EV World announced a new electric para-motor, complete with a new motor, composite mounts, and a series of battery pack setups. Made in France, a complete setup with parasail, motor, controller, batteries and controls costs 14,210 euros ($16,057). This may seem pricey, but consider that a paramotor can be carried in a pickup or SUV, needs no airport, and is truly “free flight,” avoiding a lot of the rules that encumber much of general aviation. George Blottin, the founder of Aeronature, a parasail and paramotor training site in southern France, wanted something that would avoid the noise and occasional failure of two-and-four-stroke engines. Electric motors fit that bill, and he worked with a participant on the Airbus e-Fan project to create one that met the specialized needs of paramotoring. His firm, Exomo, can provide the 15 kilowatt motor with a variety of battery packs, ranging from a 15-minute, 25 Amp-hour unit, through a 30- to 45-minute, 45 Amp-hour pack to …
Fuel Cells for Taxiing
What seemed like an easy transition a few years ago has been delayed by one developer. “Safran and Honeywell have delayed by two years the planned entry into service of their electric green taxiing system (EGTS), a device designed to enable an airplane to taxi with its engines shut down. Aviation International News (AIN) quoted a spokesperson as saying, “The team is still working on the program with a goal of certification in 2018 and entry into service shortly after.” The system uses motors on the main gear to enable taxiing under power. One of several competing systems, WheelTug, has motors on the nose gear only. Wheeltug uses a Boeing 737-800 as a testbed for the certification program. A United States company with manufacturing apparently based in Gibraltar, WheelTug claims orders for 985 systems by 22 airlines. Another system, TaxiBot, was developed by Israel Aerospace Industries in cooperation with France’s TLD, Germany’s LufthansaLEOS, the ground-handling component of the airline. The …
Perlan 2 Flies
Perlan 2, the pressurized sailplane destined to attempt flights to the edge of space, made its first test hop Wednesday, September 23 at Redmond, Oregon. It was towed to 5,000 feet above Redmond Municipal Airport, stayed aloft for about a half-hour, and alighted perfectly under the expert guidance of James (“Jim”) Payne, Chief Pilot for the Airbus-sponsored project. Morgan Sandercock, Co-pilot and Project Manager, rode the back seat and had a turn at the controls. According to post-flight chat, James and Morgan found things to their liking, with everything, including the huge dive brakes, working as designed and as simulations predicted. A video crew, on hand to capture the event, used a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter to follow Perlan 2 on tow and through the flight, and on-board cameras captured the release from the towplane and the precise touchdown. At all times, the varied beauty of central Oregon formed a backdrop to the event. Designed by Greg Cole and built …
Airbus e-Fan Prepared Well for Today’s Cross-Channel Flight
106 years after Louis Bleriot took off into a foggy morning and pointed the nose of his Model XI toward the Dover coast, Airbus celebrates the event with an anniversary flight of their e-Fan prototype, now sporting a bigger, more powerful battery pack, lightened airframe and lighter electrical components. Their press release carefully avoids mentioning Hugues Duval’s flight the day before, apparently done to upstage the e-Fan’s trip. It does claim credit for making the first cross-channel flight in a “twin-engine electric plane,” even though Duval’s Cri-Cri was powered by twin Electravia motors. “At 11am on a calm, sunny summer morning, the Airbus E-Fan touched down in Calais to enter its name in the record books. The all-electric plane became the first twin-engine electric plane taking off by its own power to negotiate the English Channel, more than 100 years after Louis Blériot had first made the intrepid journey. “Travelling in the opposite direction to the pioneering Frenchman and powered by lithium-ion …
Electric Cri-Cri Crosses English Channel
Michael Coates, the U. S. General Distributor for Pipistrel Aircraft, sent the following missive from Ivo Boscarol, General Manager and Founder of the Slovenian company, now in its 26th year. “Dear All, “It is my pleasure to inform you that our friend Hugues Duval after reading the information that Pipistrel was blocked in flying across the English Channel today became the first electric aircraft to cross the English Channel in his CRI-CRI E-Cristaline Electric aircraft. “As Duval already had the permanent permit to fly his aircraft there was no need to ask for a permit to fly over the English Channel, but only to fill the flight plan. It was possible to keep the flight information secret up to the end. “From the available information that we have, shortly after the flight announcement, an order was issued to stop him but he did not respect it and he successfully crossed the channel this evening, 9. July 2015 in the first flight …
EAS IX: Additive Manufacturing Parts Flying on Airbuses
Scott Sevcik, Aerospace and Defense Business Development Manager for Stratasys, gave EAS IX participants a look into the most advanced aircraft manufacturing techniques currently available, and what might be possible in the near future. Traditional manufacturing techniques have relied on subtractive techniques, starting with an aluminum billet, for instance, and sawing, filing and sanding away anything that doesn’t belong on the finished part. Anyone who’s worked in a shop knows the barrels and buckets of metal shavings that fill up quickly. What if there were no materials to be recycled at the end of a production run? Additive manufacturing (AM) is a way to produce parts that grow during the process, and that don’t leave much, or any, debris afterward. Scott explained that a namesake, S. Scott Crump, invented fused deposition modeling (FDM), the 3D printing process on which most desktop 3D printers rely. He also founded Stratsys, Ltd. in 1989 with his wife Lisa. He explained the Stratasys acquired …
EAS IX: Airbus Looks to a Light Electric Future
Ken McKenzie, listed as Deputy Chairman of Airbus US, has served as Vice President for Airbus Customer Services and as Chief Operating Officer for Airbus Americas, Inc. This high-powered individual comes across as a relaxed, congenial soul, though, and led attendees at the ninth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium through an overview of developments in light electric aircraft to come from the aviation giant. The e-Fan is the most visible effort for Airbus’s electric aircraft work so far, but the company is intent on carrying out a full E-aircraft program as part of its commitment to the European Commission’s Flightpath 2050 program,. which bullet-points these important goals for the next 35 years: “1. In 2050 technologies and procedures available allow a 75% reduction in CO2 emissions per passenger kilometer to support the ATAG (Air Transport Action Group) target10 and a 90% reduction in NOx emissions. The perceived noise emission of flying aircraft is reduced by 65%. These are relative to the …
Good News and a Bright Future from EAS IX
Sitting next to your editor for the first day of CAFE’s ninth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium, Paul Bertorelli from AVweb, took copious notes, made sound recordings, and during coffee and lunch breaks and in after-hours sessions, interviewed the accomplished faculty at the Symposium. His thorough and far-reaching reports appear in his last several days’ postings to AVweb. Having stressed mightily while attempting to take understandable notes from each speaker’s talk, your editor can only be impressed by Paul’s super reportorial abilities, and his communicating the scope and importance of what took place at EAS IX. From your editor’s perspective, several significant things took place this year. Senior leadership from Airbus and Siemens presented talks affirming their companies’ commitment to making progress in electric aviation, with future plans to develop two and four-seat aircraft for European and American markets from Airbus, and to produce a range of light-weight, commercially-available motors from Siemens. Siemens has 343,000 employees worldwide and revenues of 101.2 …
Japan’s First Electric Aircraft
JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, has been developing a multi-discipline approach to creating an electric light aircraft, much like efforts at Airbus. Like Airbus, its first efforts use a modified existing airframe, the Diamond Dimona HK36 TTC-ECO motorglider. Unlike Airbus, the organization has developed its own powerplant, reporting on March 14, 2014, that they had completed performance testing of the electronic propulsion system for small aircraft, in a final test program that lasted into late 2013. JAXA reports, “For the tests, researchers installed an aircraft motor system designed by JAXA in a 6.5-m x 5.5-m low-speed wind tunnel and measured motor shaft power, motor efficiency, propeller thrust, the temperatures of various motor system parts, and other values. The data showed that the system had a maximum motor output of 63 kW (kilowatts) and motor efficiency levels of 94% or higher, indicating that the motor demonstrates sufficient performance for manned flight. Researchers were also able to confirm that the system …
EAS IX to be A Gala Gathering
Dr. Seeley sent this along today. On May 1, 2, 2015, the world’s leading experts will converge for the 9th Annual CAFE Electric Aircraft Symposium in the beautiful Sonoma Wine Country. The confirmed presenters include: Airbus on “The e-Fan Design” Michigan’s Satki3 CEO Ann Marie Sastry on “Solid State Energy Storage” Italy’s Eric Raymond of GFC I Team-eGenius on “Sunstar and the SunSeeker Duo” Slovenia’s Tine Tomazic of GFC I Team Pipistrel USA on “Converting GA Aircraft to Electric Propulsion” UCR’s Zach Favors on “Beach Sand for Long Cycle Life Li-ion Batteries” Northrop-Grumman’s J. Philip Barnes on “Regenerative Electric Flight” NASA’s Dr. Eric Darcy on “Battery Safety” Ford/Ricardo’s Neil Johnson on “Li-ion BMS & Gauging” Launchpoint’s Michael Ricci on “Propulsion by Wire” Also expected are Northrop-Grumman’s Barnaby Wainfan on “Low Aspect Ratio Electric Aircraft”, Ray Pekar of Autoliv on “Airbags for Impact, Rafts and EMAS”, Bose Automotive Suspension lead Neal Lackritz on “Active Suspension for Sky Taxis” and Jeff DeGrange of …