Just as the wheels touched down on Virgin Atlantic’s historic flight from London to New York yesterday, powered by a low-carbon fuel engine made by Rolls-Royce, the company has announced a new shift. Rolls-Royce CEO Tufan Erginbilgiç says it’s time to sell off its electric jet engine unit and focus on other strategies – namely sustainable aviation fuels, or SAF.
France has received the green light from the European Commission to start cracking down on ultra-polluting short-haul flights within the country, starting with a ban on three popular flights from Paris-Orly Airport. The country also aims to curb the use of private jets in an effort to both reduce CO2 emissions and keep up the social media backlash against the super-rich jet set in a time of soaring inflation and energy cutbacks.
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In the latest sign of the auto industry’s transition to electric, Los Angeles Internation Airport (LAX) says it will add 1,300 EV chargers to modernize the facility.
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In today’s Electrek Green Energy Brief (EGEB):
JetBlue announced this week that it will offset emissions from jet fuel for all domestic flights from July 2020.
It is the first major US airline to go carbon neutral on domestic flights.
The British budget airline easyJet announced on Tuesday that it would begin to offset emissions from its 331 planes immediately. It will become the world’s first major airline to operate net zero carbon flights across their entire network.
NASA today unveiled plans to spend the next decade working on electric planes under the ‘X-57’ moniker. The X-Plane program has traditionally been used by NASA to further aviation so this is a big deal more than just a pet project or some 3D renders.
petrol version
The plane which is also called ‘Maxwell’ to honor James Clerk Maxwell, the 19th century Scottish physicist who did groundbreaking work in electromagnetism, will be based on the Italian Tecnam P2006T, a very efficient 4 seat light aircraft (pictured above). NASA will do away with the wing and petrol engines and replace them with a super-efficient thinner wing and 14 electric motors. The smaller 12 motors will only be used for takeoffs and what we can probably assume is regen during landings. The larger 2 engines on the end of the wings will propel the plane during cruising which is expected to be a solid 175mph. The Tecnam has retractable wheels and a 1500-foot take off distance which should make it a good base for an EV makeover.
There are a lot of things to unpack here…
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Earlier this year, we wrote a profile on an interesting startup, Zee Aero, developing a battery-powered vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft near Google’s X lab. The company caught our attention when it started hiring talent from NASA, Tesla and Stanford.
At the time, we couldn’t confirm where the money was coming from, but today we learn that Alphabet’s billionaire CEO Larry Page is secretively behind the electric aircraft startup, reportedly financing it with over $100 million, and even setting up a competing startup, Kitty Hawk, to test another model.
The group’s proximity with Google led a lot of people to believe it was financed by the tech giant, but in fact, Page is financing the initiative himself and not through Alphabet or Google Ventures.
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A startup operating mostly in stealth mode for the past 6 years has been developing a very interesting battery-powered vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft, which could potentially be described as a “flying car”.
Just over two years ago, some early prototypes were spotted at the company’s facility near Google’s X lab, now called the Moonshot factory, which sparked speculation that Google was financing the project. Not much was known about the company then, but we did some research after finding out that it went on a recent hiring spree and we are now bringing you the most up-to-date report on this promising project.
Zee Aero was founded by Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford and former NASA Researcher at Ames Ilan Kroo. He recruited a surprising number of students and colleagues from both organisations to launch his startup, which looks more ready than ever to debut its aircraft.
We’ve heard about flying cars supposedly coming to market for years now. It appears to be one of those “always in the lab” technology and although the term “flying car” could potentially apply to what Zee is working on considering the vehicle is shown in patent applications literally parked in an average looking parking space, simply looking at it as an aircraft is more useful here. Especially considering its differentiating features are almost as impressive on an aircraft as it would be on a car, namely its vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capacity and more importantly, the fact that it’s powered by a battery pack.
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A youtuber (gasturbine101) built a manned drone prototype powered by 54 rotors equipped with small battery packs. He posted a video of a 6 minute test flight last week.
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Airbus accomplished an historic exploit last week when their E-Fan concept, a manned electric plane, crossed the English Channel to be the first battery powered plane to do so, 106 years after Louis Blériot made the first crossing with his monoplane. The 37 minute flight itself might not seem that impressive, but considering the current state of electric propulsion, it is a hopeful glimpse into the future of electric air transport.
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Google is also looking into this type of transport.