Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electricity to get it off the ground.

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dghlsakjg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nit: When they did the actual flight I did the math on the $5 worth of power claim, and it just doesn’t pencil out even at the lowest power rates in North America. Just to illustrate: at $.05 per kWh (which is less than half the price of electricity where they flew), you get 100kwh for $5. 100kw is what it takes to takeoff a 1200 pound Cessna. Probably about 75kw for an efficient cruise in that same plane.

Still an incredible feat, but no idea where the $5 comes from. Maybe that’s just the power they use to get from the threshold of the runway to wheels up.

	▲	jacquesm 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can't convert between kWh and kW. 100 kWh = 6 MW for one minute... so there is plenty of power if the flight is short enough. They said the plane has 4 Tesla's worth of battery power, let's assume they are 80KWh packs then that's 320kWh that they could use for a short flight. That's a fair amount of juice, they definitely won't be flying long in a 25 ton aircraft without starting up the auxiliary motor but I have no doubt it will be able to get off the ground on $5 worth of electricity. To be fair though it is more likely to be 50 kWh just for the take-off, so that's probably where their $5 figure came from (at $0.10 / kWh). For comparison: a single gallon of Jet-A = ~150MJ. 320 kWh = 320,000 W for one hour so 3600 * 320,000 = 1150MJ, or about 40 gallons and I suspect that these electric motors are quite efficient. So it does pencil out, I think. Or maybe my pencil is broken and no doubt HN will correct my math.
	▲	projektfu 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The takeoff roll is only a minute or so to lift-off, so it's possible. But also somewhat meaningless, as an airplane can take off for free in high-enough headwinds.
	▲	hmokiguess 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		"hybrid system (electric + conventional turbo prop)" there's your answer
	▲	datadrivenangel 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		so for an hour flight it costs $5?

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solfox 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Would be interested to see this compared to the costs to take off a comparable small jet fuel aircraft.