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 …
Dr. Seeley Speaks at AIAA Conference, NASA Dryden
Dr. Brien Seeley, Founder and President of the CAFE Foundation, has been giving a series of talks at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture 2013, before a gathering of technical experts at NASA’s Dryden Flight Test Center, Edwards Air Force and at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) International Powered Lift Conference in Los Angeles. The International Powered Lift Conference focuses on the latest developments in Vertical or Short Takeoff and Landing (V/STOL) aircraft research, concepts, and programs, something of great interest to CAFE in its development of airplanes capable of using pocket airports. Pocket Airports will require a special type of airplane – electric, according to Dr. Seeley, and capable of taking off with a ground roll of 90 feet (home plate to first base), able to climb at an angle that would clear the 150-foot Matterhorn at Disneyland by the time it reaches the end of a 420-foot runway, and being nearly inaudible as it crosses the …