The aviation industry has high hopes for electric planes. Last year, 859 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) was produced by flights. This accounts for around two per cent of all human-created carbon emissions and aviation is responsible for 12 per cent of all transport-produced CO2.
The majority of CO2 produced by planes – around 80 per cent, according to the Air Transport Action Group's figures – comes from flights that are longer than 1,500 kilometres. Unless there's a radical overhaul of the aviation industry, there are few ways to drastically reduce the CO2 emitted by long-haul flights.
But shorter flights are in prime position for a CO2 emissions cut. Enter electric planes. Airbus, Rolls-Royce, and Boeing are all involved in the development of prototype electric and hybrid electric planes and both the airliners EasyJet and JetBlue are supporting the creation of the new aircraft.
Not only could electric planes reduce carbon emissions from flights, they also promise to reduce noise pollution, says Frank Anton, the head of electric aircraft at Siemens. The company is working with Airbus and Rolls-Royce to develop a hybrid-electric plane – involving both electric motors and batteries. "There are enough reasons to change the architecture of a plane towards distributed electric propulsion and using hybrid electric," Anton explains. Startups Zunum Aero, Wright Electric and Eviation are all developing their own electric planes.
Depending on the type of plane developed – it's size, weight, and the number of passengers it can carry – Anton predicts it is possible to reduce fuel consumption by 25 per cent. He says hybrid-electric planes will be able to use their new systems at take-off and landing and when needed on longer-haul flights use traditional aviation fuel. Zunum Aero predicts its electric propulsion system can cut emissions by 80 per cent.
But the planes are nowhere near ready to take flight – let alone carry passengers on a commercial basis. Omer Bar-Yohay, the CEO of Eviation, says the company plans to have a flying prototype of its nine-person passenger plane ready for the 2019 airshow. In a move that's "aggressive but not impossible", he says the company will attempt to get the plane certified with air authorities for 2021. Zunum claims it will have a 12-seater hybrid electric plane ready for 2022 and a 50-seater plane prepared by 2027. Airbus, Siemens and Rolls-Royce's test plane, the E-Fan X, is planned to have space for 100 people and its demonstrator plane could fly as soon as 2020.
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The complexity of developing batteries powerful enough but light enough means smaller, personal flying cars are further off still and the aviation industry remains hopeful that hybrid planes will be able to carry more people over longer distances while significantly reducing carbon emissions.
Like electric flying cars, which are being touted as short-hope taxis in the sky, hybrid electric planes will also do most of their flying over small distances. "The majority of air traffic has consolidated to a very small number of large hubs," says Ashish Kumar, the CEO of Zunum. The company's first 12-seater plane will have a maximum range of 700 miles.
"Those [international] hubs work fine for medium to long-haul journeys but if you try to do a short journey, say under a 1,000 or 1,500-mile trip, through a hub the overhead of transmitting the hub is so great it kills the proposition of air travel." He estimates that 70 per cent of the time it takes to fly domestically in the US is spent shuffling around on the ground between security, transit and in innumerable queues.
Similarly, Eviation's Bar-Yohay says the firm's planes will focus on regional travel. "When we look at what happens when you want to travel 100 miles, 200, or 500 miles, what happens today is most people will hop in a car and drive for up to ten hours," he says. The company's plane – called Alice – is designed to fly for 650 miles at most. (In the UK, Land's End to John o' Groats is 874 miles at its shortest road route).
Given these distances, electric plane dreamers are hoping for a resurgence in small, unused airfields. In the UK there are more than 40 airports operating commercially. A government map shows sites from Gatwick, Stanstead and Heathrow to smaller, less used, airports at Lands End, Oban, and Lydd.
But there are also several hundred airfields, disused airports and landing sites that could be converted into minuscule but functioning airports. But there are plenty of hurdles that would need to be overcome: airports have complex tax structures, commercial airspace is tightly regulated and the infrastructure at unused sites would have to be overhauled. In addition, for electric planes, there would need to be sufficient charging facilities.
This doesn't put the electric plane startups off the idea of regional travel, though. "A lot of the secondary airfields in the UK are being looked at for redevelopment as traffic has moved out of them. Our view would be that's short-sighted," Kumar says. "The stock of airfields that exists in the UK and Europe are actually a very significant asset that would immediately get lit up by this class of aircraft that are coming in five or ten years time."
"This area of the market is dramatically underserved," adds Bar-Yohay. "You don't need to fly that fast if you're flying 500 miles."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
