With max fuel aboard, that leaves us with about 500 pounds of useful load, or three medium-sized adults with no bags. Cruising at 75 percent power, we can fly about five hours before the engine gets quiet. Its engine, a Lycoming IO-360, weighs about 260 pounds. Fuel capacity on a 172 is about 56 gallons weighing 336 pounds. We’ll use a Cessna 172 for this because the performance specs are well-known and it represents the optimal flight-training platform. A battery with the energy equivalent to that fuel would weigh about 6.6 million pounds.

More on why that’s true later.Ī fully-fueled Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner can fly roughly 8,000 miles while ferrying 300 or so passengers and their luggage. Beyond the obvious social credits a university might receive for embracing electric over gasoline, one has to wonder what type of spreadsheet gymnastics they had to perform to justify investing in a fleet of aircraft two or three times larger than the fleet they operate today.

This last group is a bit of a mystery to me. Appearing at an average rate of about one a week, a third of them announce the selection of some parts supplier, a third discuss details of future versions of an airplane they haven’t yet built, and the rest proudly announce that this or that university or organization has “committed” to buy their electric airplanes for their training fleets. While these guys may not be good at building airplanes, they are absolute savants at issuing press releases. Ten years have gone by now and that company is in the process of building a conforming prototype, they say. About five years in, they hung an electric motor on a kitplane and hauled it around to events like EAA AirVenture in a shockingly successful search for more investors.

About eight or nine years ago, I invested a large sum in an electric aircraft company that promised to have a prototype flying within two to three years. For the most part, the coverage is breathlessly positive, merely reprints of glossy press releases in an impressive show of “suspension of common sense.”īefore I go on, a small confession. Of course, investment in less-than-great ideas happens all the time-think timeshare-but what makes Theranos and electric aircraft development stand out is how, while in the process of gathering and dispersing millions, they manage to avoid even a cursory level of skeptical review. For those not familiar with the name Theranos, suffice to say hundreds of millions of investor dollars were squandered on what appeared to be a beneficial idea with no hope of ever delivering a usable product or a return to investors. If you think my idea is just too dumb to invest in, then you haven’t been following what’s happening with electric aircraft, an investor-targeted fraud not unlike the Theranos mess from just a few years ago. And yes, a steam engine can spin a propeller. Yeah, sticks of wood are a kind of fossil fuel, but they are unleaded, so my engine is definitely greener than yours, sort of. Exciting, huh? I’m just a few years from building my conforming prototype and looking for investors with an insatiable appetite for socially responsible nonsense and too polite to wonder out loud how long it takes the boiler to build up a head of steam. The target market for such an aircraft is, of course, flight schools and any pilots looking to avoid the high cost of avgas by chopping their own firewood. Attention, investors: I’ve decided to design and build an airplane powered entirely by steam engine.

Steam power