I’m pretty sceptical about ground effect planes, there’s a very good reason why they’ve never really taken off, despite so many countries and organisations giving them a try over the years, but I’d love to know what everyone else thinks.
I’m pretty sceptical about ground effect planes, there’s a very good reason why they’ve never really taken off, despite so many countries and organisations giving them a try over the years, but I’d love to know what everyone else thinks.
This is basically a plane, right? And would be priced similar to a flight on a 12 seater plane, or perhaps even higher if they are taking you to central Auckland and saving you a taxi.
Although this brings Whangārei within commuting distance, I don’t imagine it will be priced appropriately for people do daily commuting?
I’m also curious how far their batteries take them. So they can do Whangārei to Auckland in 35 mins, can they turn around and go back or do they need to spend 6 hours charging?
Should be a lot more efficient than a plane, and able to carry more with a smaller wingspan and less power required.
https://youtu.be/yVdH_dYlVB8
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXvxJNOIXBsMyYPykdtoWRj1m5DRn4CNx
That’s awesome, thanks for sharing! For your first link about the Soviet programme, they talk about all the issues, and hypothesize that getting these working properly probably requires larger aircraft than has ever been built, because these can fly higher under ground effect, up to 10 or 20 metres.
Given the original article here states these tiny planes will fly 10 metres above the sea, I am skeptical that they will properly operate under ground effect. Wikipedia states that the effect is about half of the craft’s wingspan, putting it at a lot less than the 10 metres claimed.
And as mentioned in this comment chain, the nice videos in the article are actually all little models and it seems they haven’t actually built any of these craft at full size, so the chances are pretty low that anything will actually come of it.
Kinda, although an aircraft that operates exclusively in ground effect is explicitly not an aircraft as far as CAA is concerned, so they’re outside their rules.
As far as recharge time is concerned, I assume they would be able to fast charge in half an hour or so, like any other electric vehicle.
Interesting!
For EVs to charge in 30 mins, you need some pretty beefy power infrastructure, it’s not something available at residential houses. So if the battery capacity is a lot higher, you might not be able to get charged in that short amount of time. I’d expect power usage to be much higher for this plane than an EV, given it’s a lot larger.
But now I think about it, it might not be that much larger. Having just read up on the concept of ground-effect I guess it may be more efficient than an EV, so perhaps you’d get away with batteries about twice as large as a long-range EV? Given the right setup you could probably still do an 80% charge in under an hour, so flying each way on a 2 hour schedule would be pretty doable. Run a second one to double the frequency.
They’re operating from the CBD, so getting power to a charging station is relatively straightforward, and there are technologies available to recharge a vehicle quite fast, there is a standard being developed for trucks that will be over a megawatt of charging capacity. The east by West electric boat uses two chargers, from my understanding.
Haha can’t believe I didn’t think of that. I guess there is a battery pack in each wing, no reason not to plug in two chargers.
I also didn’t consider that while EV hyper chargers pull a lot of power, the sites often have multiple, so a larger amount of power is available than what is going through one charger. Charging is probably not as big of a deal as I originally assumed.
Probably the only limitation is how they prevent the battery getting too hot during charging, but I’m pretty sure a lot of EVs already have active battery cooling so an extension of that is probably fine as well.
I don’t know if they split the pack, or just have multiple chargers working side by side. I know Tesla have done similar when testing the Semi, just use multiple chargers at once.
The vehicle being charged already tells the charger what to do anyway.