Well, here is yet another entrant into the electric aircraft market, but they are doing things differently.

- Instead of VTOL, they are working on STOL.
- Instead of pure battery power, they are doing hybrid.
- Instead of urban mobility, they are focusing on regional/short hop flights.

Compared to all the other players, it seems they have the shortest path to success.



https://www.electra.aero/

With range and weight how does it work out with the turbine engine driving the generator for electric power vs a conventional STOL design with the turboprop engine providing thrust.

And the low altitude short distance missions planned?

basically this Vs a Helio Stallion or even scaled up vs a Twin Otter.

Hybrid for cars makes sense due to a high ratio of peak to average power. You can use a small engine closer to average power and a small battery to make up the difference during needs of peak power.

Aircraft are not like that, they run at very low peak to average power ratios, so there isn't an energy advantage to be had. This means hybrid has to be justified based on other factors such as the flexibility of using multiple electric motors (like multirotor VTOLs), or providing for a short term backup power source (from batteries).

From a power point of view, the hybrid electric path replaces a gear box/shaft to the prop with a generator, wiring, controller and electric motor. The gear box/prop is more efficient and less weight, the electric path is more flexible.

So it all comes down to whether the flexibility is worth the inefficiency and weight of a hybrid solution. My instinct tells me the answer will be no for non VTOL aircraft and yes for VTOLs primarily due to the rotor counts required for VTOLs.

Mike C.

If there were such demand for this, why aren’t little airlines running all over the place in Caravans already? They exist, can and do (eg Fedex) go to a ton of places that aren’t the 30 main airline hubs, and can haul at least 9 pax.

Yet, it doesn’t seem to exist. Why is that?

The whole point this design is high rotor/propeller count to induce airflow across the whole wing allowing for very slow takeoffs and landings. In this instance hybrid makes more sense IMO.

Whether this proves to be a useable design going forward remains to be seen, I'm always very skeptical of the "uber of airplanes" pitches, it's just too expensive to operate to make that feasable for the public historically.

In this case, the selling point is not efficiency but extreme STOL capability. They claim to be able to operate from 300 ft runways. If that's true, it's a game changer. It means they can operate from any number of piers around Manhattan, and any other football field-sized area. That opens way more potential use cases than can be served by something like a Caravan or a twin Otter.

The places where Caravans can land are not where they need to be. Small airports are usually in the boonies where no one wants to go. This thing supposedly will be able to land in many urban centers, where the demand is. The use case of "Midtown NYC to National Mall in DC" is pretty compelling.

I think it's a neat design and the founder certainly has the pedigree for aerospace innovation, but this "use case scenario" is why I'm uncertain of this aircraft's marketing perspective. The premise requires that a pilot can hit a rather precise touchdown point in all wind conditions in order to make this work.

The limiting factor for this is that a pilot is not this good 100% of the time.

"Distributed electric power" just like "diesel" locomotives.

I hear that they have quite a few deposits for this plane.

Billions in deposits.

It's a cool trick for getting out of tight spaces with noise constraints, though if the plan is to do things like fly from Manhattan to JFK, I'm sure the JFK tower controllers are gonna hate its 40 mph vref if it lands on the runway there.

Locomotives are this way because it is the only way to finely control massive amounts of torque to the limits of adhesion between a steel wheel and steel rail. You also see it in the biggest mining trucks where the torques involved make a mechanical transmission impractical. But don't kid yourself that it is efficient or lightweight. There are thermal efficiency losses in the engine, then losses in the generator to make electricity, then losses again in the motors going from electrical back to mechanical power. This is a hugely inefficient idea compared to an engine crankshaft mechanically driving a wheel (or a propellor)

If there were such demand for this, why aren’t little airlines running all over the place in Caravans already? They exist, can and do (eg Fedex) go to a ton of places that aren’t the 30 main airline hubs, and can haul at least 9 pax.

Yet, it doesn’t seem to exist. Why is that?

Currently there is no solution for getting people to where they want to go, there is a solution for getting them somewhere near that, often an hour or two away from their ultimate destination. The idea here is to have not 3 major airports serving NYC, but 30 or 60 "STOLports" sprinkled around the area. That's what the map you chuckled at shows.

And yes, you won't be flying JFK to LAX in this kind of plane. It's more like downtown Manhattan to Boston harbor or Tidal Basin in DC.

What matters here is dollars per passenger per mile. This works if that number is a fraction of what a helicopter could move a passenger for.

Part of keeping that number low is to have the computer simplify the flying. You won’t need to be the ultimate stol pilot when you have 8 independent electric motors.