100 Percent ELECTRIC POWERED Ultralight
 

Here is a link to an Experimental Aircraft Association news release about the Electric Lazair Amphibian Ultralight, with several videos of it flying at the bottom of the story.

Lazair achieves electric-powered flight

THIS is where we will perfect the electric drive system, in the air, on a "lowly" Ultralight aircraft.
Niri Te

Here is still MORE on the Electric Lazair

Electric Lazair Entered in EAA Electric Flight Contest

Also check out the comments at the bottom of the story.

Niri Te

Very cool. Where's the ikran paint job, though?! Heheh... :D

Now we just need to get room-temperature superconductors--unobtainium!--so that we can get these motors to the power-to-weight ratio and duty cycles needed to move big commercial aircraft. The U.S. Navy has already developed large superconductive motors for ships. Of course, we're talking about ships that are powered by fission reactors and have big refrigeration plants attached to the motors...

The ikran paint job is going on my HM-293 Flying Flea.
Niri Te

If you've got room-temp superconducting materials, you don't really need aircraft at all. Maglev trains are a lot more efficient, if not also faster. ;)

Show me a maglev train that will travel at MACH speeds across the Oceans Clarke. And before you bring up the demise of the Concord, might I remind you that the crash of the Air France Concord, did as much to end that aircraft's life, as anything else. What eventually pulled the plug on the design was that the Britts couldn't make any money on it after the crash, not many among the traveling public trusted the plane. The list of Pilot and tower errors that also DOOMED that plane was as long as my arm. THEN there was the GROSS engineering error of NOT armoring the lower surface of the wings in case of just what happened. It reminds me of company's RACING to get the first of a new design into the sky and taking engineering shortcuts. Remember the British Comet, versus the Boeing 707? The Comet made it into the sky first, and then a design flaw reared it's ugly head, with the deaths of MANY people, spread over several crashes. The 707 is one of the safest jets ever to take to the sky. Boeing took their time, and did it right the FIRST time. The Lockheed SST was a better, faster, more fuel efficient design, but the U.S. congress pulled the funding after the Concorde took to the sky, knowing that the flying public could not make two different designs profitable.It was before it's time, there will be a limited fleet of supersonic transports in the future, Boeing leapfrogged the SST and designed an HST "Spaceplane". The Global economies will HAVE to stabilize FIRST.
Niri Te

Concord burned more fuel merely taxiing to the runway than a modern transatlantic flight uses. It was a publicity stunt. In contrast, RTSC maglevs burn zero fuel, and use a pitiful amount of power compared to a jet aircraft, even at high speed. (Especially if the electrical grid is now superconducting. ;)) For safety reasons, I think you'd be limited to just under Mach 1, though.

...Except if you put the train inside a tunnel that has been evacuated of air. (Which or may not be underwater.) As long as your tunnel's long enough, and you don't need to stop, hypersonic is slow. ;) For instance, you could get from Paris to New York inside 3 hours quite easily and comfortably. (Accelerations up/down included.) If you want to be less comfortable, e.g. because it's freight, under 1 hour is possible.

AGAIN, I said T-R-A-N-S O-C-E-A-N-I-C. I would just LOVE to see what a tunnel laid across the Pacific from L.A. to Honolulu, to Tokyo would do when one of the many earthquakes in the Pacific rim occurred. In the air you are immune to earthquakes. I think you could build a FLEET of SST's for what the aforementioned tunnel would cost, and, again, how long before a 6-0 Earthquake hit anywhere near the tunnel.

Perfectly doable, especially if you have low pressure or vacuum in an enclosed tunnel.
Perfectly possible to build it on the ocean floor, not that differently to the hundreds of submarine cables around the world, although it would just need better armour as cables are regularly damaged by anchors.

A fleet of SSTs is cheaper, sure, but far less efficient when run for the long term. As it is, a zero-fuel SST is impractical without a completely new type of engine as at mach speeds, the air will destroy propellers.

75 minutes. Impressive. Electric hanggliders only have about 20 minutes, but I always thought that was not the limit.
Transatlantic tunnels for maglev trains - wow, that would be one hell of an investment. Thinking about how much problems it already caused to build a tunnel from Europe to the British Isles. And thinking about how Germany has still no working maglev train line even though it would surely make sense - but the constuction cost of such a thing would just be astronomical.

The cost for replacing an entire rail network is astronomical no matter what you use. Where I live, the trains are still third-rail powered instead of overhead cables. Maglev has been working in production in Japan for a long time, but obviously lacks the backward compatibility with existing lines.

Yes indeed - the costs are astronomical to replace an entire network of transportation. Especially if it is not an upgrade (like adding overhead cables or a third rail to a regular railway). In Germany, they replaced some of the major lines with new rails to get the high speed trains running, that was already a major investment, presently making travelling by rail more expensive than driving a car, even at gasoline prices of 1.70EU/liter. But at least they could use existing railway lines and add to that. For maglev the building costs for a kilometer of rail is multiple times that for a high speed regular electric rail. I think the line that was proposed to run from Munich airport to Munich central station (about 20-30 km I think) was calculated to cost several billion Euros already. Now think of building that from Munich to Frankfurt, to Hamburg, Berlin and the Ruhrcity. I dont think they would do it - maybe if they would use all the money they give away to the banks in the past months, they could do it for Germany. But that still is pale in comparison to a maglev train tunnel at 2000m below the ocean surface and all the way across the atlantic.

It is refreshing to see that someone else is not looking for magical quick solutions to our transportation pollution problems that are absolutely out in dreamland, financially speaking but looking at logical, step by step paths that can slowly get us to where we need to be atmospherically. An under the Atlantic maglev could not be afforded by all the economy's of this planet combined, one across the Pacific, would be even MORE outrageous. You want to have a very fast positive effect on air pollution? Ban ALL burning of Coal Planet wide, effective IMMEDIATELY.
Niri Te

Hehe - if coal burning would be stopped, railways would also stop by the way. At least in Germany where still a lot of electricity for the many electric rail lines is produced by coal. Personally I think, that a lot less transportation has to happen - period. No matter what the means of transport are - any long distance transport is very expensive - sometimes in terms of money, but certainly in terms of energy and resources. The reason for the astronomical prices of a project like maglev trains are not that so many people have to be paid, but it is a reflection of the amount of energy and mineral resources that go into this. Even if unobtainium (or to stay in the present - highly conductive magnetic coils) does not have to be brought actoss several light years but can be done by manufacturing, the costs in terms of energy and mineral resources are likely to be very high, plus the production of hundreds of miles of these rails.
My thought is, that long distance travelling should be kept to special occasions. I mean, if I want to go on vacation to Spain after 2 years of working, that is possibly also not perfect, but I know people who fly to London for a weekend or to New York to look at the city and go shopping. Shopping! But hey, it is only 40€ with Ryan Air, so people will of course do something like that. And businesspeople also think they are so important that they have to do a business trip for 2 days halfway across the world. A more sustainable economy cannot work that way. The same way it does not make sense to catch crabs in the North sea, fly them to Africa so they can be peeled by cheap dark skinned wage slaves and then take a plane back to Germany to be sold.

VOLLTREFFOR ma 'eylan on the last subject of unnecessary travel. Even IF the Concorde were still flying, two executives could be tasked with the solution to a business problem. One could get up in the dark one morning, get to the airport, and board the Concorde, (because he has to GET there in a hurry), while the other, gets up at the normal time, has an unrushed breakfast, and goes to work. The concord his friend in on, goes gear up at the same time that he walks into the conference room, and initiates a conference link with offices in Munich, New York, and suppliers in Milan, and a silicon chip factory in Taiwan. By the time that the jet has landed at JFK, the one who flew over, can now go back, as the problem, as well as any peripheral problems have ALL been addressed. meaning that he representatives from all the other locations would NOT have to travel to the meeting site by air, when they could do it VIRTUALLY. The reason that these people travel for business in NOT because it is required, but because it is FUN, and they get to do it on someone ELSE'S dime. Niri Te

The problem with Lazair is its size, ultralight-one/two-passenger. To really make a difference would be a small airplane, like a Beechcraft to be electrically powered. The only thing that stops electricity of being used in almost any transportation vehicle is the storage, aka, the batteries. Invent a super battery and you'll rule the world.
And, didn't Brunel build a vacuum transportation system?

He did: Isambard Kingdom Brunel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The beauty of aircraft is, that I DON'T have to follow roads, (or vacuum operated "tubes") to go somewhere, sometimes saving HUNDREDS of miles out of my way. I can fly great circle distance, point to point, direct, saving hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, and many MANY gallons of fuel, and therefore, produce far less pollution than in a car. In time, the battery technology will catch up, and electric Barons will be viable. We must crawl before we walk, and walk before we run.
Niri Te

But you still do need an airplane! IHMO, having every person flying in single seat aircrafts is a problem very similar to the one originated by cars on roads and streets.

Have you ever been to the rural southwest United States? The population density out where I live, is about one person, (not family) for every seven to ten square miles. There is NO WAY that "public Transportation" could work in an area where beef cattle outnumber the humans several thousand to one. And my plane seats two, not one. It also gets 36 to the gallon, which is 15 to the gallon better than my Truck or Jeep, only my 70 MPG Motorcycle beats everything else.

Although I haven't been in the rural SW United States, I've certainly been at places where the population density is very low, that's not the problem. The problem is transportation inside cities where millions of citizens need fast and reliable transportation. Certainly it works where there is a lot of free space, but it is a complete different context when considering cities.

I'm sorry, I misunderstood the second part of what you said. I thought that people that lived out where I do, were wasters, because they out of necessity only drove one or two in a vehicle. Or myself, because my plane only carries two people.
I was stationed in, and then lived in Germany for 14 years, during the late 60's, through the middle 80's. I fell in love with the German public transportation system, even though I had a VERY fast car that I would occasionally "have fun with" driving from Bad Tolz, to Giessen and back. I fully believed then as I STILL believe now, that the two things that the United States should just Unabashedly COPY outright from the Germans, is their Transportation System, and Their Krankenkasse. Obamacare is a JOKE, just copy what the German's have, but we don't have the money to do either in this Country anymore. Niri Te

That's fine with a low population density, but completely nonrepresentative of everyone else. The entire point of roads is to optimise routes by reducing the cost in time and fuel.