It may be too hard to do a good retrofit. If you basically have to tear the entire plane apart and rebuild and recertify it to put batteries in the right places, maybe the costs aren’t worth it for potential customers.

I know many planes use their wings as fuel tanks but given the weight of batteries maybe that doesn’t work.

I agree it’s interesting. Not a small undertaking.

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7952 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Generally all the weight of the fusaage has to go through the wings anyway so it is structurally more efficient to put weight on the wings in the first place.

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Barbing 6 hours ago | parent [-]

And they do that with fuel?! Neat!

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dghlsakjg 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yup.

On a 737 they can put about 8k pounds per wing.

Even little planes like Cessnas have wing tanks.

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Barbing 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Wow wow!

Might see planes just a smidge differently now :)

	▲	brucehoult an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In sailplanes we add up to around 200 litres of water to wing tanks in single-seat gliders (empty weight typically around 280kg) to improve the high speed performance (typically up to 270 km/h these days) and ability to fly comfortably in turbulence. It's surprising what you can fly formation with, even without an engine [1] :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0icOICQLTc Dumping (most of the) water before landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4Yv-V7eozk [1] this particular glider does have a small engine for takeoff, but maximum speed with the engine extended is 180 km/h and here they are flying at 280 km/h.