For years, you’ve been able to watch cool-looking electric-plane videos on YouTube, created by some of the 300 companies who are working on them. But Beta Technologies, in Burlington, Vermont, is unique: “I believe we’re the only company flying people,” said Beta’s CEO and founder Kyle Clark. His company’s electric plane can carry six people, and flies 250 miles on one charge.
“Every year, batteries get better and better, about seven percent per year,” he said. “That means in seven years we’ll double that. And another seven years, we’ll double that again.”
He believes that, in the-not-distant future, we will be flying on electric-powered jetliners.
Traditional airplanes pump out about a billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Electric planes produce no emissions at all, and that’s only their first advantage.
“One of the things that I think is underappreciated in electric aviation is that it’s quiet,” said Clark. “You can actually hear the wind noise over the fuselage. You feel like a bird.”
Electric motors are much simpler than jet engines, too; they contain one-tenth as many parts. Furthermore, electric planes cost far less to fly, since electricity costs only one-fortieth as much as jet fuel.
But maybe the most impressive advantage of electric planes is that not all of them require runways.
Planes are known as eVTOLs (a clumsy acronym for Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) don’t need a runway to lift off, but they can still fly forward the usual way. The eVTOLs designed by Archer Aviation, based in San Jose, California, have a series of propellers, some used only in the lifting portion of flight; other propellers tilt, to be used in both take-off and forward flight.
Read more at CBSnews.com
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