Whisper Aero – Ultralight to Heavy

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

Whisper Aero, Mark Moore’s startup in Crossville, Tennessee, fields devices to move air, ranging from leaf blowers to fairly large airplanes.  The company recently showed a lineup of three aircraft, starting with a dual-motor powered flying wing hang glider to a nine-passenger silent medium-range carrier.  Each benefits from the quiet propulsion system developed by Moore and his team. The Whisper Lineup Whisper Aero plans a range of craft from a single-seat ultralight sailplane to a small lightplane-size cargo carrier to a nine-passenger transport.  All are capable of flying autonomously, and all will be powered by from two to 30 Whisper Aero eQ250 propulsors, each capable of 80 pounds of thrust.  In this video, Manfred Ruhmer, seven-time world Class 2 ultralight soaring champion among other honors, shows off his Aeriane Swift 3, taken aloft by an Eck-Geiger electric motor, and then elevated by its light weight and Manfred’s piloting skills.  It will be fascinating to see how The ship will perform …

Whisper Aero Supercomputes and Grows

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

Supercomputing to Quiet Aerodynamics Whisper Aero of Crossville, Tennessee supercomputes its way to grand new designs.  Affiliating with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the powerplant designer and manufacturer uses the Lab’s supercomputer to investigate the most desirable aerodynamic approaches.  The ORNL is working with Whisper on a nine-passenger electric airplane called the Whisper Jet.  The collaborators will employ the world’s fourth fastest supercomputer, Summit.  (It was the fastest until recently).  According to ORNL, access to Summit and its graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture gives Whisper Aero’s team a tenfold speedup over Whisper’s in-house CPU (Central Processing Unit)-only systems.  It enables advanced simulations compared to previous systems. Vineet Ahuja, Whisper Aero’s Head of Flight Sciences and an Associate Fellow at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, says, “Using Summit affords us the possibility of expanding the scope of Whisper’s design and analysis activities that benefits aircraft control and aeropropulsive integration,  As a result, aerodynamic design has shown an incredible …