MagniX Powers a Dash 7

Dean Sigler Announcements, Electric Powerplants, Sky Taxis, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

MagniX Motors in Everett, Washington looks forward to powering a short-field performance champion, the DeHavilland Dash 7. The Dash 7 is a pretty astonishing short field aircraft, emulating the bush planes of the far north, home to its Canadian maker.  Measuring its take-off and landing capabilities, this video shows what four Pratt & Whitney PT-6 turbines can do for a 40,000 pound airplane. As shown, the craft can carry heavy load from and into some pretty isolated territory without the need for sophisticated airport support systems. The idea of such performance and load-hauling is not a new idea, World War Two, and subsequent conflicts demonstrating the need for the need to get in and out of scarcely viable landscapes. To drive the point home, here’s a second video of a Dash 7 landing with 5,700 liters (10,088 pounds) of Jet-A on board.  Not only is it a short landing but a very precise one, the main gear staying within bounds …

Next-Generation Battery Progress

Dean Sigler Batteries, Biomimicry, Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Do we have “revolutionary” battery progress, or are the next-generation batteries we see proliferating more evolutionary?  Progress has not been particularly speedy: your editor first saw Dr. Yi Chu at a 2009 electric aviation symposium, when he discussed the idea of achieving a “10X” battery within a few years.  Following his tenure at Stanford University, he founded Amprius, which is now producing 500 Watt-hour per kilogram cells.  This big jump in energy density is still short of his original goal, which was to have produced something around 1,000 Watt-hour/kilogram cells. MagniX Samson MagniX has been developing ever-larger electric motors for over a decade, and is now developing larger battery packs to power them.  Their next-generation Samson batteries contain 300 Watt-hours per kilogram at the pack level, which means higher energy densities at the module and cell levels.  The addition of a necessary battery management system (BMS) when cells assembled into modules or packs adds weight, but is necessary with lithium …