In 15 years, we could be flying in silent planes that emit zero fumes
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The family resemblance — the toothy smile, the grinning eyes — comes
through more in some photos than others. But Erik Lindbergh clearly
shares one thing with his famous grandfather Charles — a new idea about
flying that can make hearts and imaginations soar.
Charles Lindbergh ignited excitement for air travel in 1927 with his
historic 33 hour, 30 minute solo flight across the Atlantic in his
single-engine monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. And now Erik
Lindbergh, 51-year-old aviator, artist, philanthropist and entrepreneur,
is devoting himself to the dream of electric aircraft — planes powered
by electricity instead of fossil fuels.
“Our mission is to make aviation clean and quiet,” Lindbergh says.
“Noise is one of the huge constraints that we have for aircraft, whether
it’s jet aircraft or prop aircraft. People don’t want to hear it. It’s
bad for you. It causes heart disease, hypertension.”
What if you could live smack next door to La Guardia and never hear
planes because they whispered instead of roared? What if the 5 percent
contribution to the greenhouse effect some scientists blame on
commercial airliners was all but eliminated because they no longer ran
on aviation gas? What if you could hop from Brooklyn to Midtown in a
quiet, cheap air taxi?
With his historic 1927 flight, Charles Lindbergh won the $25,000
prize offered by New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig for the first
nonstop flight between New York City and Paris.
In this millennium, Erik Lindbergh has taken a page from his
ancestor’s book, spending a decade helping award Lindbergh Foundation
prizes to small companies that advance electric-aircraft development.
One went to e-volo GmbH, a company based in Karlsruhe, Germany, that
made history in March with the first manned flight of its innovative
Volocopter — a two-seat “multicopter” powered by 18 electric rotors on a
circular frame. The craft looks like a drone on steroids. Charles Lindbergh completed a historic 33 hour solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.
Lindbergh also has served on the board of the XPrize Foundation,
whose $10 million Ansari X Prize has nurtured private space travel. He
hopes to see the XPrize Foundation offer a similar reward for
electric-aircraft achievement.
Through his private company, Powering Imagination, Lindbergh is also
working with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the National Park
Service on the Quiet Flight Initiative.
Graduate students taking part in the initiative are modifying an
Austrian motorized glider into an electric, two-seat plane for
near-silent tours above US National Parks that they hope will make its
maiden flight early next year.
But that’s just one idea.
“The Holy Grail is vertical takeoff and landing quiet enough that it
doesn’t piss off your neighbors,” Lindbergh said. “That is going to
change the way we move around the planet. We’re not going to be looking
at Uber cars, we’re going to be looking at Uber aircraft.”
Vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — or as experts call them,
VTOLs (pronounced “VEE-talls”) — are the hardest to design. Airplanes
rolling down a runway get lift from their wings, but in order to climb
straight up into the air, a machine has to produce a pound of downward
thrust for every pound it weighs. That’s one reason helicopters are so
loud. Erik
Lindbergh’s (Charles’ grandson) private company, Powering Imagination,
is working to design silent planes that emit zero fumes.
Electric motors are relatively quiet. But batteries are relatively
heavy. And the lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries prevalent today
provide only about a tenth the power per pound as aviation fuel.
That’s why Pat Anderson, director of the Flight Research Center at
Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, Fla., who is working on electric aircraft
ideas with Lindbergh, NASA and a consortium of aviation companies
including Airbus, offers a word of caution.
“This is not a slam-dunk easy thing to do,” Anderson said. “Because
[aircraft are] so weight-critical and batteries are so heavy.”
Major breakthroughs in battery technology must come, Anderson said,
before all-electric aircraft with serious endurance, range and passenger
and cargo capacity can be built.
Lithium-battery fires, which can be caused by a chemical chain
reaction called “thermal runaway,” also pose a risk, prompting the FAA
to impose restrictions on shipping such batteries by air.
And yet Lindbergh, who still recalls the thrill of flying an electric
ultralight aircraft and hearing a dog barking far below, believes that
the necessary breakthroughs in electric aviation will come. What’s more,
using electric motors rather than combustion engines to generate power,
and wires instead of complex mechanical conduits to transmit that
power, could ultimately help solve a host of stubborn
aeronautical-engineering problems.
“There are a lot of people around the world who are spending millions
of dollars right now trying to develop electric-powered VTOL aircraft
for personal use,” said Mike Hirschberg, executive director of the
American Helicopter Society International. “We are at the cusp of a
revolution in electric flight.”
Google co-founder Larry Page, through a secretive company called Zee.Aero,
is said to be among those people. So is Joby Aviation founder JoeBen
Bevirt, who is working on an all-electric, 200-mph VTOL suitable for use
as an air taxi — among other ideas.
Meanwhile, academic and government engineers and researchers, major
corporations such as European aviation giant Airbus, and NASA are also
charged up about electric aircraft.
Airbus’ all-electric E-Fan marked a big milestone one year ago by flying across the English Channel solely on batteries.
NASA, for its part, is developing an electric technology demonstrator
aircraft — the X-57 — and hopes to produce three ever-larger electric
aircraft for practical use over the next 15 years: an ultra-quiet urban
VTOL air taxi for short trips in cities by 2020; pollution-free electric
commuter aircraft for trips shorter than 300 miles by 2025; and
electric commercial airliners by 2030.
But given the issues with batteries, hybrid electric aircraft may be
more practical than all-electric ones for some time to come. Germany’s
e-volo plans to add a combustion engine to its Volocopter to power a
generator supplying electricity both to the aircraft’s batteries and its
electric motor.
Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va., has a far beefier hybrid
concept for a VTOL drone. Its LightningStrike will use a turbine engine
to run three 1-megawatt electric generators. With its turbine engine
running, the LightningStrike probably won’t be as quiet as a
battery-powered electric aircraft, but its generators will give it
vastly more power than batteries could provide.
“People are nibbling around the edges of what electric can do,” said
Aurora founder and CEO John Langford. “This airplane drives directly to
the heart.”
In his own heart, Erik Lindbergh thinks his illustrious grandfather
“would be fascinated by” the prospect of electric aircraft. “I think it
would be an area that he would be pushing on.”
With that in mind, Lindbergh hopes to see a quiet, clean,
four-passenger all-electric plane cross the Atlantic in, say, 11 years,
to prove such aircraft can one day be practical. That would be in 2027 —
a nice, round century after his grandfather Charles proved air travel
practical. And electrified the world.
All charged up: The latest in E-planes
The hybrid of the skies
Airbus hybrid electric aircraft E-Fan 1.2.
Airbus’ all-electric E-Fan marked a major milestone one year ago by
flying across the English Channel solely on batteries. The Airbus E-Fan
1.2 (above and inset) is a hybrid derivative of that craft. It includes a
two-cycle gas engine, allowing the plane to use quiet electric power
for takeoffs and landings but fly on its combustion engine for better
endurance. Airbus plans to use the hybrid E-Fan 1.2, which flew for the
first time three weeks ago in France, for research into
electric-aircraft technologies.
The future air taxi All-electric 200 mph VTOL S2
After making a fortune in other businesses, Joby Aviation founder
JoeBen Bevirt turned to his childhood dream of creating aircraft like
Doc Brown’s flying DeLorean car in the movie “Back to the Future” or the
aerocars in the “Jetsons” cartoon show. On its website, his company
says, “Joby Aviation was founded to revolutionize how we commute.” For
now, Joby is developing an aircraft that has the familiar shape of a
conventional plane — except for eight tilting propellers arrayed along
the leading edge of its wing and four more tilting propellers mounted on
its V-shaped tail. Called the S2, Joby hopes the all-electric, 200 mph
VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing aircraft) will be suitable for use as
an air taxi.
NASA’s mega-efficient prop plane
Artist rendition of NASA’s X-57
NASA is developing the X-57 — a four-seat experimental light aircraft
with a long, skinny wing sporting 14 propellers — a dozen of which will
turn only during takeoffs and landings. The X-57 (below) will use two
larger propellers, one on each wingtip powered by their own electric
motors, to cruise at 175 mph using only a fifth as much energy as the
conventionally powered Tecnam P2006T, a light Italian plane whose
airframe NASA is using for the X-57. The hoverplane
The VTOL X-Plane, LightningStrike
Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va., won a $90 million contract
last year to build a VTOL X-Plane. Called the LightningStrike, the
hybrid electric craft should be able to carry 1,500 pounds of payload,
fly nearly as fast as an airliner and hover better than any existing
helicopter. LightningStrike will be able to take off and land without a
runway, and with computers adjusting the power sent to each individual
fan, it promises to be exceptionally agile. First flight is scheduled
for September 2018.
The sporty multicopter German company e-volo GmbH all-electric Volocopter VC200P
In March, the German equivalent of the Federal Aviation
Administration approved the all-electric Volocopter VC200 prototype to
fly in civilian airspace. Made by German company e-volo GmbH, the little
multicopter — a two-seater ultralight aircraft designed mainly for
sport flying — is powered by 18 electric rotors mounted on a circular
frame. Maximum flight duration to date is only 20 minutes, but e-volo
predicts “this will become as much as an hour and more in the near
future.”
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