Electric Seaplane

[Tigger]

Speaking of Electric Cars ... here's the maiden flight for Harbour Air's newly powered electric Seaplane! Really. Pretty cool.

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-new ... n-richmond

[JoeP]

I heard about that. Pretty cool. Probably a proof of concept at this stage but I wonder how much it will eventually be able to carry and how far. 160 km is about 100 miles but that would limit it to 50 miles both ways right now.

[Steele]

It seems worth noting they used a 60 year old metal airframe and a motor with much more power than the radial it replaced. I wonder what the range may be with a modern efficient shape, CF construction, and a more modest power plant.

[Tigger]

It will be interesting to watch. Vancouver Harbour to Nanaimo Harbour is a 20 minute flight. If the charging infrastructure is there, perhaps a complete recharge can be achieved in the 30 minutes before the next take off?

I'm guess that the radial engine + fuel may be close to the weight of the electric motor plus batteries? Paging Steve to the white courtesy phone ...

[Panope]

It seems worth noting they used a 60 year old metal airframe and a motor with much more power than the radial it replaced. I wonder what the range may be with a modern efficient shape, CF construction, and a more modest power plant.

Tom, the Dehaviland Beaver's performance on floats may never be surpassed by a new, certified plane, for several reasons.

First, float plane speed will always be slow due to the requirement for very large, thick wings and dragging floats through the air. Therefore the smooth and sexy compound curves of composite construction are not a large benefit to efficiency (parasite drag is a small percent of total).

Next, the Beaver was designed and certified before the current, more stringent standards. It is "grandfathered in" so to speak. Today's standards (such as seats that limit G loads on occupants during crashes) will always result in a heavier plane (of same material) than in the past.

The potential market for seaplanes of this size is very small, making the very high development costs hard to recoup.

Unlike using welded aluminum for boat hulls, riveted aluminum is very, very hard to beat in aircraft construction. If carbon fiber was a slam dunk replacement, Boeing would have done it decades ago.

Lastly, the Beaver on floats is a true masterpiece. A benchmark aircraft. Near perfection. Various plane makers have been trying for decades to replace it. All have failed.

Steve

[Steele]

Steve,
Your insights are appreciated, I know squat about airplanes. We live very close to Kenmore Air's north lake Washington's faculty and see the Beavers and Otters come and go all day long. Your explanation accounts for how they have done so well rebuilding and flying those planes.

In all fainess Boeing has gone to composite construction, but it has been a bumbpy road.

[Panope]

It will be interesting to watch. Vancouver Harbour to Nanaimo Harbour is a 20 minute flight. If the charging infrastructure is there, perhaps a complete recharge can be achieved in the 30 minutes before the next take off?

I'm guess that the radial engine + fuel may be close to the weight of the electric motor plus batteries? Paging Steve to the white courtesy phone ...

Ross, I am not up to speed on this project's details.

However, a small two seat training aircraft has been developed that uses batteries mounted in suitcase sized modules that are quickly removable for swapping out with charged batts. Seems like something similar could be done with the scheduled, short haul routes being considered.

Steve

[JoeP]

Perhaps some sort of conformal removable battery pack could be used but it had better be very watertight. Salt water and Lithium batteries generally don't play well together I have heard.

[LarryHoward]

This is an interesting experiment and maybe just the use case for electric aircraft. 15 minutes with a 25 minute reserve isn't a lot. It does turn some planning factors upside down, particularly for longer flights now served by turbine engine aircraft with high fuel fractions. Generally speaking, aircraft can take off with substantially more fuel than they can land with so fuel planning is crucial. In this case, take off weight equals landing weight as batteries don't get lighter as they discharge so an existing aircraft can carry no more battery (and engine) weight than it's conventional counterpart's gasoline engine and maximum landing fuel. More battery weight equals longer range but fewer passengers.

Hope it works out. Perhaps it's time to introduce this in the limited mission trailers mentioned above and specific short haul flights

[Ajax]

I'm surprised that a seaplane is the chosen platform for this conversion.

The drag of pontoons on water vs. wheel on runway are much greater, resulting in a much larger energy consumption to get airborne plus the weight of the pontoons themselves. I get that the use case of the route and passengers lends itself to an electric plane, but...

I know little of such things. Steven and Larry are the SME's.

[BeauV]

I'm no airplane guy, but Steve's comments about how the Beaver is a great airplane were certainly interesting.

They guys at Kittyhawk have taken a very different approach. lots of small props that are used for lift as well as forward movement. I'm betting that automation, of the pilot's job, results in a much bigger win than folks think. 10 pounds of computers could replace well over 200 pounds of pilot and gear. The Kitthawk market research data indicates that a massive percentage of short-haul private flights are 2 or less passengers. If that's the case, then something the size of an electric Beaver is simply too much aircraft. It would be interesting to know what the average load for Kenmore Air is running around Puget Sound.

Video HERE

[LarryHoward]

Ajax,

Keep in mind that the first thing you do to convert a land plane into a sea plane is a larger, "torquier" prop because getting initial acceleration to get the floats up on a plane is critical to take off distance. A piston engine is limited to a maximum manifold pressure and needs rpm to keep the pressure withing limits. That means a lower pitch prop which is just what you don;t want for torque. An electric motor has max torque at 0 rpm so can turn a large, aggressive prop well and then be very efficient at cruise power. Without seeing the numbers, I'd bet a significant decrease in "powerplant" (engine/prop) weight for the electric. Think "ludicrous mode" for initial take off.

Beau,

We have been looking for personal air transport since the 60's. I still don't see George Jetson flying around town. Problem I see is "sense and avoid" when the traffic gets dense. We're been working that for a multitude of UAVs and the problem is similar to autonomous cars. They work great as long as everybody plays by a rule set. Unfortunately, the average Sunday driver can;t do that in 2 dimensions with defined paths. Cant imaging it happening in 3 dimensions. COuld be done in code until somebody plants a virus or you experience a blue screen of death. Have to wonder what the product liability would cost for a device you sent your child off to school in.

[kimbottles]

I don’t think i will climb into a pilotless plane anytime soon.

[BeauV]

Larry, the Kittyhawk folks will never "sell" their planes to anyone, they will provide them as an air-taxi service. I don't believe there will ever be any controls inside the aircraft. If the computer fails or does the crap a PC does (blue screen) you are screwed. Fortunately, we actually do know how to build reliable software, it's just that MSFT hasn't ever bothered with the disciplines required. Given the obvious risk, I doubt there will be ways to "hack in" to these devices. They will not be "flown" from the ground, they'll be given a route/schedule and they will fly it. Air traffic control just tells them where they need to go, how fast, and who else is around.

Of course, that means for efficiency sake there will probably be corridors where "normal" aircraft are not allowed. But, the FAA already does that.

One major advantage of a computer is that they follow the rules. No idiots deciding to cut a corner in the pattern or fly in an unauthorized route. No jokers doing tree-top flybys. Computers follow instructions, pilots.... sometimes not so much. I think an entirely autonomous fleet will be massively more reliable than planes driven by humans.

As to liability and real risk, people get into ground taxi cabs all the time, even in places like Boston and Phili. Those guys have insurance. I'll bet that we find that these computer-controlled air taxis are massively safer than regular 4 wheel taxis driven by some clown who can read the road signs. I guess I think the programming problems can be solved much more easily than building a reliable air-taxi with the range to work hard all day. We still don't have a good way to re-charge except battery swap and that's a big cumbersome job, which is probably riskier than anything the vehicle will do in the air.

[LarryHoward]

Beau,

We have autonomous flight today and it’s more expensive and consumes more resources than a piloted aircraft. The same tech that flies Global Hawk can control an A-380 on a 20 hour flight. I don’t see anyone clamoring to get rid of pilots.

Can autonomous taxis work? Sure. Public trust still has to be built and carving out exclusive 3 d space is really quite hard unless you ban all VFR traffic. Traffic and news helicopters are a great example of “see and avoid” operators that complicate the mix.

A fully controlled and ordered system doesn’t require pilots in the same way a fully ordered, rule based 2D system doesn’t require drivers. We are not there in 2D yet. 3D is a lot harder. A 2 D system that gets confused or experiences a fault can brake to a safe stop. An autonomous aircraft can’t park on the nearest cloud.

I think the tech is great and one day personal air transport will be as common as elevators without operators. For it to succeed, 6 sigma reliability isn’t nearly enough. We do se things through different lenses. I tend to look at flight safety from a a FMECA (failure modes and effects criticality analysis). Fully autonomous flight has a lot of very short fault trees. If a,b and c happens - everybody dies. The 737 Max shows when we put in tech that can fail and cause a crash. Both mishaps were preventable with pretty simple pilot actions. Low experience, likely poorly trained pilots just let a basic but simple failure kill almost 400 people. Software safety analysis falls apart when you get more than a couple of million lines of code. There are just too many potential failure paths. Object priests architecture and reusable code were the future 15-20 years ago. Hasn’t happened. We still see random hardware events creating situations that very heavily tested software can’t deal with.

Aerospace has been investing hundreds of millions trying to develop and prove the sense and avoid logic that allows autonomous aircraft to freely operate in current airspace and its hard. Like fully autonomous driving, the new entrant will be expected to adopt to the existing world and not be able to write new rules for everyone else. It’s going to be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

[BeauV]

Larry,

I don't disagree with anything you've said. But, I think we're talking about two radically different potential solutions.

First, the problem with 3D vs 2D is that the surface of the road has many more "bad actors" for software to deal with. Dogs, kids, drunks, etc... are all wandering around. While news choppers have been legendary for rule-breaking etc... (I remember that guy in Arizona who would fly around about 10' off the ground.) airspace is already extremely limited in many areas where VFR is simply not allowed. While one does have birds to bang into and weather events to route around, there aren't moose, deer, road washouts, kids on bikes, football games in the streets, street-racers on the freeway etc....

Here in the SF Bay area and around Washington DC, there are massive areas that are full-on no-fly zones. I'm pretty sure the private pilot's "privilege" of flying VFR is doomed in congested areas. Indeed, I think I read that a fully automated take-off, flight, and landing system was just being approved for commercial airliners; I couldn't find it doing a quick search.

Second, in the small air taxi space, there isn't anything like the consequences of failure. When a two or three-person air taxi crashes it may be an everybody dies scenario, but it's not hundreds of folks as we saw with the Boeing cock-up. Yes, all life is equally valuable but the total risk is massively smaller. I realize that folks aren't rational about risk, but anyone who rides a motorcycle should be thrilled to be in something as safe as an air-taxi. I completely accept that we'll have to wait until obviously irrational people accept that the things are safe, but why isn't that a choice of the passenger rather than the worried granny wringing her hands. Current, commercial air travel already suffers from an absurd and idiotic (in my opinion) target level of reliability. Yet, the hand-wringers continue to drive the cost of air travel up because of their absurd beliefs about risk. I'm probably wrong about human nature here. But, I find it absolutely absurd to allow folks to ride motorcycles while howling about how dangers air travel is. In 2016 we had 19 fatalities in commercial air travel in the US (source). For the same year, we had 5,286 fatalities on motorcycles (source). The absurdity makes me nuts! Again, I'm probably wrong, as people don't seem to care what the real risks are, only their obviously idiotic perceived risk.

Finally, I've spent most of my adult life around software with all sorts of varying levels of reliability. For the current model of aircraft with high passenger count and low rationality on true risk, you are also correct about software reliability. But, I'd point out that this is just as nuts as the current phobia about the Tesla Autopilot. Tesla has a massive number of miles driven now and a fatality rate that is a tiny fraction of human drivers. Yet, because folks don't understand it, they fear it. The software does make mistakes, which is a bad thing. But, it makes far fewer than drivers, especially drunk drivers. The numbers don't lie, but the folks reading them don't think.

There are techniques around that make software vastly more reliable on a statistical basis than it was 20 years or even 10 years ago. The fundamental difference in approach (I'm oversimplifying here) is to build easy to test components, have the author generate a test suite for their own code, have others audit the code and test sweet, which is all pretty straight forward. What is different is to then write the correction code to deal with things that don't work. This is also backed up with multiple redundancies built into the system. This approach has yielded much lower failure rates for the overall system and even lower failure rates for the modules. There isn't any way that we'd be able to have built the monsters software we use every day if two things weren't acceptable. A statistical level of failure that is non-zero and a highly structured system to process failures, even those that no one predicted. The shift from what I'll call a priori software, in which everything has a path and all trees are explored for their risk; to a layered response to failures, in which supervisory layers deal with problems that are well outside of anything folks predicted has revolutionized the field. All that said, it is hard for anyone to accept that there is a 0.2% chance that granny will die on her way to Christmas dinner because her air taxi crashed; even if it was 10 times as safe as an auto-taxi.

The last point is that one of my friends walked away from his Cirris airplane after it hit the dirt. The parachute allowed a relatively gentle crash landing. The plane is toast, my buddy is just fine. (Retired F-14 pilot) Given the extremely lightweight of the Kittyhawl air-taxi, I imagine this could work pretty well. ( The picture isn't my buddy, but it just here because I type too much text in my posts. )

[Charlie]

The very first plane I was ever in was a Piper Cub with floats. There was a guy near our cottage who gave tours of the Ontario lakes. Fond memories of seaplanes.

I didn’t get on a commercial airline until I was in high school. Now I’m on them continuously. I miss the seaplane.

[SemiSalt]

I have a hard time taking drone delivery and air taxis seriously. Here is a Google Earth view of my house. Winter view of course, with none of the nice foliage Beau has. A photo taken in high summer would show very little of the house and yard, just leafy treetops.

2019-12-13_1444.png

The whole plane parachute systems are credited with saving over 400 lives. I suspect Beau's picture is from a test since there looks to be plenty of opportunity to land the plane on the open terrain.

This article https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber ... SKBN1W12OV suggests there are 80,000 Uber drivers in NYC. Say 5000 active at any one time. Could there be enough air taxis to be anything other than a treat for the wealthy? And where actually are they going to land? I'm wondering what they are planning for in terms of a typical length of ride. I guess I could see a market for hops between JFK, LGA, ,EWR, HPN and TEB.

[LarryHoward]

I have a hard time taking drone delivery and air taxis seriously. Here is a Google Earth view of my house. Winter view of course, with none of the nice foliage Beau has. A photo taken in high summer would show very little of the house and yard, just leafy treetops.

2019-12-13_1444.png

The whole plane parachute systems are credited with saving over 400 lives. I suspect Beau's picture is from a test since there looks to be plenty of opportunity to land the plane on the open terrain.

This article https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber ... SKBN1W12OV suggests there are 80,000 Uber drivers in NYC. Say 5000 active at any one time. Could there be enough air taxis to be anything other than a treat for the wealthy? And where actually are they going to land? I'm wondering what they are planning for in terms of a typical length of ride. I guess I could see a market for hops between JFK, LGA, ,EWR, HPN and TEB.

I suspect BRS is claiming a “save” for each person in every airplane that has pulled the handle. With 35,000 units installed and a pretty high GA accident rate, I’m sure they have saved lives. Helicopter transfers between JFK, a couple of heliports in Manhattan and Newark are already available and not terribly expensive on a scheduled basis but it’s not “Uber in the air.” Don’t think you’ll see autonomous air taxis picking folks up in Midtown anytime soon due to air traffic density and population density under the flight path. Not sure how you would carve out an exclusive “drone corridor” in a high density area. It’s a cool idea and we will probably get there but not while any of us geezers are around.

Beau. Human nature likes accountability and folks decide more on emotion than data. As a society, we punish drunk drivers. Are we going to jail Elon when a Teala on AP kills someone? How will society get it’s pound of flesh? I just don’t think those making policy today will buy into the “we tested it and it’s safe (enough). When grandma crash lands in the middle of the local park, someone will look for “justice.” Maybe the millennials will put more faith in tech and maybe we can tamper proof software someday. That full “autoland” has been available for a while and is very good. It also requires a fully certified pilot at the controls all of the time.

Appreciate the software discussion and that is the way we do aircraft software these days and the systems still occasionally surprise us.

[Steele]

The air taxi thing could work well in our area. The I5 coridor is increasingly congested, and the because of our geography alternative routes are very limited. We have lots of wealthy people and companies in the puget sound area and time is money. I also assume that since it is a single trip ride for one client or small group, and because the aircraft is not in control of anybody on board, all the TSA hassles would not apply.

As an example Seattle to Bellevue (home of microsoft) can take 90 min at rush hour for a 15 mile trip. Seattle to Portand is 190 miles, but can take over 5 hours driving depending on traffic, weather etc. Even with that it still makes sense to drive since flying involves the commute the airport, TSA lines, wating at the gate etc.

[LarryHoward]

The air taxi thing could work well in our area. The I5 coridor is increasingly congested, and the because of our geography alternative routes are very limited. We have lots of wealthy people and companies in the puget sound area and time is money. I also assume that since it is a single trip ride for one client or small group, and because the aircraft is not in control of anybody on board, all the TSA hassles would not apply.

As an example Seattle to Bellevue (home of microsoft) can take 90 min at rush hour for a 15 mile trip. Seattle to Portand is 190 miles, but can take over 5 hours driving depending on traffic, weather etc. Even with that it still makes sense to drive since flying involves the commute the airport, TSA lines, wating at the gate etc.

Not sure. If there is demand, are helicopter taxis common there now? I look at the helicopter taxis from Manhattan to the Hamptons. Certainly a market there and if you can get a corridor out of the city and under the LGA traffic, you are pretty clear of commercial lanes. If there is a market, that trip could prove it but Seattle may have less resistance to adopting new tech.

[Steele]

I guess I was thinking in terms of future opportunities rather than comparing to helicopters. If the vaporware of the electric small aircraft companies is to be beleived they should be much quieter, safer, and less expensive than copters. The cost savings could be found in reduced energy cost and not needing pilots. I am way beyond my knowledge base here, but it would seem that dedicated air corridors could be set up for use by these types of aircraft. This would allow transit between community hubs, but not door to door (unless a hub was a private site, like Google headquarters etc).

To the best of my knowledge private helicopter services are not common in my area, but I am not part of that demographic. Several communties have banned their use. The late Paul Allen famously built a very large flat topped "yacht" to be moored at his lakefront home. The wealthy communtiy where he had his compound banned helicopters, but could do nothing about them flying in over water and landing on his boat.

[BeauV]

I've got at least 20 friends who have helicopters and have enough land at their "weekend houses" that they can land the chopper there. The most extreme example has 4 choppers, one at each "weekend house". So, there is certainly a very very very small market for air-taxi service for the uber-rich.

I've read a lot about the communities which ban choppers. As far as I can tell it's entirely based on noise. Currently, choppers are very loud and their owners sometimes wish to leave/arrive when their neighbors are trying to sleep. For those who have looked at the Kittyhawk videos, their #1 pitch is that they don't make noise. To put this in perspective, the Kittyhawk is much quieter than the average leaf-blower. One can't say that about choppers.

I think that Larry's observation, that there is already a air-taxi service between NYCity and the Hamptons (which uses choppers) is a great example. If we ignore the autonomous operation issue, which Kittyhawk could solve by limiting load to 2 passengers vs 3 and using the additional seat for a pilot, then the question is operating costs for a Kitthawk electric chopper vs current technology. I'm guessing that the electric chopper wins here, especially as it is really a version of a tilt-rotor and can fly with the lift from its wing when in transit.

I'm reminded of the simple fact that a Tesla is cheaper to operate than an MBZ or BMW regardless of any discussion about the Tesla Autopilot.

(rant on) Larry, I do agree that many people make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. It should be obvious by now that I'm not one of them. As to how someone gets "justice" when a chopper crashes and grandma dies, my first observation is that Americans aren't looking for "justice" they are looking for "vengeance". My second observation is that we Americans are complete wimps about risk. It's embarrassing. I'm seriously disgusted with us as a country and all the money, time, and effort we waste trying to figure out who gets blamed when someone does something stupid. If grandma decided to ride a motorcycle to the family Christmas party, would people try to seek vengeance when she was hit by a pickup truck and killed while she was running a red light? Nope. She made her choice and died as a consequence. How pitiful it is that we Americans consistently try to blame someone else when the outcome of our choices goes badly. The culture of vengeance for one's own mistakes is pitiful. (rant off)

[SemiSalt]

I dont see an air traffic problem with air taxis from NYC to the Hamptons if they are willing and able to stay below 1000 ft. I do wonder about endurance. I'm thinking 100 mile trip with 50 mile reserve is challenging, and a recharge would be necessary before the return.

[LarryHoward]

(rant on) Larry, I do agree that many people make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. It should be obvious by now that I'm not one of them. As to how someone gets "justice" when a chopper crashes and grandma dies, my first observation is that Americans aren't looking for "justice" they are looking for "vengeance". My second observation is that we Americans are complete wimps about risk. It's embarrassing. I'm seriously disgusted with us as a country and all the money, time, and effort we waste trying to figure out who gets blamed when someone does something stupid. If grandma decided to ride a motorcycle to the family Christmas party, would people try to seek vengeance when she was hit by a pickup truck and killed while she was running a red light? Nope. She made her choice and died as a consequence. How pitiful it is that we Americans consistently try to blame someone else when the outcome of our choices goes badly. The culture of vengeance for one's own mistakes is pitiful. (rant off)

Beau,

I don’t create the news, I just observe.

Product liability just about killed general aviation. Many of us carry umbrella policies in the event we become targets for someone wanting “what they are due” in the event of an accident. I know when my 18 YO had an at fault accident and I got the “demand letter” from the other driver’s attorney, I took a hard look at how exposed we were and we are not “rich.” Fortunately, the injury was minor and the claim was reasonable. A friend of mine wasn’t so lucky and faced bankruptcy on a scam bump at a traffic light. Even though the other driver had a record of bogus claims, it took a PI and videos of him surfing the north shore to finally counter the crippling permanent injury claim.

If grandma runs the red light, her problem. If grandma is sitting in a “safe and well proven” autonomous transport and it kills her, someone is going to try to get very rich. That is my point.

[SemiSalt]

My second observation is that we Americans are complete wimps about risk.

Not so very long ago, say 150 years, it was assumed that "accidents happen" and there wasn't much you could do about it. I can't say when it started, but science and engineering got organized. We've had time & motion studies, operations research, NASA and NTSB. Now we assume that every accident can be analyzed to find the exact cause. Add that to the litigious society and here we are.

[BeauV]

Larry,

In my rant I wasn’t trying to claim you supported any of this litigious nonsense. I agree with what you’ve said. But, as New Zealand proved, if the population gets pissed off enough about the abuses of Personal Injury lawsuits, they can do something. It took a national vote, but the entire concept of PI lawsuits was removed. You can’t sue anyone for what goes wrong. If you’re bungee jumping and die, it’s your fault. Of course, then our citizens couldn’t use the courts to get vengeance or as a formal way of blaming someone else for their own poor decisions.

Thus, my comment that Semi echoed, we have become a society of wimps unwilling to take responsibility for our choices. This desire to seek vengeance and shed blame is probably a larger inhibition on our personal liberty than any set of laws. Imagine the number of things people in the US don’t do because they fear liability? I fight against it endlessly in sailboat racing. Based on absolutely no evidence members of the race committee will announce that some proposed action, race course, or change to safety equipment will get us sued. When one asks if they have any evidence of the probability of such a suit, they haven’t a single shred of evidence.

I’ll get off my hobby horse now.

Cheers,

Beau