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Airbus investigating battery powered, ducted fan airliners

The Screamliner can't make it a year with out catching on fire. Now Airbus is going to try to one up them with a plane powered with nothing but batties?
 
Hmmmm, yeah, I dunno about this. Electric cars and golf carts can run out of power and you stop and recharge them, but I don't see stopping a plane in a cloud and recharging it.
 
Certain electic car batteries also burst into flame. Battery tech is not up to the task yet.
 
I think the costs would be astronomical... especially when it came to replacing the batteries in a plane the size of let's say, the A-310 or a Boeing 737. Now small planes like the one pictured in the article... that may be feasible. But I'll bet the runtime for such a craft wouldn't be that long. The batteries would have to be pretty light to get even an hour of runtime.

BB686
 
I think the future is in turbo/electric (TE) systems. You use one or two gas generators (i.e. turboshaft engines) to drive an electric generator that powers a series (e.g. 10-12 for a 100 pax airliner) small diameter electric fans. Boeing and Airbus have both considered this technology over battery powered designs, which are very heavy and need the entire battery replaced after a given flight (or rather, removed, recharged and replaced). The downside to TE systems is the materials used for conductivity. The technology to make TE effective for airliners is projected 10-20 years away by NASA's own admission. Small lab designs are already running. Who knows when real Ejets (Electric not Embraer) will be flying in to our regional airports?
 
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