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 …
EADS Pulls Off Electric Hat Trick at 2011 Paris Air Show
At the 2011 Paris Air Show at Le Bourget this week, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company N.V. (EADS) showcased at least three electric flight vehicles – two emonstrating current reality and one pointing toward a cleaner future for short-to-medium range airliners. Cri-Cri, the four-motored, contra-rotating props on stalks aerobatic wonder, did indeed perform at the 2011 Paris Air Show, doing six-minute routines daily at the show. Didier Esteyne, the plane’s obviously accomplished pilot, explains things in this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76h4VA3yoNI Emmanuel Joubert, Program Head for the All-electric Cri-Cri at EADS, explained the plane’s advantages. “In all-electric mode, the plane’s performance during climb and aerobatics is better compared to a conventional aircraft of this type. This allows the pilot to really have ‘fun flying’ – with no noise and high torque at low and high speed.” Because of the light weight and small size of the Cri-Cri, initial flights were limited to 20 minutes, but now run 30 minutes, with …