Crossover Preparing for Market Re-Entry

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Hybrid Aircraft, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Teofilo Leite introduced his Crossover, a touring motorglider powered by two Emrax motors, several years ago.  This video from six years ago shows how it was configured then.  Crossover has gone through several changes in its mode of propulsion since then and has become the svelte form that expresses a need to fly. In its original configuration, Crossover’s flaps, landing gear and motors extended and retracted, a neat bit of packaging in the slender fuselage.  The airplane went through several changes, including one variant, shown at Aero 2014, that had a Rotax engine driving a long carbon-fiber shaft that drove a series of belts to a tail-mounted propeller.  On the other side, a hybrid version with Rotax engine driving a generator charged the electric motor on the tail.  It was a stunning display. Under its beautiful canopy, which opens via Bluetooth command, the low-slung seating is accessible even from a wheelchair.  Carbon molded bucket seats “are shaped for long journeys …

Floating Over the Danube: The Vision of the Little Tailor of Ulm Lives

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

The beautiful blue Danube River of Strauss waltz fame, “…Rises in the Black Forest mountains of western Germany and flows for some 1,770 miles (2,850 kilometers) to its mouth on the Black Sea. Along its course, it passes through nine countries: Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1811, Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, a tailor in the city of Ulm near the headwaters of the second longest river in Europe, tried a novel idea – flying across the river on a nicely sewn-together hang glider.  His splashdown marked the end of his aeronautical career, but made him famous and an unlikely harbinger of things to come. City fathers have announced, “In the spirit of Berblinger, and continuing his vision, the City of Ulm aims to promote innovative developments in general aviation that makes it possible to perform an environmentally sustainable long-distance flight.  The long-distance objective is a competition flight following the course of the Danube along its whole length from source to mouth, as free of …