We had a great meeting last Saturday and Dr. Seeley gave an excellent presentation.
I wish more of you would have been there.
His presentation covered a lot of ground (or maybe I should say air).
The research on commuting patterns, traffic congestion, average travel times, trip speeds and airport locations was very enlightening.
Even if everyone drove an EV, we would still have commute traffic congestion using our 2 dimensional travel paradigm.
By adding a third dimension of altitude and combining it with EV technology, lightweight but safe aircraft with capacity of 1 – 4 passengers could solve the congestion problem. Rather than have a few large airports in locations that are not near most commuters, he described “pocket” airports for small aircraft that would fit on a 2 acre plot. Many of these could be located where they would be convenient to where most people live and work.
For example, he showed an aerial map of the Santa Rosa vicinity where as few as 17 pocket airports could allow air commuters from that area to the San Francisco peninsula and East Bay to fly to work instead of drive. This would remove enough cars from the Golden Gate and San Rafael bridges to allow the rest of the automobile traffic to travel at the speed limit instead of the current stop-and-go rush hour speeds. That’s an interesting oxymoron: stop-and-go rush hour….
Recent advances in lithium battery technology, lightweight composite materials and motor design have made electric aircraft possible.
A few prototypes have been built and tested and one eastern European company called Pipistrel is already selling their production model electric airplane: the Electro Taurus G2. This is a two passenger model and can fit inside a solar trailer that can completely recharge the batteries in 5 hours.
They call this concept “Flying For Free” (although the up-front costs would take a long time to amortize). Pipistrel already has several dealers in the USA.
http://www.pipistrel.si/plane/taurus-electro/overview
For the recent Green Flight Challenge, Pipistrel combined two of these planes side-by side to create a 4 passenger version that successfully completed the competition. This design is called the Taurus G4 and was listed among the Popular Science best innovations of 2011.
http://www.pipistrel.si/photo/7554
Dr. Seeley went on to discuss their annual CAFE Foundation symposium that focuses on topics such as propeller noise and fuel efficiency.
Research in propeller design has made electric aircraft nearly silent so a pocket airport would not disturb nearby residents.
Using hub motors in the landing gear wheels supports shorter take-offs and landings (using the hub motors for regenerative braking) and allows use of a smaller propeller motor to maintain airspeed. He even discussed an aircraft design that would allow for easily removable wings that have a shape such that many of them could be stored in a small space (like nested shopping carts).
This would help keep the pocket airport size small since less room would be needed for aircraft storage.
On-board navigation systems can provide autonomous flight even when visibility is not possible due to night time flight or heavy clouds.
Time normally spent driving can be used for productive work on a portable computer or a text-enabled device since the aircraft can literally fly itself.
While this sounded scary to a couple of people in our audience, this technique is essentially the same one safely used by commercial airlines for their auto-pilots.
Another possibility that was presented is the idea of air taxis that would get passengers to their destination quickly by avoiding ground traffic.
The pilot (taxi driver) could make many trips per day using a battery swap technique such as that currently being demonstrated by Better Place.
This would also make the pocket airports more productive since the planes would spend more time in the air instead of parked and waiting for the passenger’s return trip.
For those who missed it, I may give a quick overview of this topic and show a few of Dr. Seeley’s slides at the December 10 SJ EAA holiday party at the Hyundai Dealership in San Jose.
See our website EVents page for details on that event.
Our website will be updated in a couple of days.
Adios,
Jerry Pohorsky
EAASV Chapter President
www.eaasv.org
Source eeasv
Related posts:
Recent Comments