Aircraft emissions are lower than those produced by the millions of trips we make on the road every day. Cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles are responsible for two-thirds of the 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide that the transportation industry generates each year, according to the International Energy Agency. But even so, they amount to 1 billion tons, which is not a few. Furthermore, in this matter, we find crucial differences between land and air transport.
For the first, there is already an electrification plan that will significantly reduce emissions in the long term. By 2050, the majority of vehicles on the world’s roads are expected to be electric. And what about air transport? There are still many doubts about the way forward, but the answer to these questions will not be as simple as “let’s make airplanes electric.”
The amount of power that today’s batteries provide, their weight and the aerodynamic requirements are an impossible puzzle to fit if we look at the way we fly today. It is simply not possible to manufacture an electric aircraft capable of carrying hundreds of passengers on an intercontinental flight. The weight of the batteries required would prevent the aircraft from taking off.
The energy density of the fuel used by Esunas aircraft is 138 times greater than that provided by a battery like the one found in a Tesla car. And even with such high efficiency, weight control in an aircraft is one of the fundamental parts of flight.
But not all is lost. Although today it is impossible to make an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 747 that works with the aforementioned batteries, building an electric airplane is within the conceivable, if it does not need to be very large or go very far. That is precisely what Heart Aerospace, a Swedish company that has teamed up with United Airlines to build an all-electric passenger flying machine before the end of the decade, is trying to do.
The device will be capable of transporting nineteen people to a maximum distance of 400 kilometers. It does not seem like much, but the idea is to use it to replace conventional aircraft on small secondary routes, for which small-range planes or jets are used today.
Such a distance may be sufficient to cover the connection needs of a large city with nearby rural communities, for example. United Airlines has identified different locations in the United States for which it might make sense to use one of these aircraft. The distance that separates New York from Boston or Washington DC, for example, falls within the range of these planes.
A security problem
But Heart Aerospace faces two problems. The first is regulatory. One of the reasons we don’t see much innovation in the way passenger aircraft are built is that the organizations that govern this market, such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in the United States, or the EASA, in Europe They are usually quite conservative. And they are for good reasons.
The airplanes that we use today are very safe thanks to the fact that the standards and requirements that govern their construction are, in turn, rigid and clear, and have been tested in hundreds of millions of flight hours over the last decades. . However, the batteries we typically use, especially lithium-ion batteries, can be unstable, and failure would be catastrophic. It is the reason why airlines limit the size of batteries that can be carried in the cabin or directly prohibit including them in checked luggage.
In fact, some errors in the batteries that aircraft use for on-board electrical systems have caused emergency situations in the past, such as fires, that have endangered the safety of the passenger. And we are talking about much smaller devices and less capacity than those that will be necessary in an electroplane. It is understandable that the authorities do not want to rush.
The FAA relaxed the rules a bit in 2016, to allow the flight of commercial electric aircraft capable of carrying up to a maximum of nineteen people – hence the capacity of the aircraft that Heart Aerospace is developing. With the new requirements, it has been possible to begin to carry out the necessary tests to manufacture devices of this type that are totally safe during flight. Much work remains to be done, but without that blessing from a regulator, the market would never have gotten going.
The second problem is one of convenience. As long as the scope of these flights is so limited, the truth is that they won’t make much sense. A high-speed train covers the aforementioned 400 kilometers more efficiently, in less time and for a greater number of passengers. Even a trip by car – electric – would be a much more pleasant alternative.
Despite everything, Heart Aerospace believes that there are certain cases in which its aircraft could perfectly complement these other forms of transport: travel between islands, for example, or regional travel in areas that do not have a good infrastructure or for the that building a high-speed rail line is not possible or economically profitable.
And, of course, there is always room for technological optimism. The fact that the current batteries do not allow the electrification of air transport does not mean that in the future we will not be able to develop others that are much more suitable. Perhaps in a few decades the idea of an intercontinental electric flight will not sound so far-fetched.
