those issues you mentioned would have applied to the current fleet anyway.
For point 3, I agree that ignoring or assuming electricity costs to be negligible is lazy. However, I don’t agree that electricity prices would go up because of renewables, as they are cheaper than coal/gas fired power generation. The upfront costs aren’t even higher, and apart from maintenance you don’t need to consume fuel which you have to pay for. To be fair, add in the costs of building a mini renewable power plant in this calculation, but no need to assume any massive increase in electricity prices.
@@jholotanbest2688 i dont think it was obvious. Instead he did the opposite and said there would be this crazy number for profit which included the subsidy. I think his point remains though. Theres no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the government reduced its subsidy, the tax payers would get a massive break so the savings are still there
I'm surprised you didn't mention Harbour Air in BC, Canada - partnered with Seattle's MagniX. The electric plane is built and has test flights already done. They had anticipated passenger flights in the air by the end of this year but the pandemic seems to have pushed them back a year.
So we are gonna get one in like 20-30 years. Battery technology needs to massively innovate so that electric planes become viable for anything that isn't short distance flying
Hydrogen. Before battery stans rip me to shreds, a liquid hydrogen tank stores much, much more energy than any kind of electrochemical battery per unit mass. Airbus are threatening to build some prototype planes that use hydrogen as a fuel, apparently using 'hybrid hydrogen' engines, which I think means that it's partially electric and partially combustion. Hydrogen is wildly inefficient as a fuel. Electricity might be cheap, but electrolysing it to hydrogen and liquefying it is not particularly. A hydrogen vehicle will always be more expensive to use per mile travelled than battery electric. Period. It *might* eventually be cheaper than fossil fuels, but a lot of hydrogen sold and used today is derived from fossil fuels (because reforming natural gas and venting the CO2 is cheap). Burning it is also extremely inefficient, and it's more efficient to feed it into a fuel cell to turn it back to electricity, assuming you have a good motor-driven propulsion engine. Some might argue that the future of long-haul aviation is in synthetic fuels or biofuels. To the former I say: hydrogen *is* a synthetic fuel, and any synthetic fuels would use it as a feedstock, meaning their energy density goes up but so does the cost per joule. To the latter I say: go and watch Real Engineering's most recent video, biofuels are even less efficient than synthetic fuels (and are arguably a lobbying strategy from the American agricultural industry). Hydrogen and synthetic fuels might not be an ideal solution, but they might be a viable one. Footnote: something that might make medium-haul zero-emissions aviation viable is structural batteries. Use carbon fibre, or a similarly strong material, as the anode/cathode and your battery itself is as strong as steel. Strong enough to *replace* the structural steel in the body of the aircraft. Their energy density is lower than other kinds of Li ion batteries, and it's still early stuck-in-the-lab days, but you'll save literal tons of weight using structural battery packs and we'll hopefully see longer ranges (and shorter charging times) as a result.
"Music" in quotes. I am not sure what to call it but it is so irritating to whatever percentage of the population I belong, that I perceive it as the foreground sound rather than background. It is also frenetic, to the point that the rapid talking in the foreground is utterly excluded from my attention. My solution was turning off the sound and turning on the CC close captioning. Then, to offset fast talk, I set the playback speed to 75%. No, that did not work, try 50%. No that did not work either. The automatically generated subtitles have errors and apparently difficulty in interpreting the sound. Some stay on the screen too long and others flash too briefly. So, only out of curiousity, at this point, I reset speed and sound to normal and just observed without making any attempt to understand or even interpret. Then I noticed that the graphics running at 10X, showing sped up human activity while background and large objects are still or pan by slowly, lends very much to the frenetic feeling of the production. So why all the zippiness. Well, said the tortoise, "It is to give the impression that a great deal of information is being delivered to the viewer/listener. With such a rich stream of information we feel obligated to listen carefully (with all our might, in fact) for as long as it takes for the point to be made."
Most people's phones start to lose the ability to hold a charge dramatically in just a few years, apply that same concept to cars and planes and it becomes a nightmare. Imagine your gas tank shrinking by half in just a few years of owning a car.
You can design around it though. It's possible to build a phone with a battery that lasts 10 years but it would cost more and nobody would pay because they want to replace their phone after three years anyway. Tesla's Powerwall uses the same types of batteries but comes with a 10 year warranty, so it's definitely doable, but of course lots of people complain that the Powerwall is too expensive so there you go. But you can bet just like EVs and taxis, airlines will factor in replacement batteries to their maintenance costs in just the same way as they factor in the cost of all the other parts that need replacing on either type of plane. If it still works out more cost effective then they will proceed, if not, they won't.
@@Berkeloid0 have you ever read the Powerwall waranty? You can find it in google.... It guarantees 70% load capacity after 10 years OR after a certain energy storage volume ... basically frequent deep-cycling, i.e. what you do with your phone or with an electric plane, is excluded...
@@NuclearSavety Yeah but if you work out the storage volume it works out as one full cycle a day, which is what the product is designed to do. But I'm not defending the Powerwall, just using it to make the point that if you want a battery device to last longer it's possible, but it costs more than most people are willing to pay. Of course in this scenario it makes little sense, because the way you make a battery last for 10 years is to design in a lot of extra capacity, so as it degrades the original capacity is still available. But in the case of an aircraft that would mean carrying around a lot of extra weight, so you'd be better off with a smaller, cheaper battery that needs replacing more frequently, so you aren't carry around as much dead weight.
@@ZackFrisbee you do realize that all EVs have an 8 year warranty on the batteries right?? Kind of kills your false facts doesn't it?? Stop spreading misinformation and talking shit.
I live in Australia which has a lot of small regional airports and I've been thinking about this for the past two years. I personally hope some of the Australian based startups get in on the electric aviation production game.
High speed rail would be significantly better in terms of cost and the environment. The problem is the airline lobby is too powerful in Australia and any mention of high speed rail gets shot down.
@@m136dalie High speed rail can connect City Hubs but is too expensive to connect rural communities. I think electrified small commuter aircraft can make a difference in remote locations
Electric planes would make a huge difference for smaller low capacity rural routes in Australia. Particularly because most rural airports in Australia have ample space and the perfect environment for on-site solar power generation capacity.
9:30 There is still the issue of charging time. Petro fueled aircraft can take on fuel quickly. Unless the airlines buy additional battery packs that can be quick swapped small electric vehicles couldn’t be used. 15:08 It will need to charge sometime. It has a range of 440 nm on new batteries.
EV range also decreases with battery life, and he didn't figure the cost of new batteries every 4 years into maintenance costs, the equivalent of a engine rebuild in price.
As the holder of an MSME with 30 year’s experience in aerospace design and flight test, I'm stuck somewhere between horse feathers and opium for the new age masses. This offering is sufficiently misleading as to be labeled shameful.
If you mean this analysis is piss poor, I agree with you. I am working towards a doctorate in aerospace engineering, specifically propulsion. There is so much handwavey economics bullshit here, I’m actually rather angry
@@rkan2 Simply removing fuel costs is misleading. Electricity does still cost money; a lot less, but it's not free. It's also not accurate to assume the gov will just continue to pay that same subsidy if operating costs get slashed.
Well yes, but that wouldn't take into effect until after their 4 year bid runs out. So... that still a lot of profit. And since the costs would be so much lower, any airline that didn't have the same margins wouldn't even be able to compete, gauranteeing the electric one to win the next 4 year contract. All around wins.
It's effectively free when someone else pays for it, I guess. It's not free to generate. It's not free to "alternate energy." It's not free to store. It's not free to develop a product that will use it. Hmmm.
I could imagine that it's even more expansive to power airplanes by electricity than with fuel. Jetfuel is a lot cheaper than gasoline and even EVs don't have a huge price advantage on fuel compared to normal cars.
@@icedragonaftermath That's not feasible with flight critical hardware. It takes an airline over an hour to replace a simple light bulb in the cockpit. Never mind tens of thousands of pounds of batteries.
@@otm646 That bulb you’re talking About isn’t designed to be changed in under an hour. The battery pack wil likely be, and housed unerneath the airplane and be changed in very little time. Also as long as boarding stil takes a lot of time, It is feasable. Besides that, the pilots Will be able to continue their work in the cockpit while the battery pack is changed.
Range: 815 km (506 mi, 440 nmi) +45min IFR reserve The company plans for recharging to be carried out by mobile charging vehicles, similar to aviation fuel trucks. Each hour of flight time is expected to require a charging time of 30 minutes. Quote from Wiki: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eviation_Alice Total flight time is about 2 hours. With empty battery about 1 hour for full charge (>800 km)
The day that electric engines and batteries are lighter than combustion engines and fuel is the day all planes will become electric. That is a very, very long way off.
@ChairForce The problem with hydrogen is that nobody has yet invented a really good way of storing it. It's only really compressed into a tank which means you need a huge heavy reinforced tank to cope with the pressure from only a very small amount of fuel. Gasoline and jet fuel by virtue of being liquid at atmospheric pressure have the molecules packed in so close together that unlike a gas like hydrogen, you can fit a lot more of it into a small tank. What needs to happen is someone has to come up with a new chemical has a lot of hydrogen in its molecular structure, is a liquid, and is very easy to convert to and from pure hydrogen. Once this happens you can pump a tank full of this liquid and convert it back into pure hydrogen to feed the fuel cell. Until then, conventional fuels pack so much more energy into a much smaller volume that they will be here to stay until someone solves that hydrogen puzzle.
I do not think the business case is that strong. If you must ground your plane for an hour because it must recharge. The business case goes away. A TBM 930 has a range of 1500+ miles. Which means they can refuel at night or once a day. That dramatically cuts into the profitability of an electric plane, who has to sit for an hour after a roundtrip.
Semantics is how journalists can fool everyday people every time they report on a new battery with improved energy density, knowing full well there is no weight improvement. Precise language makes the world a better place.
There are so many wild assumptions in this (future capacity of batteries, operating costs of these planes, success of random startups, ...) that it is baffling to me how you can possibly come to such a certain conclusion.
Especially when everyone's cell phone battery starts degrading to the point where it barely holds a charge for 2 hours after just a couple of years. Imagine your car's gas tank shrinking every single year.
Yep, the "one little thing" everyone forgets because ideology is king. Especially when a battery with these requirements being charged and discharged multiple times a day, often working in extreme temperatures and also being reliable enough with little to no diminished capacity probably dies after several months of use, and it'll also be pretty expensive. Oh and if it catches fire, well, have fun. You think burning jet fuel is bad? Try lithium fire...
@@amunak_ Lithium Ion batterys dont catch on fire as much, but you only see one in the media, Take a guess? Nobody would care if you put gas fires in newspapers
Lithium is often mined from salt flats and large evaporation pools, but greener, more environmentally-friendly methods are a very hot topic in research. Cobalt and its sourcing is a known issue, it's being used in smaller and smaller proportions (particularly for high energy density batteries) and it's the biggest target for recycling (not too difficult, because it's ferromagnetic). Nickel is going to become increasingly important, too. The biggest rising demand for batteries is in electric cars, and a lot of these are likely to eventually be lithium iron phosphate batteries, with no cobalt or nickel involved. Li ion batteries degrade over their lifespan, but when they're retired from electric vehicles (road, sea or sky), they often still have years of life left in them as second-life stationary batteries. Tesla's Powerwalls might be built new, but you can get domestic and business batteries that are second-life Nissan Leaf/Renault Zoe batteries. Stationary Li ion batteries are the perfect complement to solar power, allowing you to store the energy and use it in the evening, and might one day be mass-mobilised as virtual peaker plants to keep the grid stable. When they do truly reach the end of their life, Li ion batteries are surprisingly recyclable. At the moment, recycling volumes are limited, but recovering the metals from the batteries is really not that difficult, particularly if you site your facility somewhere with lots of clean electricity (e.g. Norway) and use the energy from the partially-discharged packs you need to recycle. They're often just crushed, then the powders separated by magnetism, then conventional separation techniques - think of the powder like a super-rich artificial ore. Final point: people who question the environmental and socio-political ethics of Li ion batteries tend not to concern themselves too much with the environmental and socio-political ethics of fossil fuels. Extraction is dirty and easily goes wrong - Deepwater Horizon, anyone? Once it's extracted, refining is a very energy-intensive process, too, and the electricity/fuel is rarely sourced as scrupulously as battery production. Fossil fuels have a long history of transport issues too - I'm gonna namedrop the Exxon Valdez, but also mention the methane that leaks from wells, refineries and pipelines, with a greater greenhouse gas potential than carbon dioxide. Then, on top of that, burning fossil fuels emits a load more CO2, SO2, NOx and particulates, disproportionately in populated areas, but also at high altitudes, where they disperse more readily and becomes more potent as pollutants. Electric vehicles are not absolutely green, and the best thing you can do for the environment is absolutely to just travel less, but they are a long, long way ahead of fossil fuel vehicles.
I think we will have recycling solutions for batteries because of their demand and it would be economical sense to recycle them for their valuable materials. Also a large part of lithium is mined from brine(i.e sea water waste after desalination). Even though this isn't mined from sea water waste as water scarcity increases so does desalination plants becomes a necessity so more and more brine is produced leading to more lithium which inturn helps in getting more batteries. Cobalt mining is really bad for the environment though. Also there is a interesting Ted talk from a scientist/entrepreneur who is currently building and running a test for large scale grid batteries that are made entirely of dirt/chemical waste. Even though they are not as efficient or light as comparable lithium ion batteries they are cheaper to produce at scale and don't use copious amounts of lithium, Cobalt and nickel for a storage solution that more or less stays in place. With the advent of electric energy we are in between a transition stage and am very optimistic about the future.
It seems like combustion engines powered by synthetic/bio fuel produced with renewable energy is the way to go, but it's not something talked about often for some reason.
Because no one likes to admit that despite the fact we're pretty fly as far as technology is concerned we're still bound by the harsh laws of nature. Not to mention the tech sector has more spin doctors working for it than any other industry, Google Facebook and Microsoft manage to maintain good public images mostly because of how new they are and how they evolved much... much later having all the extremely effective tools the other companies "invented" to maintain their public image.
“…will turn Cape Air into the highest operating margin airline” etc. UNTIL the government removes the subsidy BECAUSE of that profit margin and drives it back to $1.06 per passenger.
I advise you check the actual prive for that flight on cape air. I did and cuoldn't find 1 date with under 100 usd one way or under 200 roundtrip! This is a simplistic and flawed analsys... plus it's guided to showing you something that is not YET the case! Electri is the future but it's shown as a golden goose already existent! That's not quite true! Also.. the diea of saying.. carbon emissions.. well.. so far electric is pretty close (as you get electricity from coal or gas power plants mostly or you get it from wind turbines that require massive maintenance, parts and that means carbon emissions for manufacturing etc etc)!
@@bboyjunyor Even if all the electricity for electric planes and cars come from coal plants, it's easier to treat the exhaust gases and do carbon capture in a single chimney than in a jet plane or millions of car exhausts. And a big static powerplant it's able to operate at nearly twice the efficiency than a car/plane even using the same fuel because it's not constantly changing his regimen and you can install regenerators and cogeneration that reutilize waste heat.
And a subsided route now becomes a competitive route. How many more routes will be opened as a result. (Plus the fueled planes will not be able to compete)
Maintenance of the engines would drop sure, but you’re forgetting the batteries. With modern lithium ion batteries, they will lose capacity over time and will need replacing. That’s perhaps 1000 charge-discharge cycles, though it could be 5 times larger or smaller depending on the battery design. That’s an expensive event every year or two for each plane.
@@aerodynamicist4 I think I’d look towards ceramic lithium batteries instead. Or even better, some sort of battery chemistry that doesn’t require lithium mining.
Why the fuck would you be in electric plane, which won't have a long range, way off over the largest ocean on the planet? Might as well ask what I'm going to do in my Tesla when I look at the window and see I'm driving in a mine field.
It would be funny because... The whole video is simply garbage because what said at 12:55 A good turboprop aircraft engine has at least 50% or even higher efficiency. Jet A fuel cost. 1.75 USD/USG = 0.46 USD / liter = 0.575 USD/kg 1 kg jet A means 43.6 MJ/kg = 12.77 kWh 50% efficiency 6.38 kWh This means 0.575 USD for 6.38 kWh ---> 1 kWh = 0.09 USD Aham... Lets assume just 90% charging and discharging and 90% engine efficiency for electric plane. The average electricity rate is 13.19 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the US. So it means 13.19/0.81 for 1 kWh USED energy 0.165 USD The electric fuel cost is not 0. In fact it makes more expensive the flying.
For once, I actually find myself disagreeing with your video. In terms of capacity and weight, battery technology is very limited, and the only flights that will exist in an affordable, low carbon society are the long-haul, overseas routes that HSR can't effectively substitute for. Also, as a person who grew up in Midcoast Maine, the Rockland - Boston service is a waste of taxpayer's money. The service is mostly used by wealthy people who summer on the islands, the fares don't compete with Bangor/Portland for budget oriented travelers, and the layover in Logan is far from ideal for anyone who isn't going to Boston. The route is also already served by the Amtrak Downeaster and the Concord Coach buses, which are significantly cheaper and take about 4 1/2 hours, which is not significantly longer than flying when TSA lines, check in, baggage claims, and commuting are considered in the equation. Needless to say, in any progressive society, the barriers to long-distance travel need to be kept low, and with a few isolated exceptions, electric planes are simply not an adequate or economically viable alternative for scheduled, commercial air travel.
High speed rail only makes sense for large connections, otherwise it becomes very expensive. For countries that don't have extensive rail networks already in place, it will probably be cheaper to have electric planes than to build new rail
Exactly. Batteries will never reach the energy density of fossil fuels. At that point you're making a bomb. We should instead be focusing on replacing short/mid haul flights with rail wherever possible. I think trying to completely eliminate fossil fuels is a pipe dream unless we literally break physics as we know it. Fortunately if we take steps to eliminate them where it makes sense, we won't need to completely get rid of them.
The trouble with the Rockland example is, as soon as an airline adopted electric and showed better profit margins the government would get rid of the subsidy.
One thing you’ve overlooked, it take 5 minutes to refuel a Cessna 402, it definitely does not take 5 mins to recharge an electric plane. So that 402 can fly to Rockford and back, whilst the electric one is still on the ramp in Boston recharging. All of a sudden, one 402 worth of work requires 3 or 4 electric ones to do the same work.
I was thinking the same thing. Airlines try to get as many flying hours out of their planes as possible which means running them non-stop - refuel, switch crew, keep going. If they can no longer do that, their capital costs will go through the roof.
I'm not sure if they'll be issues Skilling it up but in that two-seater they showed at the beginning of the video they are able to drop the battery pack
So true about short distance flying being more expensive than long distance. A short distance flight from my school to my home costs $1,300 round trip. About the same cost to fly the entire length of my country return.
I was actually wondering how he survived without something related to airplane for past 2 videos.
Knob
Arplanes are involved in shipping
Hahahahhahaha
You guys savage 😂
do
@@cubeul2943 ships do shipping
Got worried for a second when there wasn’t an airplane related upload for the past two videos
The same 😱
Omg they will now upload everytime after asking you okay?
Knob
@@swaprbhatt it’s a fucking joke chill
I got scared forREAL
Next up: *The logistics of flying electric* ⚡
After that: *How to start an electric airline!*
I'm pretty sure rich and gullible people would back this stupid plan just like they do with Elon's wet dreams.
@@_blank-_ Get well soon
@@anishadamane4179 Yeah no.
@@anishadamane4179 Rich = gullible. Probably not an accurate declaration.
@@_blank-_ dude, the video literally explains how short-range electric flights make economic sense
how the hell are you calling it a scam
and elon doesn't produce airplanes
Electric planes like this may make sense in the remote parts of the US, where public transport is poor. For densely interconnected countries like France, it wouldn't make much sense, when an electric train can carry more passengers
True, which is probably why he moved away from France. I believe the point there was to show that there are countries that will apply costs or outright ban flights to certain routes if they aren't green enough.
Will the U.S. do anything similar? Probably not, but it could push via economic incentives for the adoption of such aircrafts and he showed why it would make sense in a mostly U.S.-centric scenario that could also be applied to other specific places, such as northern Norway.
Since France and many other places in Europe and elsewhere have the transportation infrastructure to do what it did or rather will (since I think the French Senate still hasn't voted on this measure), this whole thing doesn't much matter over there, but airline companies are still paying attention and will do anything to not be as strongly regulated as the French example.
WP focused on one particular French law, but much aviation policy in Europe is handled at the EU level, rather than member states, and within Europe, there is a lot favouring electric aviation. Firstly, Airbus (a pan-EU company) is heavily invested in electric flight research, much more so than Boeing. Secondly, the EU is very interested in supporting outlying and remote regions, and within Europe there are a lot of routes where electric aviation could have a transformative effect on making lifeline routes cheaper and therefore more accessible. The most obvious case for this is in Tahiti, which is a French territory, and recieves a lot of help from EU funds. If you look at the inter-island route network out of PPT, it's incredibly dense with short island-hopper flights, especially around the Tuamotus. All of these are currently run on ATRs. A few do carry enough passengers to fill these planes (especially to the most touristic islands), but most don't, and so frequency is extremely low (sometimes only a few flights a week), and some islands have no air service at all and rely on a ferry to the nearest island with air service. Small, efficient electric aircraft could allow for higher frequencies, and France has been very interested in this option. There are numerous similar cases accross the EU - The Ushant islands off mainland NW France, the innumerable islands of Croatia, as WP mentioned with Wideroe in Norway (not part of the EU, but enjoying a very close relationship with it through the EEA, which means most EU aviation rules apply). There's also Greece, which between mountains and islands is very air reliant, while Sweden and Finland are just big and sparsely populated, with lots of remote, isolated settlements, while Denmark supports an absolutely massive lifeline air network in Greenland, and a smaller one in the Faroes. In most of these cases, as well as the cost savings of electric, there is also the sizable benefit of reliability. The simplicity, reliability and minimal maintenance requires of electric motors (and the modular nature possible with battery arrays), could make for a compelling use case in the remote areas where a lot of these routes are happening. Waiting on a replacement part for an aircraft suck in a remote settlement in eastern Greenland, or an atoll in the Tuamotus isn't a great situation for an airline to be in.
I think it's probably best in the most remote parts of the US and Canada, particularly Alaska and the far north, where cheaper and more frequent short distance flights are critical to transport where roads and rails are impossible
True and batteries use rare earth minerals ( Nickel ,Cobot , etc.). Which only way to mine those minerals is to have an open pit mine.
True, but for now at least, taking a train in France is many times more expensive than flying, if electric planes can make flying even cheaper, no one will use trains.
As an Aeronautical Engineering student, I feel I need to make people aware that some information given in this video is not complete. Large scale commercial electric aviation is definitely not possible with the coming 30 years or so. Firstly, there are the energy density issues that come with both lithium and hydrogen fuel cells. Given the current energy density of these type of "fuels", a plane will be unable to complete a flight with payload. The amount of development needed to get anywhere close to the energy density of traditional fuels is enormous and cannot be simply overlooked as done in this video. Secondly, the regulatory and safety bit which is always part of aviation has significant influences. Current regulations are not yet ready commercial electric flight and will need significant revisions and additions in order to guarantee safety. The last issue I want to mention is that the impact of electric flight on airports is completely overlooked. Current airports are nowhere near ready for the transition to alternative fuels. The infrastructure required to accommodate large scale electric charging or hydrogen transport is significant and will need to be widespread to make commercial electric aviation possible and profitable.
At my college, we do not even cover other forms of propulsion other than combustion engines as these new forms will not be viable in the coming 30 years or so. In this comment I have only pointed out some of the issues related to commercial electric flight. But I hope this gives a bit more context on the matter.
Battery technology will never surpass the energy density of fuel. As you said, It will never happen. Commercial electric flight will never be viable
Not even considering the cost for replacing batteries after limited number of charge/discharge cycles
As a fellow aeronautical engineering student I can support this.
I'm mechanical engineering, but I've heard exactly these ideas coming from professors and aero eng students, so I can back this up too.
As an airline equity research analyst, this.
The long term and more economical solution for the airline industry to reach carbon neutrality will likely involve carbon capture plants and carbon storage.
He ends every sentence with THREE... DISTINCT... WORDS....
There is a reason for this. There is a rule of three when speaking. But I dont know much about it anymore and dont want to look it up right now.
Each youtuber has their own way of generating content and most of them have something that makes them be like they are. Another example is SovietWomble which puts moving subtitles under game characters. He does them frame by frame and different colour for each person speaking.
Right as I read your comment, I heard this: 16:24
Yeah, it's really fucking annoying.
@@ShadowsOfTheSky Because I've been watching his content For. A few. Years. And I generally enjoy his videos except for This. Single. Habit. Which really disrupts the Flow. Of the. Narration. Isn't this Really. Annoying. To read? He didn't used to Do this. As. Much. I see comments like OP's on almost every one Of. His. Videos. I know I'm exaggerating, but it really brings the video's overall presentation down. That's why.
drinking game: down a shot whenever he says 'therefore'
A fun name for that game would be "Alcohol Poisoning"
Counting the therefores:
0:31
0:52
1:28
8:45
11:47
Total: 5
(Will be edited)
Result (assuming 40 mL of 40% shots for 175 cm 75 kg 25 yo female (have to specify): 0.131%
Tell me if I miss one please
The transcript shows that that's all.
Wheneve he says “you see…”
Or everytime he tries to greenwash a dying industry, completely ignoring that lithium and other elements used in batteries are in finite quantity, that their exploitation is often tied with pollution and child slavery. Or don't, alcohol poisoning isn't a nice way to die.
@@_blank-_ You must be fun at parties
I can't get over how good the brand name "Eviation" is.
Thanks I'll take it.
I'll make a company about flying rc plane. 🥱
@@andyc9902 There's already a company called that shown in the video, which is what this comment is talking about
Great video but you ignored that most of the income from the routes discussed was mainly from subsidies and not tickets. This means that if the operating cost fell sharply then a large part of the subsidies would disappear and thus there would be little change in the profit margins
On the other hand, a lot of governments are increasing subsidies for environmentally sustainable development. While it might not always be the case, there could be a shift from one kind of subsidy to another
This doesn't really matter. The profit margin will go down to being tight anyway, simply because the market is very competitive, so other airlines using the same concept will of course price match them. In the end, the value for this company isn't extra profit which they won't have either way; but instead an increase in market share as they can outbid everyone else with their lower costs (and thus lower need for subsidies).
He's using the subsidized route because that's the one we have hard numbers for, but he's generalizing to non-subsidized routes. Those would theoretically see that kind of increase in profits, until competition brings down the prices. But I agree he should have been clearer, as a $100 profit per passenger on $86 ticket per passenger is pretty silly.
@@SeanTBarrett Now they can pay people to be passengers and still turn a profit!
@@SeanTBarrett nearly all shortrange US flights to small towns are heavily subsidized exactly like this one
You can almost hear the semicolon whenever Sam says “therefore”.
"You see"
Wow. That was a racist comment.
@@RocketAnthem wat.
@@RocketAnthem ???
Also the succeeding comma 👍
That title sounds like it was created by an AI tasked with creating the most "Wendover Productions" style title ever
*tom scott flashback*
I think marketing slogan generators were one of the first things AI could be used without people being able to note it was not created by a human.
Oooh! I've heard of those!
Thumbnail: Why Electric Planes are the FUTURE…
Video: … for a small fraction of aviation
Now this is the Wendover we knew and loved!
P L A N E S !
For saying BS...?
The whole video is simply garbage because what said at 12:55
A good turboprop aircraft engine has at least 50% or even higher efficiency.
Jet A fuel cost. 1.75 USD/USG = 0.46 USD / liter = 0.575 USD/kg
1 kg jet A means 43.6 MJ/kg = 12.77 kWh
50% efficiency 6.38 kWh
This means 0.575 USD for 6.38 kWh ---> 1 kWh = 0.09 USD
Aham...
Lets assume just 90% charging and discharging and 90% engine efficiency for electric plane.
The average electricity rate is 13.19 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the US.
So it means 13.19/0.81 for 1 kWh USED energy 0.165 USD
The electric fuel cost is not 0.
In fact it makes more expensive the flying.
BIKES!
@@molnibalage83 bruh.... General ICE engines come at a efficiency of 40%. And aircraft engines push through air which is less dense and require more energy to move for locomotion. Where did you pull out the over 50% stats from?
@@nicedurians It does not matter that 30% or 50%. You missed the point of the comment. Counting ZERO the electric fuel cost is simply laughably stupid.
I expected much better quality from the channel...
If you count only 25% engine eff. only about parity can be achieved with jet fuel even if you consider quite a cheap electricity...
This video also has a good amount about logistics.
But, that $2 million profit becomes a loss/near loss when the gov't pulls the support funding because the airline technically no longer needs it because they're turning such a huge profit. Maybe only a portion is pulled, but either way, I would predict that the funding will get pulled/reduced and the equation will look much different.
Happened in the SF Bay area. After a certain number of hybrid and electric cars hit the road, SF bridge authority started charging them the going rate for crossing the bridges.
eventually that will be true, however, who did start first still gets the funding and therefor will get a huge boost now.
Considering the estimated profit margin is larger than the ticket cost, it's almost certain that the subsidy will get pulled unless the politicians get a cut
True, but it doesn't change the conclusion. Electric aircraft still win, because with a lower subsidy, non-electric planes can't do the job at all.
Still a positive for the airline, because non-electric planes will not be remotely able to turn a profit on the route. The airline with electric aircraft still beats its conventional fuel competitors
16:56 Grumpy dude in a big flower bath, yeeting his laptop into the water: probably the best stock footage acting ever.
That doesn't seem general enough to be stock footage. Imagine the day they were filming these. Probably cranked out a bunch. "Okay, Carl, we need businessmen shaking hands. Got it, great. Next we'll do 'Man in a tie, pointing at graphs in a conference room.' Perfect. Okay, now hop in this flower-filled bathtub while wearing nothing but a face full of scowl, and act pissed off at this laptop."
@@frigginjerk it might have been commissioned for a specific clip. And now its available as stock footage cause bruh, why else would he have that clip? I doubt he made it himself xD you can find stock footage or pics of most things you can think of, there's big databases of the stuff out there.
Two things from an aircraft mechanic:
Swap out the numbers on decreased maintenance cost with those for battery replacement. The first registered 777 was retired after 24 years with 50,000 flight hours - the equivalent of nearly six years of continuous flying. That's the norm. Airlines don't lease planes for them to sit around and incur storage fees. Electric airplanes will kill batteries faster than typical TBO on most turbine engines.
Batteries still have pathetic specific energy. You are talking about taking a 4,000 lbs aircraft that normally carries 1,200 lbs of fuel and now requiring it to carry 20,000 lbs to cover the same range. The cutoff for certification as a part 23 commuter plane is 19,000 pounds MTOW. Now your little ten passenger plane will be part 25 transport category and have to comply with big boy rules, which only add more weight and cost. I also suspect many of the airports that would benefit from cheap short haul flights don't have the runway length to accommodate 50,000 lbs planes.
Is it possible? Sure. Does it make any financial sense? Only if you believe the guesstimates of something that's never been done for. I mean, aircraft engineering is famous for sticking to original cost estimates. Does it make any engineering sense? Of course not.
Another thing to be aware of is that you can't use cars to compare the cost and efficiency of electricity to conventional fuels when it comes to planes. One big reason why EVs are cheaper to run than ICE vehicles is because of their regenerative braking, recovering and reusing the energy that ICE vehicles burn off as heat when slowing down and coming to a stop. While this does make electric cars more efficient, an aircraft is not going to be doing much braking during a flight, so this big part of what makes EVs cheaper to run just won't apply to aircraft.
@@Berkeloid0 The big thing that makes EV cheper to run then ICE is more of the power gets from the fuel to the wheels. Sure it can regenerate more but if that was the main case then on highways ICE and EVs would cost about the same to run due to the no breaking.
I'd imagine that the extra weight of the batteries could be compensated due to the elimination of the engines.
Think about it: Electric aircraft would have motors, but no engines, and engines account for a considerable amount of weight on an airplane.
Also, there are probably many cases where an airline operates an aircraft with more range than it actually needs, in which case the reduced range of an electric aircraft would be negligible.
Furthermore, the problem with extra weight could easily be solved with extra wheels and/or low-pressure tires, which are used in planes landing and taking off from unpaved or unimproved surfaces.
Finally, I don't think it's fair to say that something doesn't make engineering sense, when that argument has been proven wrong on many occasions with innovations that once seemed outlandish, but which are now commonplace.
For example: Jetliners. Early on, airlines claimed that jet airliners would be unprofitable to operate. Now, it's hard to think of a major airline without them.
Widebody and long-range twinjets. FAA administrator Lyn Helms once said, "It'll be a cold day in h*** before I let twins fly long-haul, overwater routes." Now, twin-engined airliners do just that every single day.
Besides, I don't think it's fair to judge an aircraft that doesn't exist yet, simply because, it doesn't exist yet! Maybe electric aircraft are the future, and maybe they aren't.
I do respect your expert opinion as a mechanic. I really do. I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong.
I'm just saying that conditions, say, 10 years from now, are likely going to be a LOT different than they are today, and, while your insight IS a good argument, and an important one, it's just one piece of a much larger and hard-to-predict puzzle.
@@catprog the ONLY thing that makes an EV cheaper to run is government subsidies, once the majority are on EVs the government will pull the rug out and EVs will be as expensive to operate as regular cars, and still cost 2x as much up front. Then the final step is banning all ICE cars so youre stuck with their overpriced overtaxed EVs, and the poors just can’t drive anymore.
Reality wins ! A 737 would require about a 100-200 tonne battery pack (depending on range), requiring a full recharge after every flight. Aside from the fact you can't turn one around in 30 mins as a result and that multi-megawatt chargers are rare, with say 5 flights a day, the battery will need replacement before a year is up.
Also, as a 50 or so tonne aircraft, you can't fit a 100-200 tonne battery anyway !
Dam 1 dollar a month for both that’s insane I never thought I would buy a TH-camr sponsorship but this is just too good.
U got me
I got the 14 dollars/year last year. It is definitely worth it. Great content on both sites.
@@rubeniz5151 Really? lol
"The U.S. government subsidizes routes to these small, remote communities... "
Augusta, the literal capital of the state of Maine: Am I a joke to you?
a lot of state capitals are in smaller cities, the thinking is that having the capital in a smaller city with less commerce would reduce the risk of corruption among the state's politicians and elected officials, because it's harder for wealthy people to push them around if they live a few hours apart from each other. obviously there's exceptions, and obviously there's still corruption all over, but that's the general idea
Yes
No, just a punch line; you're too small to be a whole joke. 😁😆😂🤣
Never heard of it
So, small remote community.
When talking about electric and battery tech, can Wendover make a video about recycling current batteries, like EV cars' batteries? Because if we don't address this recycling issue now, soon it will be too late to ignore and create another environment problem.
We aren't good at foresight. How do you think we fucked the environment in the first place?
We kind of are.
It is not just the recycling. Though, an electric car is cheaper to fuel (For the moment) if you use your own electric supply. Yet the electric energy that arrives at your house is on average 35% of the energy used to create the electricity so then factoring in the transformer to charge the car, the battery charge to discharge efficiency and the motor efficiency you are more efficient running petrol let alone Diesel.
This genius film is talking about flying a battery powered plane way beyond the distance a battery powered plane has ever flown. Don't hold your breath waiting for this.
@@COIcultist can you walk us through your numbers where you figured out EVs are less efficient than ICEs?
@@COIcultist because it seems like you’re comparing full footprint efficiency of an EV to just the efficiency of the ICE itself and ignoring the inefficiencies and energy cost of fuel production
I think you ignored a few basic points:
1) How much actual weight would they be adding for these batteries? I'm certain it would be a non-negligible amount, therefore reduced occupancy/cargo.
2) Batteries don't like going from 100% to 0% repeatedly - which causes premature wear. So in order to have longer lasting batteries, you'd need to oversize the capacity (see 1)
2) What's the turnaround time for the next flight given that charging is much slower than refueling (note repeated high current fast charging also degrades the battery)? You could do battery swapping but that would probably be more work than refueling too.
Not if the planes are designed for swapping
Plane takes off with loaded full weight. Plane lands with loaded fuel weight. One of the reasons why planes won't fly with full wing tanks when their destination is closer than the range of the plane is - wait for it ...
1) to be practical they want a battery mass the same as a loaded fuel mass, but that in itself demands design changes to the aircraft.
2) Depth of discharge is a function of the chemistry of the battery, it's not a hard and fast rule for them all.
3) Recharge will always be slower than refuel. The trade off is the down time for maintenance will be less.
In short battery power density has a way to go before making anything other than short range small aircraft possible.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom Max take off weight and Max landing weight is different, batteries will dramaticly increase the landing weight thus limits passanger and cargo.
Also, in terms of the economics involved, the small-distance flights are competing with trains (tracks much more ubiquitous in Europe), buses and cars. It really is not that clear that electric planes will be competitive on short distances.
There is one issue I am wondering about, the de-icing/anti-icing system. Without jet engines to provide bleed air for a heat source and generators/alternators to provide electricity to run the pumps for de-icig boots, the electric aircraft will need to find a way to prevent icing in flight. The electrical de-icing/anti-icing systems are massive power drains on the elctrical systems and would greatly shorten the aircraft's range if they used the main batteries. I am sure they will have a work around but it is just food for thought.
That will probably just need to be accounted for when choosing the battery size for the route. And if there's any new technology discovered to de-ice using less energy, it'll be great for all aircraft, not just electric.
@@winkcla 'Probably' and 'if' are not solutions. This issue will be a game stopper until a hard solution is developed and tested.
@@maxsmodels I mean... There are commercial airplanes that don't have deicing systems reliant on engine bleed air.
@@rkan2 Wet wings require large tanks of glycol and have a time limit (old tech) and boots eat a lot of power as do the electrically heated props. Sustained icing is the 800 pound gorilla in the room (think Roselawn IL crash or Air France 447). It is not the only hurdle but it must be met and as of yet it has not even been mentioned (too many other hurdles right now).
There's another issue: cabin heating. Turbine aircraft typically use the engine exhaust as a source of heat that can then be used for the cabin climate control system, which means it is, basically, free, as it is using the otherwise waste heat from the propulsion system. An all-electric aircraft would be required to power the heaters from its battery, which adds yet another drain, even if a smaller one. Someone sitting sweating while waiting on the tarmac might not consider this. Those of us who live in places like Northern Canada and fly in winter have it very much on our minds.
Everyone gangsta until the plane is on 5% mid air
they glide tho
@@geogeo3644 Everyone gangsta until the plane stalls
@@hyri3188 Eject the batteries and the heaviest dude, stall corrected. Also... with the push configuration the thing can kind of gliding backwards as well.
@@geogeo3644 Gliding to an airport with a transport category aircraft is very hard. Every one that made it after they ran out of fuel is considered a miracle. Take a look at this list to see how many didn't make it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_flights_that_required_gliding
Yeah, such things never happen with ICE engines...
Planes are interesting! By the way, thank you for always having subtitles, because I'm German and I think that's the best way to learn English.
Can you tell people around you that Germany closing down its nuclear power plants was the stupidest move ever? Thanks.
Guten Abend, mein Freund
@@_blank-_
[Insert random, off topic and hostile comment about some country]
@@danielalasoo2930 Danke, ich wünsche dir noch einen schönen Tag
Props, dass du dir Mühe gibst beim Englisch lernen. Viel Erfolg noch
One thing overlooked is that batteries have a lifespan and will have to be replaced. That will need to be amortized into the operational maintenance costs and this will not be insignificant.
Electricity is significantly cheaper than fuel in many places, and aircraft are required to regularly replace and overhaul parts already. If fuel cost continue to rise and battery technology improves, it might become economically feasible.
That's true, but i'd also expect battery prices to come down in price as the techology matures. And as the guy above me said, regular planes also needs to regularly replace parts, some of which won't need to be swapped out as often in an electric plane.
The technology cost almost never influences the actual price of spare parts in aviation. Titanium fanblads sometimes are hollow to reduce the moving mass and are incredibly hard to manufacture. But they cost the same as an oil differential pressure switch. Fanblade cfm56 ~ 60k, 131-9 oil pump 400k. The price to produce a battery is not the issue, the cost of licensing it for aviation is.
they do, but again, when compared to IC propulsion, these costs are almost negligible. Also, battery recycling is going to be a big thing, so the costs of replacing batteries will soon be replaced by the costs of recycling them....very low.
A 777 carries 171,175 liters of fuel at approximately 35 Mega Joules per Liter. A lithium battery has an energy density of about 0.3 MJ per Kg. So, a 777 would need 19,970,417 Kg of batteries for maximum range. So, while there may be niche case for electric airplanes (especially given the dubious assumptions in the video), there will need to be several orders of magnitude improvement in energy density before anything but the shortest flights are electric.
The other things that videos like this seem to ignore is that the cost of electricity will go up dramatically with transportation electrification. If we really want an electric future, we need to start building giant nuclear plants today. There is no other currently proven technology that can provide enough energy for transportation electrification on the timelines governments have been pushing.
Wendover doesn't have a fuckin clue. He has mentioned in another video that the future of aviation is human carrying electric quadcopters flying into city rooftop helipads. Anyone who knows a thing about vertical aviation knows that that sort of thing is not a scalable technology let alone the idea of rooftop helipad coming back en masse
Actually, out of the numbers you gave, jet engine effectively only can extract only about 40% so all your numbers needs to go down.. haven't seen electric jet engine but I imagine it will be pretty efficient
@@matejbludsky8410 cutting down the required energy by half for a best case scenario for electric planes you‘d still need 10 million kg of batteries. The highest maximum takeoff weight of a 777 that takes 171,175L of fuel is just below 300,000kg so the batteries alone would come in at more 30 times the maximum takeoff weigh.
You simply cannot even come close to traditional aircraft designs with electric planes until someone figures out a way to revolutionize electric energy storage.
@@skirata3144 I agree. You always have to run the numbers. The numbers will tell you if you are living in fantasyland or not. These numbers say that electric flight is a long way from being ready for prime time. 🤦♂️🙄
It's all going to depend on battery power density in the future. If it goes the way of compute storage then yes, think back to how much storage space was in a floppy disk in 1990 and compared to today (kb and mb to tb). If some major discovery or breakthrough occurs then it's not unreasonable to expect power density changes of 10x or 100x in the next 30 years
According to a recent AOPA article, jet fuel is 50 times more energy dense than batteries. Until batteries make a quantum leap in technology there’s no overcoming that.
🥋
@@RocketAnthem no, you are.
@@hypergalaxyhoover No u
Yep electric has a long way to go before its viable. Period
@@kilikus822 fight! fight! fight!
"Electricity [...] cost is so low [...] that it essentially becomes a non-factor"
*cries in German*
*cries with you* It was much more than "ne Kugel Eis" just so we can buy coal generated electricity from Poland...
if only you guys didnt shut down your massive producers of no CO2 energy, nuclear plants. Germany is proving that nuclear is the future. They act "green" and shut down the most green source of energy there is
@@joshdoeseverything4575 All other issues aside, that would have spared us a lot of trouble...
@@joshdoeseverything4575 But you see, nuclear is *Scary*. (meanwhile coal ash damns continue to leak, and coal mines devastate landscapes) Luckily Gas Turbine - Steam Turbine Combined Cycle plants seem to be filling the baseload/peaking plant role (at least in the USA) and are adaptable to e-fuel/biofuel (methane, hydrogen etc)
Most of that cost is in the grid upgrades (24/25%), you're paying the most now, will come down now and by 2030 should drop substantially. The renewable portion is already falling (from 23% in 2018 to 21% in 2019, 6.79 vs 6.41) and will keep going, you'll probably see a drop to 0.21 or so by 2025, so matching Portugal, Italy, etc. while allowing for more, cheaper energy to be added so would guess by 2030 will probably have among the cheaper energy prices in Europe.
Don't use fixed price, use on-demand if you can, there's a cap on it as well, ends up lowering the electricity price to
What about charging wait times? I’m not sure how the scheduling of these smaller regional airlines like Cape Air works, but I know the bigger airlines need as quick of a turn-around time as possible to get their planes in the air and making money. With current charging technology, electric planes will take way longer to be recharged than it would take a regular turbofan/turboprop/prison plane to refuel. This would significantly extend the time these planes are on the ground, both racking up the service fees at the airport and bringing down the income-per-plane for the airline. Maybe Cape air doesn’t need as quick turn-around times because of their regional timetable, but the charging time of these electric planes should not be ignored.
i am guessing they will develop some sort of removeable battery system , kind of like old laptops.
@@rawvid9065 lets say you have batteries in your plane, and you think to yourself, where best to store said batteries. One would think of the wings, because if you displace fuel for batteries, you may as well put batteries where fuel once was.
How are you going to remove batteries from a wing?
Fuel is liquid and can thus be drained and filled for the wings
Batteries are solid.
Also changing batteries out will probably take way longer then filling with fuel, which isn't solving the original problem
@@fluoroantimonictippedcruis1537 I suppose something like a "slot" system would be possible in the wings, where batteries are slotted in and replaced after each flight. But otherwise, charging doesen't necessarily have to be slow.
@@rawvid9065
Na they will probly overlook a need for quick change battery packs. The way woke millennials design things these days don't allow for much serviceability, Use for a very short life cycle and throw it out and go buy another latest and greatest.
Replace the battery with one that has already been charged at the station, recharged in less than a minute.
As soon as short-range electric aircraft become generally available, the bids for subsidized routes will drop and cut the margins to the razor thin levels they are now.
But if Cape Air does it first, they have a massive advantage in bidding against other airlines until they catch up. That gives them a major short-term profit advantage while setting them up longer-term for the increased environmental regulation
Yes, but all other ones will make huge losses.
@@quatzecoatlname6296 That's all well and good for cape air but unlike most other airlines that will be using Electric Planes, Cape air has a huge disadvantage that means if they don't bid first and get the advantage, they will go Out of Business.
TRAINS, Cape air operates exclusively in the northeast corridor meaning unlike nearly all other airlines like it, trains especially with Amtrak's big upgrade plans and an increase of operating speed on their express trains to 200MPH. If Cape Air doesn't find a way to dramatically cut costs, it's game over
Look at United Airlines, an example from the video, of all the destinations they serve within 250 miles of Denver, none of them have a reliable train service making the plane the only option
Billions of tax dollar money are being saved you say?
There is much more to these aircraft than just the engines, cabin pressurization, wing anti ice, cowl anti ice, just to mention a few... I suspect that the cost breakdown you showed is overly optimistic and in reality cost of ownership, as well as cost of maintenance will be significantly north of what you predict.
Fair, though even if it wasn't $100/person profit and only 10% of that it'd still be interesting for airliners.
@@quintiax He skips over the energy density issue of batteries like oh no big deal. Batteries suck as a fuel source for airplanes. Every single airplane that used batteries were slow, lightweight and barely more than one or two people on them. kerosene has an energy density of 43 megajoules per kilogram and the nice thing about fuel like that the longer you travel the lighter you become. Lithium ion batteries the best things we have has an energy density of around 1.8 MJ per kilo and you have to tug all of that weight for the entire flight. That isn't even getting into safety issue of batteries. Does anyone remember when samsung made phone grenades yeah that can still happen in planes and those issues can cause major issues 10,000 feet in the air. Gas is very stable for how energy dense it is and actually requires a lot to get it going.
@@heilmadon Interesting, if batteries would be too risky to properly implement in massive airlines, how would you feel about using hydrogen as an alternative?
@@quintiax As in hydrogen fuel cells?
@@davak72 Yes something along these lines, I can't speak out for it as it is not my field of study.
2:50 I think this part about trains is the most interesting part of the video.
With the cost of running and airline so much higher than running trains and the price of fuel vs electricity, I'm amazed that trains aren't so much cheaper that everyone just takes the train and short haul flying is the more expensive option.
I live in a place where flying is by far the cheapest and quickest way to travel short haul (300-1500kms) as the roads are mostly terrible and there are no train options.
For a 1500km journey you either:
-fly there in 1 hour 45mins
-drive in 2 days
-take the bus and take 3 days.
If a 4 hour train ride was an option and it were cheaper than flying I'd do it in a heart beat.
This is why high speed rail (or just railways in general) are vastly superior to planes and cars in terms of mid-range transportation. Obviously crossing the Atlantic would be impossible in a train, but just imagine if the US had high speed rail connecting all of its major cities lmfao
@@realtissaye It doesn't even need to be high speed rail. Even a regional rail will do, as long it is slightly faster than driving, and better experience than flying (legroom especially).
The big issue is that trains need to pay for infrastructure along the entire route, whereas air travel only needs infrastructure at the origin and destination. Paying for all of that land and maintenance adds up.
It's similar to how ocean transport of cargo is an order of magnitude less expensive than even train cargo.
@@haxney Following your logic, should we get rid of highways too? They also require infrastructure along the entire route, and highways are more expensive than railways to maintain.
While trains are vastly superior to planes, they are enourmsly superior in comparison to cars in medium range transportation. Thats why countries with a big automotive industry don't have great rail networks, for example the USA and Germany. The only exception is Japan
2:07 - "...consumers increasingly care about their carbon footprint."
Actually, "consumers increasingly care about pretending to care about their carbon footprint". I know sometimes it's hard to parse, but that's closer to the truth.
True. A recent research thingy found that 24% of flying customers were "willing" to pay more to compensate the carbon of their flights, but when faced with the option to actually do so, less than 1% did.
Everyone wants the ecological life as long as someone else does all the work and they don't have to change anything about their routines. And God forbid opening their wallets. Unthinkable!
@@justastudent1423 the united states NEEDS more high speed rail
That’s the reason clean energy has to be subsidized
@@justastudent1423 😂😂😂💀
@@tristanmoller9498
🤨
So, aren't hydrogen based planes a much more likely idea of longer haul? Fuel Density is better and refueling times are a lot better. Once you get there, you could used them for short haul flights as well.
Plus with electrolysis and fuel cells it can essentially be electric.
Hydrogen should go well with planes.electricity wont because adding more stuff inside like heat pumps would make them heavy and not allowed to fly.
the "Energy Density" metric he brought up isn't right per-se. Energy per unit Mass is called Specific Energy, which Hydrogen excels at, whereas Energy per unit Volume is terrible for Hydrogen
if they can figure out how to use hydrogen as a fuel, then that would be great energy-wise, but storing it would be a pain
hydrogen has a very bad image
@@jalchi8367 What about this one? cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/KmpifM7nQyaAbdZDhh3NK6-320-80.jpg
How many plane videos will you post?
Wendover: Yes
@hey bro the best I was in this morning 🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄🌄 just kidding I'm I think 🤔 it to me on Saturday so
Hydrogen powered aircraft seems more likely, it dumps it's weight as it goes unlike batteries, and it's production is "green". They will at least be used for long distance where diminishing weight is essential.
Aren’t they costly to create and pressurize?
I’ve also heard that it’s usually created with gasoline, but I could be wrong about that one.
@@jakinchan3432 Grey hydrogen is made from methane, releasing CO2.
Green H2 is electrolyzed from water with renewable energy.
Blue H2 is in the middle, but doesn't meet the renewable energy standard.
Why bother compressing and chilling hydrogen when fuel does the same thing without needing fancy tanks, preferably just not to leak.
@@georgesbv1 Exactly, hydrogen is far more energy dense until you take into account the containers which then they shoot way down in density. Not to mention, pressurized hydrogen, heck non pressurized hydrogen in an oxygenated environment if any of those canisters leaked or broke during a crash you are getting fireballs like no other
@@heilmadon keeping hydrogen as a liquid could potentially be a comercial use for aerogel, as that material's 2 defining characteristics are 1) being incredibly light and 2) being an incredibly good thermal insulator. As for the fireball, you already get that with kerosene. There was a 747 that exploded above new york city because the fuel tanks heated up too much and the fuel vaporized.
Correct, a battery powered aircraft will have the same landing and takeoff weight which drives a different design case compared to current types. As well as structural factors the wing loading does not decrease as the flight progresses which negatively affects aerodynamic drag. Currently the best batteries are still only 1/24th as energy dense as Jet A1 fuel which presents a fundamental problem for any electric powered aircraft, possibly a Hydrogen fuel cell might be a solution if they can get close to the required energy density.
The issue with Green Hydrogen is that it is currently incredibly expensive to produce as the process involved many steps all incurring losses.
It's cool watching this the day a battery company is about to release an almost doubled the average watt per kg from 275 to 500. Things move quickly.
I guess we shall see how the economics work out, but I suspect that unless the specific energy of batteries increase by 10x, electric planes might stay niche in the transport industry.
You gotta remember that electric doesn't mean only battery, it very well could be hydrogen fuel cells and that should have the energy density we need
@@Mitchacho74 am sorry but that is in no way "electric". Hidrogen works same as a normal fuel car but with certain different mechanical parta
@@Plaufin There are Combustion engines that run in hydrogen, but what fuel cells do is to convert the energy in the hydrogen to electric energy which can then bei used to poerr an electric motor
@@Mitchacho74 hydrogen is a bit of a pickle, great energy density and very green but it's very difficult to store (in gas form, it requires heavy pressure cylinders; in liquid form, it must be kept cryogenically cooled and boils off over time). Plus, hydrogen-oxygen is literally one of the most volatile chemical reactions in existence, and when you have a plane full of people the last thing you want is something violently exploding. I too am looking forward to hydrogen power becoming more common for ground and air vehicles, but I think it will take a long while to figure it out
@@psychoticlime9940 it only takes one mistake and one incident to cause bad PR. I work on the ground on the Ramp for 6 years and with all of the safety procedures my cowokers take, things still can happen. The big 3 Airlines in the US will be very picky and stingy introducing hydrogen
Planes and Wendover. Never ending bond.
An electric plane is less efficient at the end of the flight than at the start...weighs the same and batteries are depleted.
A jet loses weight as it burns fuel, becoming more efficient and better performing as the flight progresses.
You're forgetting that electric motors have a 95+% energy efficiency while turbofans have a 70+% energy efficiency. The weight-loss equation only starts having a significant effect on relatively long medium-haul or long-haul routes.
Maybe one should start jettisoning the batteries during the flight? ;)
@@razorfoundation In my opinion it isn't enough to cover added mass (because batteries have much less energy density than kerosine
@@maciejj6152 you're right. With current densities it's not possible to do it with a fairly cheap plane for more than medium-haul even though the comparative energy cost is much cheaper. That explains why Airbus is researching an hydrogen powered narrowbody to launch in around 2030.
and it's actually necessary to have decreased weight at the end for landing.
landing early in emergencies usually requires dumping fuel
While battery-electric may win these short routes, I’d wager that the medium-to-long-term solution for longer routes as they get squeezed by regulation will be H2 fuel. Liquid Hydrogen isn’t as energy dense as jet fuel, but is comparable, and like Jet Fuel works on the same general “burn the fuel to superheat air and toss it out the back” principle that jet fuel does, so tradition tubojet, turbofan, and turboprop engines only need to be redesigned, not completely reimagined to work with H2. And H2 can be produced from water with electricity and only releases one combustion product: water, the same as it was made from. So it’s at least as green as batteries (many would say greener, since batteries aren’t green to manufacture or dispose of), comparable to jet fuel in a lot of other ways (tho COLD, which poses some extra logistical issues), and like battery-electric, it is feasible to manufacture on site at a lot of airports instead of shipping it in.
h2 in combustion engines in a high nitrogen environment (air) produces NOx which is pretty bad. It would also be the same cost to redesign an engine to use h2 as it would be to build an electric engine. The changes to logistical infrastructure, training, storage, etc that comes with hydrogen make shifting to it worse than shifting to electric aircraft even if we ignore the NOx problem. h2 requires tech that we just dont have yet and likely wont for decades to be feasible in aircraft.
Seeing how much Sam likes to talk about airplanes, I think he should rename the channel to "WENDOV-AIR PRODUCTIONS"! :D
Orrrrr..... maybe not. But it's an idea!
Peak comedy my man
So funny, you should become a comedian
My dad would be proud of you
G E T O U T
That would be wending over backwards...
What about turn around time? You can fuel in minutes, therefore you need more aircraft some charging and some flying.
Not necessarily more aircraft. if the battery can be swapped out quickly you just need more batteries. Obviously that's expensive, but not nearly as bad as extra aircraft.
Not an issue at all huge DC chargers will be installed at airport gates which will charge the batteries ultra fast like in 20-30 minutes (Refueling takes almost same time)tesla rn with their supercharger charges their vehicle for 200miles in just 15 minutes! Imagine what will be technological advancements in the future
@@jamesdinius7769 Batteries are very expensive to buy double qty at lest makes even more expensive with is already it is.
Because the video failed to do the math...
The whole video is simply garbage because what said at 12:55
A good turboprop aircraft engine has at least 50% or even higher efficiency.
Jet A fuel cost. 1.75 USD/USG = 0.46 USD / liter = 0.575 USD/kg
1 kg jet A means 43.6 MJ/kg = 12.77 kWh
50% efficiency 6.38 kWh
This means 0.575 USD for 6.38 kWh ---> 1 kWh = 0.09 USD
Aham...
Lets assume just 90% charging and discharging and 90% engine efficiency for electric plane.
The average electricity rate is 13.19 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the US.
So it means 13.19/0.81 for 1 kWh USED energy 0.165 USD
The electric fuel cost is not 0.
In fact it makes more expensive the flying.
@@molnibalage83 Just like with electric cars then.
Si I guess you were not listening after 15:05 ?
"Rockland is a tourist hotspot" - procedes to show footage of Portland Headlight in Cape Elizabeth, 80 miles away and serviced by an entirely different and more accessible airport.
Editing isn't always perfect XD
This was a fantastic analysis of this situation. Thanks so much for doing this.
We need a 1 hour video completely about planes
yessir
"...without a negative impact to overall trip time" 45 minutes vs 75 minutes would mean an increase of 60% in trip duration. That's a pretty negative impact.
There is likely a lot of people taking those flights precisely because it's significantly faster to do so than taking a car, bus, train, etc.
An increase of 60% is costly for the passengers, but it's even more costly for the Airline.
For most airlines (especially regionals) to be profitable, they have to be running their planes almost every second of the waking day something like 6:00 AM to 11:00 PM. Increasing trip times by 60% also means that the airline would have to purchase many more planes to fly the same number of routes, and hire many more pilots. Not quite 60% more, because turnaround times at the airport likely aren't increasingly proportionally. But even at 30% more planes/crews, that's a HUGE cost increase.
Did you even watch the video? 45 versus 75 minutes isn't a comparison between fossil fuel and electric aircraft, it is a comparison between two types of fossil fuel powered aircraft that are flying that route right now. An electric airplane would be a drop in replacement for one of those types of fossil fueled airplane. The reason the slower planes are viable right now probably is probably from lower ticket prices and higher rate of flights per day on the smaller craft, going to electric would allow even lower ticket prices making the slightly longer flight even more attractive.
Sam: If you heard me in the past, you should already know that the most costly element of flying is fuel. Now, eliminate it totally.
weightless fuel.... is helium?
Actually, insurance is a higher cost than fuel. Thank the lawyers.
Outstanding, where can I get this free electricity?
I remember Sam actually made a video about why is flying so expensive, and he said in that video that fuel isn't really the most costly element
@@00BillyTorontoBill Too bad helium is already at its duplet state.... its hard to split the neutron and electron....
Funny. If the algorithm is hampering with access to videos being over 15 minutes long, it's hardly doing it all that much. This video goes over 15 minutes and it works perfectly well for me. But anyways, you guys have made quite an intriguing insight into the potential future of the airline industry. Keep up the good work over there.
"There are no mom and pop airlines"
That's actually false. There are a few, but they're usually in the form on one person with one plane flying a short, niche route for a very limited number of passengers
Example?
@@Nooticus A lot of charter prop flights in remote regions where flying is the only convenient way to travel are family founded/run. You can take a look at the airlines for Nunavut listed here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines_of_Nunavut
@@Nooticus Probablly some in Alaska. Especially when you consider cargo.
@@WellBattle6 I dont need to look at that link as I already know the airlines of Nunavut pretty well! None of those are mom and pop airlines, trust me.
@@Nooticus There is an old man who comes by the store I work out now and then and talk about how he used to be a pilot. Outside of working as a pilot proper as his main job, he also owned his own small plane that he would use to occasionally fly people around to local places. I really doubt he did that for free considering how expensive owning and using one is. Idk if that qualifies as mom and pop or not but I dont see why it wouldnt.
Aight you've finally convinced me to get Curiosity Stream & Nebula
Edit: A bunch of people are pissed at me for some reason
Nope. I've never even checked out either of them
Nooooooo it is trash. I will get it as soon as they fix their lagging issues.
Simp energy
@@maresgoez That doesn't sound like a big problem for $12/year.
I haven’t watched the whole video yet. I’m guessing he’s cutting half of the video off like always. It’s like ea dlc: you get the first bit but must pay for more.
EDIT: just reached the end. I was right. No surprise there.
Your definition of "energy density" confuses it with "specific energy"
well you could also use gravimetric energy density for specific energy
There's one big problem with going to more smaller flights. Especially at busier, hub airports, there are limited landing and takeoff slots. 1 100 passenger jet takes half as many slots as 2 50 passenger prop planes. We'd probably need to build a bunch of new, though shorter, runways, which is expensive, but also politically difficult.
Electric planes have an easier time being made for STOL or even VTOL.
We already have companies trying to design "air taxis".
If Airbus or Boeing got behind it. I'm sure they could make a decent bus sized plane that could haul passengers with a very short runway.
Of course batteries, and super capacitators need to get better. I say capacitators, because I hear they are incredible useful for flight on having extreme power for certain aspects like take off.
Anyway that is the way I see it all going forward. Still think we should focus in high speed rails for dense areas.
@@dianapennepacker6854 it doesn't matter if the plane only needs 1/4 of the full length runway to operate, it still takes a full slot in the rotation. Airports and congested flight corridors can't just reconfigure at no cost for smaller flights, especially when they still have to serve the large planes as well.
'Airlines are scared of the r-word... regulations'
-Wendover 2021
@@calebnasiatka5711 no, only conservatives are
@@austinhernandez2716 So democrats where all for Trumps regulations?
The sad truth is that there is absolutely no shortage of terrible regulation, politicians are, after all, neither wise, nor angels.
Everyone should be afraid. Look what their regulations did to us in 2020.
@@Illyrien what regulations?
@@johnathin0061892 Be more specific
Was so nervous as soon as I heard that Sam was going to analyze my employer but I feel better now that I reached the end of the video. Rockland is such a tiny but beautiful place! Thanks for making this video Sam! If you ever decide to visit Rockland I might be your pilot :D
but... the electric plan in your example only holds 9 people, so the extra 11 minutes isn't much, but what about the 10 additional planes required and the time it takes all of them to take off and land and passengers to board etc.
How can people be this simple? How bout I ask it like this? If you travel distance A-B... Do you take the 1 time unit option that costs 100 units or the 2 time unit option which costs... say 30-50 units.. ot maybr even 20?? short haul small electric planes don't suddenly replace everything, but as said at the end - "the business case is just too strong"
Board times are signifficantly reduced for smaller arilines and aircrafts. Maintanence and pre flight checks are also reduced heavily for electric planes due to their being considerably less opportunity for failure. And lastly, for an airline that does less than a dozen round trips over the course of say, a 12 hour work day, 10 additional flights per week is entirely manageable.
This is amazing, because if you look at the history of commercial air travel, this is exactly how many airlines started in the 1920's and 30's with early development of arifoil and ICE power trains. Super cool.
The soundtrack has me reflecting on my whole life
i know why is it so sad ahaha
It's nice! Is there a way of knowing which songs it is?
@@mikkelkirketerp4884 Shazam
@@365Cani yes if it wasn't for the voiceover ruining it. Also I'm at work so using headphones
Ikr ...Hahaha
Maybe on a local level.Electric planes can not battle the constant weight to fuel/energy ratio.If they do not figure out how to improve the batteries and store more power on less storage we will never see a way to use these.
Hydrogen is the fuel of the future.Electric energy came to us way down the line.
Electric is a dead end, and mining Hydrogen pure enough for fuel is not a green process. Making Jet Fuel burning engines more and more efficient is the answer.
@@mikelp72 yes,but to what level?Where do we hit the wall?Hydrogen is still the element that we can both produce and find in nature in large quantities.
İ'm just an idiot but wouldn't electric planes made using current tech be like 50 to 70% battery? Add to that the dangers, i can atleast run out of a burning EV.... The biggest load in a regular plane are people and luggage, in an electric one it would be mostly battery, incredibly heavy...
@@AC-bg4cs yes,massive amount of batteries have to be there,and in case of fuel,you loose the weight when you burn it.Here 98 percent of weight is still there when it lands.
@@temistogen Doesn't seem feasible for jets... Maybe if we start putting like 20 comercial passengers in jet planes that are just as big or even bigger than normal jet planes, oh wait that isn't feasible either from a cost benefit standpoint...nvm. This would only make sense for like incredibly short flights (like they do in alaska) in single engine propellor planes.
I am still waiting for my flying car, as promised on the cover of Mechanix Illustrated magazine in June of 1955, when I was 2 years old.
You mean like helicopters and private planes? I mean, they are fun, not the easiest for people to get a license for and by specing into flight they kinda suck as ground vehicles, but they are pretty cool.
@A Z Eh, I get the joke, it's just kinda boring and played out for me. I mean, it's not like we completely failed to pursue working versions of the basic flying car idea. Honestly, we basically achieved the versions of that which we can make work societally. Like, maybe a couple more could be unlocked with cheaper flight, but as best I can tell it'd be a glorified taxi service at best.
@A Z Dude, that world would be a shit show. Just imagine all of the drunk plane crashes. It'd be madness.
Some companies are already buying the " flying cars ". Embraer already sold around 250 of them, to be delivered by 2026.
Peter Thiel's famous quote goes "they promised us flying cars, and instead we got 140 characters" or something to that extent.
Batteries being less energy dense than fuel is actually a big problem. Lithium-ion batteries are very light already, but still not close to kerosene. It’s not just some extra cost, each bit of extra weight increases the energy required to take off, and store that energy you’ll need to use heavy batteries - increasing weights again. Right now the technology just isn’t there for commercial aircraft.
Also, batteries don't get lighter as they're expended, as opposed to fuel tanks. So practical flight endurance is even more skewed in favour of combustion aircraft engines.
It's practical for < 1 hour local flights, but beyond that it doesn't work and it's not going to in the foreseeable future. If you apply current battery tech to the 737, the longest it could possibly fly is 40 minutes. There are applications for EVs and we should use them where they make sense, but air travel is very limited.
disagree....as the piece explains, while we can't replace fossil fuels for long haul fights at this time, for short haul flights it's a virtual no-brainer. As battery technologies improves, electricity as fuel will gradually expand to longer and longer flights.
As always amazing content. Couple issues with the analysis (just for debate) with respect to cape air example:
1. If the outright cost of the electric plane doubles (which I think is what you’re getting at when referencing higher ownership costs), the amortized cost will more than double if electric planes have useful lives shorter than the fuel-powered equivalent because the cost is amortized over the life of the asset. From my understanding of electric vehicles the useful life is significantly shorter than ICE vehicles.
2. I think Passenger capacity matters when it comes to airport economics re landing fees (I.e. economies of scale improves the more passengers you have). Yes electric aircraft will have quicker boarding times as only ~9 people board, but the time/effort/cost to the airport for providing flight services is the same as for a 300 passenger plane. Not sure they are willing to reduce landing fees by that much to make the cost per passenger on par with bigger planes (this is more of a problem at larger airports and not tiny ones like in the video)
3. The argument that electricity costs are negligible is not great - I like the idea of on site renewables but ultimately this is intermittent energy and it’s likely the airport will need to buy power, and as the world electrifies I’m not sure today’s power price will be indicative of future prices, especially when coal/nat gas generation is switched off.
4. Finally the example you picked is heavily subsidized by the government. Can’t generalize this case and apply more broadly.
I agree electric flying will eventually happen and first in short haul. I think you nailed it in the earlier part of the video where mentioning the focus on battery development thus far has been on cost/kwh, which suits cars, but the advancement for air needs higher power density. I’m sure it will come but it’s a little concerning not much progress (that I’m aware of) has been made on that front.
Another item we are missing is the general aviation tax charged of over 20cents per gallon which is used to keep all the navigational system outside the plain running. Wich is about 5-10% of the fuel cost. Somebody will have to pay for that.
To your first point;
Traditional aircraft need engine maintenance often and need replacement parts all the time.
Electric motors almost never fail in comparison.
In the case of batteries, having to replace a battery pack every 10 years is still a much lower overall cost than fuel/engine maintenance
I agree with point 4. Most of the subsidy would evaporate when the route is commercially viable, therefore the profit would drop back to close to zero per passenger again.
For the idea to take off, it would probably need to make money without route subsidies. However, nothing to stop the government to subsidise the route from environmental perspective.
Point 1 is probably partially addressed by other comments. Additionally, refurbished battery would have great capacity at a fraction of the costs, although more real world data required on the degradation trajectory for a definitive answer.
Point 2 is also addressed in the video. Electric plane can focus on routes that has low passenger volume to begin with and already operating (albeit with government subsidies), so those issues you mentioned would have applied to the current fleet anyway.
For point 3, I agree that ignoring or assuming electricity costs to be negligible is lazy. However, I don’t agree that electricity prices would go up because of renewables, as they are cheaper than coal/gas fired power generation. The upfront costs aren’t even higher, and apart from maintenance you don’t need to consume fuel which you have to pay for.
To be fair, add in the costs of building a mini renewable power plant in this calculation, but no need to assume any massive increase in electricity prices.
Yeah but wouldn’t the government reduce the subsidy if the airline’s cost goes down?
This was so obvious Sam didn't even bother mentioning it.
@@jholotanbest2688 i dont think it was obvious. Instead he did the opposite and said there would be this crazy number for profit which included the subsidy.
I think his point remains though. Theres no such thing as a free lunch. Even if the government reduced its subsidy, the tax payers would get a massive break so the savings are still there
Lower operating costs promote success regardless of the subsidy framework.
@@stevenrickett4333 Well, no.
The democrats will probably push a bill to subsidize electric flights on routes like from ATL to smaller places in Georgia.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Harbour Air in BC, Canada - partnered with Seattle's MagniX. The electric plane is built and has test flights already done. They had anticipated passenger flights in the air by the end of this year but the pandemic seems to have pushed them back a year.
This comment is 2 years old. Have they started yet?
@@PapaphobiaPictures nope, waiting on british columbia certification
So we are gonna get one in like 20-30 years. Battery technology needs to massively innovate so that electric planes become viable for anything that isn't short distance flying
Wendover guy: "There are no 'mom and pop' airlines."
[LoganAir has entered the chat]
Ah, the Pauls
You get a caramel wafer or tunnocks tea cake if you fly with them.
I tried to start an airplane stand in front of my house when I was 8 😋
@@리주민 I guess it didn't take off?
@@pspolygons
The paper airplane couldn't take the weight of my classmates. I started a weight loss stand afterwards 😋
"Every change we see [in these airports/megaprojects] has gone through intense planning and scrutiny" - you've never been to germany before, have you?
He actually made a video on why Berlin is so bad at airports
The future of [short haul] flying may be electric.
But there's no reasonable prospect of an Airbus going all-electric any time soon.
There is never a reasonable prospect of an impossibly giant leap of progress.
@@bdijkstra1982 Except the reason why here is physics, not a lack of progress.
@@ObjectsInMotion
Lithium Air Batteries
Hydrogen. Before battery stans rip me to shreds, a liquid hydrogen tank stores much, much more energy than any kind of electrochemical battery per unit mass. Airbus are threatening to build some prototype planes that use hydrogen as a fuel, apparently using 'hybrid hydrogen' engines, which I think means that it's partially electric and partially combustion.
Hydrogen is wildly inefficient as a fuel. Electricity might be cheap, but electrolysing it to hydrogen and liquefying it is not particularly. A hydrogen vehicle will always be more expensive to use per mile travelled than battery electric. Period. It *might* eventually be cheaper than fossil fuels, but a lot of hydrogen sold and used today is derived from fossil fuels (because reforming natural gas and venting the CO2 is cheap). Burning it is also extremely inefficient, and it's more efficient to feed it into a fuel cell to turn it back to electricity, assuming you have a good motor-driven propulsion engine.
Some might argue that the future of long-haul aviation is in synthetic fuels or biofuels. To the former I say: hydrogen *is* a synthetic fuel, and any synthetic fuels would use it as a feedstock, meaning their energy density goes up but so does the cost per joule. To the latter I say: go and watch Real Engineering's most recent video, biofuels are even less efficient than synthetic fuels (and are arguably a lobbying strategy from the American agricultural industry). Hydrogen and synthetic fuels might not be an ideal solution, but they might be a viable one.
Footnote: something that might make medium-haul zero-emissions aviation viable is structural batteries. Use carbon fibre, or a similarly strong material, as the anode/cathode and your battery itself is as strong as steel. Strong enough to *replace* the structural steel in the body of the aircraft. Their energy density is lower than other kinds of Li ion batteries, and it's still early stuck-in-the-lab days, but you'll save literal tons of weight using structural battery packs and we'll hopefully see longer ranges (and shorter charging times) as a result.
@@gigabyte2248 structural graphene batteries would be perfect for electric aircrafts.
Hmmm. . . Yes. . .
This video definitely is. . .
Half as inter- *invincible theme plays*
Jesus, this background music is making me cry. D:
"Music" in quotes. I am not sure what to call it but it is so irritating to whatever percentage of the population I belong, that I perceive it as the foreground sound rather than background. It is also frenetic, to the point that the rapid talking in the foreground is utterly excluded from my attention.
My solution was turning off the sound and turning on the CC close captioning. Then, to offset fast talk, I set the playback speed to 75%. No, that did not work, try 50%. No that did not work either. The automatically generated subtitles have errors and apparently difficulty in interpreting the sound. Some stay on the screen too long and others flash too briefly.
So, only out of curiousity, at this point, I reset speed and sound to normal and just observed without making any attempt to understand or even interpret. Then I noticed that the graphics running at 10X, showing sped up human activity while background and large objects are still or pan by slowly, lends very much to the frenetic feeling of the production.
So why all the zippiness. Well, said the tortoise, "It is to give the impression that a great deal of information is being delivered to the viewer/listener. With such a rich stream of information we feel obligated to listen carefully (with all our might, in fact) for as long as it takes for the point to be made."
really? I see nature scares and baby critters at play in my mind with this ")
It definitely belongs more in a feature film than it does in a mini-doc about airplanes.
I didn't even realize there was background music until I saw this comment lol
14:40 good that batteries dont age and you dont have to factor in their replacement in the budgeting...
Most people's phones start to lose the ability to hold a charge dramatically in just a few years, apply that same concept to cars and planes and it becomes a nightmare. Imagine your gas tank shrinking by half in just a few years of owning a car.
You can design around it though. It's possible to build a phone with a battery that lasts 10 years but it would cost more and nobody would pay because they want to replace their phone after three years anyway. Tesla's Powerwall uses the same types of batteries but comes with a 10 year warranty, so it's definitely doable, but of course lots of people complain that the Powerwall is too expensive so there you go. But you can bet just like EVs and taxis, airlines will factor in replacement batteries to their maintenance costs in just the same way as they factor in the cost of all the other parts that need replacing on either type of plane. If it still works out more cost effective then they will proceed, if not, they won't.
@@Berkeloid0 have you ever read the Powerwall waranty? You can find it in google....
It guarantees 70% load capacity after 10 years OR after a certain energy storage volume ... basically frequent deep-cycling, i.e. what you do with your phone or with an electric plane, is excluded...
@@NuclearSavety Yeah but if you work out the storage volume it works out as one full cycle a day, which is what the product is designed to do. But I'm not defending the Powerwall, just using it to make the point that if you want a battery device to last longer it's possible, but it costs more than most people are willing to pay.
Of course in this scenario it makes little sense, because the way you make a battery last for 10 years is to design in a lot of extra capacity, so as it degrades the original capacity is still available. But in the case of an aircraft that would mean carrying around a lot of extra weight, so you'd be better off with a smaller, cheaper battery that needs replacing more frequently, so you aren't carry around as much dead weight.
@@ZackFrisbee you do realize that all EVs have an 8 year warranty on the batteries right??
Kind of kills your false facts doesn't it??
Stop spreading misinformation and talking shit.
Viewers: How many times are you going to use the word "therefore"?
Sam from Wendover Productions: Yes.
I live in Australia which has a lot of small regional airports and I've been thinking about this for the past two years. I personally hope some of the Australian based startups get in on the electric aviation production game.
High speed rail would be significantly better in terms of cost and the environment. The problem is the airline lobby is too powerful in Australia and any mention of high speed rail gets shot down.
@@m136dalie High speed rail can connect City Hubs but is too expensive to connect rural communities. I think electrified small commuter aircraft can make a difference in remote locations
Electric planes would make a huge difference for smaller low capacity rural routes in Australia. Particularly because most rural airports in Australia have ample space and the perfect environment for on-site solar power generation capacity.
@@Somerandom1922 My thoughts exactly.
9:30 There is still the issue of charging time. Petro fueled aircraft can take on fuel quickly. Unless the airlines buy additional battery packs that can be quick swapped small electric vehicles couldn’t be used.
15:08 It will need to charge sometime. It has a range of 440 nm on new batteries.
EV range also decreases with battery life, and he didn't figure the cost of new batteries every 4 years into maintenance costs, the equivalent of a engine rebuild in price.
just swap the pack....faster than fueling a jet.
@@dangrass The cost of multiple batteries would negate the fuel savings.
As the holder of an MSME with 30 year’s experience in aerospace design and flight test, I'm stuck somewhere between horse feathers and opium for the new age masses. This offering is sufficiently misleading as to be labeled shameful.
Which offering exactly?
If you mean this analysis is piss poor, I agree with you. I am working towards a doctorate in aerospace engineering, specifically propulsion. There is so much handwavey economics bullshit here, I’m actually rather angry
Yeah, I was smelling BS, too.
@@geoffreysvensson9768 Where? He didn't say anything that is untrue.
@@rkan2 Simply removing fuel costs is misleading. Electricity does still cost money; a lot less, but it's not free. It's also not accurate to assume the gov will just continue to pay that same subsidy if operating costs get slashed.
If the profit on that route would go up that much, surely the subsidies would massively shrink.
Of course, but that wasn't the point.
Well yes, but that wouldn't take into effect until after their 4 year bid runs out. So... that still a lot of profit. And since the costs would be so much lower, any airline that didn't have the same margins wouldn't even be able to compete, gauranteeing the electric one to win the next 4 year contract. All around wins.
I’d like to see numbers on that “electricity is effectively free” claim.
It's effectively free when someone else pays for it, I guess. It's not free to generate. It's not free to "alternate energy." It's not free to store. It's not free to develop a product that will use it. Hmmm.
@cavscout 1/100 * 800 = 8, I don't care anymore if it is 100, 110 or 80 the end number can be ignored
@@cavscout1739 It's also not "free" environmentally in any sense of the word.
Offsetting jet fuel for coal plants in the name of saving the planet
I could imagine that it's even more expansive to power airplanes by electricity than with fuel. Jetfuel is a lot cheaper than gasoline and even EVs don't have a huge price advantage on fuel compared to normal cars.
This is really cool, you should do more videos on airlines/aviation, just a thought.
And what about turn around time, leave the airplane charging for hours before next flight?!
Couldn't you swap out the batteries in-between flights at the airlines to allow for optimum on-site charging and quicker turnaround?
@@icedragonaftermath That's not feasible with flight critical hardware. It takes an airline over an hour to replace a simple light bulb in the cockpit. Never mind tens of thousands of pounds of batteries.
@@otm646 That bulb you’re talking About isn’t designed to be changed in under an hour. The battery pack wil likely be, and housed unerneath the airplane and be changed in very little time.
Also as long as boarding stil takes a lot of time, It is feasable. Besides that, the pilots Will be able to continue their work in the cockpit while the battery pack is changed.
Range: 815 km (506 mi, 440 nmi) +45min IFR reserve
The company plans for recharging to be carried out by mobile charging vehicles, similar to aviation fuel trucks. Each hour of flight time is expected to require a charging time of 30 minutes.
Quote from Wiki: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eviation_Alice
Total flight time is about 2 hours.
With empty battery about 1 hour for full charge (>800 km)
The charging speed won't be an issue.
The day that electric engines and batteries are lighter than combustion engines and fuel is the day all planes will become electric. That is a very, very long way off.
not just lighter, but space efficient
Electric engines are already way lighter than normal. Batteries will never be lighter than fuel, we will have to find ways to circumvent the problem..
@ChairForce hydrogen is much less dense than fuel so there would be either a speed penalty due to bigger crosssection or limited range.
@ChairForce The problem with hydrogen is that nobody has yet invented a really good way of storing it. It's only really compressed into a tank which means you need a huge heavy reinforced tank to cope with the pressure from only a very small amount of fuel. Gasoline and jet fuel by virtue of being liquid at atmospheric pressure have the molecules packed in so close together that unlike a gas like hydrogen, you can fit a lot more of it into a small tank. What needs to happen is someone has to come up with a new chemical has a lot of hydrogen in its molecular structure, is a liquid, and is very easy to convert to and from pure hydrogen. Once this happens you can pump a tank full of this liquid and convert it back into pure hydrogen to feed the fuel cell. Until then, conventional fuels pack so much more energy into a much smaller volume that they will be here to stay until someone solves that hydrogen puzzle.
It will never happen, physic is a bitch.
I do not think the business case is that strong. If you must ground your plane for an hour because it must recharge. The business case goes away. A TBM 930 has a range of 1500+ miles. Which means they can refuel at night or once a day. That dramatically cuts into the profitability of an electric plane, who has to sit for an hour after a roundtrip.
Energy density is by volume. You mean specific energy for mass.
@@74RN31L Yup, needless semantics from the comment above.
According to Wikipedia, Energy density can mean both, depending on context.
Semantics is how journalists can fool everyday people every time they report on a new battery with improved energy density, knowing full well there is no weight improvement. Precise language makes the world a better place.
It’s a great day when wendover uploads
There are so many wild assumptions in this (future capacity of batteries, operating costs of these planes, success of random startups, ...) that it is baffling to me how you can possibly come to such a certain conclusion.
Especially when everyone's cell phone battery starts degrading to the point where it barely holds a charge for 2 hours after just a couple of years. Imagine your car's gas tank shrinking every single year.
@@ZackFrisbee More like every refill.
@@ZackFrisbee you can control the battery to ensure only 80 % is filled up all times.
One of your best videos yet. Keep up the good work.
SUGGESTION: Hey Wendover you should talk about joby aviations
Still think that nuclear jets are a great idea, designs have already been drawn and even flown, like, 50 years ago
Uhh yeah, no.
Those are disasters waiting to happen.
If one goes down, a nuke occurs.
bruh
I am a supporter of nuclear reactor. But nuclear planes sounds like a really really bad idea. Imagine if the plane crashes or explodes.
@@Dexter037S4 not how it works, but please keep spreading ignorance and misinformation on the topic.
@@freddy04123 I mean, a nuclear plane is basically a missile with a dirty bomb in it.
Nevermind the environmental impact of lithium & cobalt mining and expired battery disposal.
Yep, the "one little thing" everyone forgets because ideology is king. Especially when a battery with these requirements being charged and discharged multiple times a day, often working in extreme temperatures and also being reliable enough with little to no diminished capacity probably dies after several months of use, and it'll also be pretty expensive.
Oh and if it catches fire, well, have fun. You think burning jet fuel is bad? Try lithium fire...
Well, i see were your going, but after the mining of fuels it would actually be more green especally with the solar Cape Air has hinted at.
@@amunak_ Lithium Ion batterys dont catch on fire as much, but you only see one in the media, Take a guess? Nobody would care if you put gas fires in newspapers
Lithium is often mined from salt flats and large evaporation pools, but greener, more environmentally-friendly methods are a very hot topic in research. Cobalt and its sourcing is a known issue, it's being used in smaller and smaller proportions (particularly for high energy density batteries) and it's the biggest target for recycling (not too difficult, because it's ferromagnetic). Nickel is going to become increasingly important, too. The biggest rising demand for batteries is in electric cars, and a lot of these are likely to eventually be lithium iron phosphate batteries, with no cobalt or nickel involved.
Li ion batteries degrade over their lifespan, but when they're retired from electric vehicles (road, sea or sky), they often still have years of life left in them as second-life stationary batteries. Tesla's Powerwalls might be built new, but you can get domestic and business batteries that are second-life Nissan Leaf/Renault Zoe batteries. Stationary Li ion batteries are the perfect complement to solar power, allowing you to store the energy and use it in the evening, and might one day be mass-mobilised as virtual peaker plants to keep the grid stable.
When they do truly reach the end of their life, Li ion batteries are surprisingly recyclable. At the moment, recycling volumes are limited, but recovering the metals from the batteries is really not that difficult, particularly if you site your facility somewhere with lots of clean electricity (e.g. Norway) and use the energy from the partially-discharged packs you need to recycle. They're often just crushed, then the powders separated by magnetism, then conventional separation techniques - think of the powder like a super-rich artificial ore.
Final point: people who question the environmental and socio-political ethics of Li ion batteries tend not to concern themselves too much with the environmental and socio-political ethics of fossil fuels. Extraction is dirty and easily goes wrong - Deepwater Horizon, anyone? Once it's extracted, refining is a very energy-intensive process, too, and the electricity/fuel is rarely sourced as scrupulously as battery production. Fossil fuels have a long history of transport issues too - I'm gonna namedrop the Exxon Valdez, but also mention the methane that leaks from wells, refineries and pipelines, with a greater greenhouse gas potential than carbon dioxide. Then, on top of that, burning fossil fuels emits a load more CO2, SO2, NOx and particulates, disproportionately in populated areas, but also at high altitudes, where they disperse more readily and becomes more potent as pollutants.
Electric vehicles are not absolutely green, and the best thing you can do for the environment is absolutely to just travel less, but they are a long, long way ahead of fossil fuel vehicles.
I think we will have recycling solutions for batteries because of their demand and it would be economical sense to recycle them for their valuable materials.
Also a large part of lithium is mined from brine(i.e sea water waste after desalination).
Even though this isn't mined from sea water waste as water scarcity increases so does desalination plants becomes a necessity so more and more brine is produced leading to more lithium which inturn helps in getting more batteries.
Cobalt mining is really bad for the environment though.
Also there is a interesting Ted talk from a scientist/entrepreneur who is currently building and running a test for large scale grid batteries that are made entirely of dirt/chemical waste.
Even though they are not as efficient or light as comparable lithium ion batteries they are cheaper to produce at scale and don't use copious amounts of lithium, Cobalt and nickel for a storage solution that more or less stays in place.
With the advent of electric energy we are in between a transition stage and am very optimistic about the future.
It seems like combustion engines powered by synthetic/bio fuel produced with renewable energy is the way to go, but it's not something talked about often for some reason.
Because no one likes to admit that despite the fact we're pretty fly as far as technology is concerned we're still bound by the harsh laws of nature.
Not to mention the tech sector has more spin doctors working for it than any other industry, Google Facebook and Microsoft manage to maintain good public images mostly because of how new they are and how they evolved much... much later having all the extremely effective tools the other companies "invented" to maintain their public image.
Because that's still carbon positive and doesn't solve anything. Unless you're taking the carbon for your fuel directly out of the atmosphere.
Airbus already promised a hydrogen fleet by 2035. It’s already happening
@@cordellchase2023 Such as by plants growing biomass?
“…will turn Cape Air into the highest operating margin airline” etc. UNTIL the government removes the subsidy BECAUSE of that profit margin and drives it back to $1.06 per passenger.
I advise you check the actual prive for that flight on cape air. I did and cuoldn't find 1 date with under 100 usd one way or under 200 roundtrip! This is a simplistic and flawed analsys... plus it's guided to showing you something that is not YET the case! Electri is the future but it's shown as a golden goose already existent! That's not quite true! Also.. the diea of saying.. carbon emissions.. well.. so far electric is pretty close (as you get electricity from coal or gas power plants mostly or you get it from wind turbines that require massive maintenance, parts and that means carbon emissions for manufacturing etc etc)!
@@bboyjunyor Even if all the electricity for electric planes and cars come from coal plants, it's easier to treat the exhaust gases and do carbon capture in a single chimney than in a jet plane or millions of car exhausts. And a big static powerplant it's able to operate at nearly twice the efficiency than a car/plane even using the same fuel because it's not constantly changing his regimen and you can install regenerators and cogeneration that reutilize waste heat.
Taking your plane and sidelining it for a few hours while it recharges would play absolute havoc with pilot's hours of service.
And a subsided route now becomes a competitive route. How many more routes will be opened as a result. (Plus the fueled planes will not be able to compete)
Maintenance of the engines would drop sure, but you’re forgetting the batteries. With modern lithium ion batteries, they will lose capacity over time and will need replacing. That’s perhaps 1000 charge-discharge cycles, though it could be 5 times larger or smaller depending on the battery design. That’s an expensive event every year or two for each plane.
Battery recycling is becoming more feasible and less expensive, hopefully recycling processes can make batteries far more affordable in the future.
@@aerodynamicist4 I think I’d look towards ceramic lithium batteries instead. Or even better, some sort of battery chemistry that doesn’t require lithium mining.
Imagine that ur flight is in the middle of the pacific, then u hear " low battery"
Or the battery temp sensor puts the whole system in a kind of limp mode to prevent a battery fire while over the Pacific.
Why the fuck would you be in electric plane, which won't have a long range, way off over the largest ocean on the planet?
Might as well ask what I'm going to do in my Tesla when I look at the window and see I'm driving in a mine field.
Or just flying in the Rockies, you start to ice so you throw on your heaters, which very quickly drains your batteries.
The only way you're going to be in the middle of the pacific in a battery electric airplane is if you took off from a carrier.
i will wait for the first million miles and count the accidents. then decide.
Eviation is growing like crazy. Their newe design is sleek af and already got orders from companies all across the world
Next video: How Wendover Started a 100% Electric Airline
Kyle let me take you out to dinner
@@iLoveBoysandBerries But what is your purpose?
@@kylecramer8489 haha to take you out for some beers. What's your ig?
It would be funny because...
The whole video is simply garbage because what said at 12:55
A good turboprop aircraft engine has at least 50% or even higher efficiency.
Jet A fuel cost. 1.75 USD/USG = 0.46 USD / liter = 0.575 USD/kg
1 kg jet A means 43.6 MJ/kg = 12.77 kWh
50% efficiency 6.38 kWh
This means 0.575 USD for 6.38 kWh ---> 1 kWh = 0.09 USD
Aham...
Lets assume just 90% charging and discharging and 90% engine efficiency for electric plane.
The average electricity rate is 13.19 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the US.
So it means 13.19/0.81 for 1 kWh USED energy 0.165 USD
The electric fuel cost is not 0.
In fact it makes more expensive the flying.
@@molnibalage83 Why do you keep spamming the comments? We got it the first couple times.
the back ground music its Legendary, that melody makes ear phones best place to be in ears , could you please name it ?
Infinity Ripple - Cause
For once, I actually find myself disagreeing with your video. In terms of capacity and weight, battery technology is very limited, and the only flights that will exist in an affordable, low carbon society are the long-haul, overseas routes that HSR can't effectively substitute for.
Also, as a person who grew up in Midcoast Maine, the Rockland - Boston service is a waste of taxpayer's money. The service is mostly used by wealthy people who summer on the islands, the fares don't compete with Bangor/Portland for budget oriented travelers, and the layover in Logan is far from ideal for anyone who isn't going to Boston.
The route is also already served by the Amtrak Downeaster and the Concord Coach buses, which are significantly cheaper and take about 4 1/2 hours, which is not significantly longer than flying when TSA lines, check in, baggage claims, and commuting are considered in the equation.
Needless to say, in any progressive society, the barriers to long-distance travel need to be kept low, and with a few isolated exceptions, electric planes are simply not an adequate or economically viable alternative for scheduled, commercial air travel.
High speed rail only makes sense for large connections, otherwise it becomes very expensive. For countries that don't have extensive rail networks already in place, it will probably be cheaper to have electric planes than to build new rail
Exactly. Batteries will never reach the energy density of fossil fuels. At that point you're making a bomb.
We should instead be focusing on replacing short/mid haul flights with rail wherever possible.
I think trying to completely eliminate fossil fuels is a pipe dream unless we literally break physics as we know it. Fortunately if we take steps to eliminate them where it makes sense, we won't need to completely get rid of them.
The trouble with the Rockland example is, as soon as an airline adopted electric and showed better profit margins the government would get rid of the subsidy.
13:45 Rich Rebuilds might've wanna say something about this.
Rich Rebuildts is a load of garbage and not an indication of anything in real life.
One thing you’ve overlooked, it take 5 minutes to refuel a Cessna 402, it definitely does not take 5 mins to recharge an electric plane. So that 402 can fly to Rockford and back, whilst the electric one is still on the ramp in Boston recharging. All of a sudden, one 402 worth of work requires 3 or 4 electric ones to do the same work.
How long does it take to get the passengers/lugage off and the new passengers/luggage on ?
I was thinking the same thing. Airlines try to get as many flying hours out of their planes as possible which means running them non-stop - refuel, switch crew, keep going. If they can no longer do that, their capital costs will go through the roof.
@@catprog I can tell you for one of "Europe favorites airline" that does it reliably for under 25 minutes with 189 passengers out and 189 in.
I'm not sure if they'll be issues Skilling it up but in that two-seater they showed at the beginning of the video they are able to drop the battery pack
Batteries suck but the charge time shouldn't be a problem. Just swap batteries.
That stock footage of the guy sitting in the bathtub mad at his laptop is hilarious. I can just imagine his face when that concept was suggested. Lol
So true about short distance flying being more expensive than long distance. A short distance flight from my school to my home costs $1,300 round trip. About the same cost to fly the entire length of my country return.