Electric airliner ?

[J4CKO]

With all the talk of electric cars, what is the possibility of an electrically powered airliner ?

What happens when the fossil fuels run out, cars are sorted, but planes seem to rely on burning huge amounts of fossil fuel with no alternative.

Can electric motor be built to produce enough thrust ?

Even assuming it could, I am guessing it would need more than four double A batteries ?

Based on this is the future for plane fuel just some synthetic Avgas ?

I know the Americans and Russians had a go with nuclear powered ones in the 50s but dont see that being a popular option

[J4CKO]

Max_Torque said:

A 747-400 has a fuel capacity of 215,745 litres!

Kerosene has a specific energy of 37.4 MJ/litre

So a fully fuelled 747 has pretty much 8100 GJs of energy on board!

You'd need about 74,000 Nissan leaf batteries to hold that much energy (and they would weigh over 14,000 tonnes!). That's going to make getting off the runway quite difficult....



(in reality, air transport will have to move to synthetic hydrocarbon or Biofuels when oil runs out)

Or a really, really long extension cord

[J4CKO]

JuniorD said:

Foliage said:

J4CKO said:

What happens when the fossil fuels run out,

We have 1000s of years of fossil fuels left, but that's an aside since we can also build engines that can burn vegetable oils.

But that doesn't get round the fact that we are spewing noxious gas into the atmosphere, whether mmgw is a thing or not.

Electric airliners would be a rather big challenge, a better approach would be to address shipping & industry first.

Private citizens and aircraft are the least of the problem.

I#m looking forward to when Jet A1 is replaced with vegetable oil. Airports will smell like a gaint chippy!

All those dodgy old blokes that do car boot sales in veg oil powered Peugeot 405's will be drafted in as consultants.