random question. Why not use electric energy for cruising? I mean engine are basically turbines already. So you can charge electric energy there & use fuel for lift up/ landing
Excellent episode! We all hope that the aviation industry can decarbonise itself for the sake of the planet. I would include one blasphemous comment. Perhaps the industry should consider totally dropping the regional market in favor of high speed rail. They could then emphasize larger planes which would continue to use more pilots with larger passenger loads. Airlines would then be profitable providing service where they are needed most.
Well Captain.. considering that hydrogen detonates worse than C4😳as you can see »» ruclips.net/video/vSDmlj-u6QM/видео.html .... instead of burning outside the plane letting you passengers out like in British Airways flight 2276 and others 🤔........... and that after all.. to get hydrogen you need to use energy AKA Oil.. AKA Greenhouse Gases🤷♀........ if "pilot pay is threatening to KILL the future of electric or hydrogen-powered aircraft?".. I hope so 😠...
If something (inevitably) goes wrong with a plane, I want an experienced and passionate airman to handle the situation. I don't want to decrease the person's pay as i trust my life in them ....
Is pilot pay a problem? Sure. There needs to be more of an incentive to encourage a lot more pilots to spend the money to get certified. Boeing's numbers say that the world needs 650,000 pilots. That is a lot of money spent training. I would know.
I don't like incentives, as they tend to encourage people who aren't natural pilots or have the necessary skills to force themselves through the process...or the companies then feel the need to let them through even when they shouldn't.
@@pistonburner6448psychologically, rewards do work badly as you describe. Reinforcements can work, the difference is essentially timing. What is really needed is inspiration/promotion: the x-files made applications to the FBI increase a ton, as a silly example. But also people outside of the normal pool of people need help getting started/ deciding to continue, financially, socially, even. That’s not the same thing as paying the non interested
Then maby they should start employing pilots with low flight hr that are certified but need more flight hr to be able to fly passenger planes thats the biggest reason why they have no pilots and most people give up on the pilot job.
I agree with @pistonburner6448 and @ghost4fly659-we don’t want to incentivize people who only see a paycheck and otherwise don’t care about flying when hundreds of lives will be in their hands. But at the same time, the 1500-hour rule deters those who genuinely do want to fly. Getting 1500 hours in a small aircraft is so different than flying massive planes that it’s pretty pointless. The crash that resulted in that rule had two pilots who had more hours than that. I honestly think the reason for that rule comes down to forcing airline-hopefuls to have to be CFIs if they can’t afford to rent planes for 1,500 hours which results in bad CFIs and bad training (I dealt with a bad CFI who was just trying to get hours and didn’t care about training). Hour-requirements need to be reasonable. Don’t lower the standard a pilot much reach to be signed off to fly a passenger plane, but don’t keep the minimum to be hired so absurdly high either.
Not a new project, but a fascinating one: the US Naval Research Lab did a series of carbonic acid- based carbon capture fuel synthesis experiments that was able to synthesize multiple different types of jet fuel from normal seawater. No infrastructure change for the users, same engines and aircraft, but the source is already-emitted CO2. The main challenge is energy input, which gets better the hotter the reaction chambers are, with a specific call or to using waste heat from a nuclear reactor on top of using it as an electrical source for maximum efficiency. They even were able to produce an array of olefins (the building blocks of plastics) for solids manufacture, and bunker fuel for ships!
This is not special. The chemical reactions necessary have been known for years and I had the foundations in high school. The problem is always THE ENERGY IT TAKES TO MAKE ANY AMOUNT OF FUEL!
Hydrogen is really difficult to handle. As is obtaining it in the first place... Hydrogen being no more than energy storage. Quite inefficient at that.
handling? yes obtaining it? not so much - its more or less just electrodes in water, there is a basic experiment that we did in school when I was 14. if youre interested in how its done google for hydrogen electrolysis
If you use a renewable form of energy like solar to crack water to get hydrogen, then process that hydrogen with atmospheric CO2 to form methane, we already have robust storage and transportation methods for this fuel, and converting existing engines and platforms is much easier. This still ends up carbon neutral with a much easier transition that can be accomplished sooner.
@@JQLiFiCE Hydrogen today is obtained from Methane. Electrolysis of water takes far more energy than you get back. Manufacturers are working on the assumption that politicians will regulate hydrocarbon fuel out of the market. This will not happen and as soon as early next year we will see a return to sensible economics and electric and hydrogen will be sidelined once more.
Hydrogen is difficult to store (If you don't go the cryogenic route, there is no container it doesn't slowly leak out because of the small molecule/atom size. If you do go the cryogenic route, the energy cost of keeping it at such low temperatures is again going to take an awful lot of energy, that you can't use for flying in this case, Hydrogen is difficult to handle (It explodes in any mix with Oxygen). But Hydrogen isn't difficult to obtain (I can make it at home, just electrolyze water with a separation between the poles).. It just costs more energy than you will ever get out of the produced Hydrogen.. so it isn't all that economical. And Methane pyrolysis isn't great in terms of efficiency either (it's the best way we know of, and the most commonly used)... Better than electrolysis of water, but not great.. And that energy consumption (of producing and storing Hydrogen) also has to be taken in account. That energy is still being used.. Also Hydrogen and aviation are historically a bad mix...
Something that is not discussed enough is that almost all hydrogen in the world is produced by chemically reforming natural gas, which essentially partially burns it into H2 and CO2. This is the cheapest way of making hydrogen on an industrial scale, and making it from water and electricity is multiple times as expensive, and unless you are in France or Norway where most of the power is nuclear or hydroelectric, that power is coming from burning stuff. So basically the same issue as anything electric.
I think the overall aim to make it carbon neutral is to use excess renewable energy to make hydrogen from water via electrolysis Obviously a long way away from that point atm.
But hydrogen can be produced without CO2 emissions. The problem is a lack of alternatives. Batteries are to heavy, E-fuels need even more energy and bio-fuels are not available on the needed scale. Of course today hydrogen, electric cars, heat pumps and so on are today not emission free, but electricity can easily be produced without emission and it just takes time to scale up. As long as we don´t have enough emission free produced electricity, there is no point in using it to produce hydrogen, but many countries will soon at least temporarily produce more renewable electricity than they need and then it becomes interesting. I think we won´t see a significant amount of hydrogen planes before the late-2030s or 2040s.
Yet another reason the fear mongering against nuclear needs to stop. Hydrogen can be easily produced using nuclear power, on top of the grid electricity it produces.
Don't we already have a solution for this? In most places today we already have the problem of "extra electricity" on the grid and because of large scale solar panel use this tends to be even more problematic with each passing day (basically, we produce more in the time of day that we consume less and have trouble consuming the electricity or shutting down the producers in that period). If we find industrial usage for hidrogen at the scale we now have for oil/gas, then we can start using industrial solutions to produce hidrogen to basically normalize/balance the power consumption of the grid. The cost would basically be offset (not in full, but it's still something) by the gains we'd have in electricity production/distribution cost by finally being able to balance the grid at the consumption level, rather then at the production level. From nuclear powerplants that produce constant energy to not having powerplants that "burn stuff" just because they're the fastest to shutdown/startup, to enabling every single house to have a solar panel and tie it to the electricity grid even if they aren't predictable sources.
a quick google search shows that CEO pay falls into the neighborhood of 195 times what pilot pay is. Pilot pay is not the problem. prioritizing short term profit is nearly always the problem in any situation where management is saying employee wages are the problem.
Most of that is stock options, not salaried income. But let's assume it was all cash. Delta as an example has 15,000 pilots. Fire that CEO and don't even replace him, and give his salary *only* to thy pilots, and you've increased their compensation by 1.3%.
@@EnDSchultz1 now, if you take away the CEO's pay to hire ONE more pilot, how much does that reduce the CEO's pay? I'll give you a hint: it would probably disappear in rounding.
@@kenbrown2808 well if the CEO's pay were all cash (it's not) you could add a total of 195 pilots if there were no CEO. Or probably less, because I'm guessing whatever inflammatory article you read just took the flat income for that "195x" figure and didn't include all the other costs (training, benefits, etc) involved in hiring and employing a pilot for an airline. So I'm still lost as to your point.
For the record, I just checked and the salary of Delta's CEO is just under $1 million per year. The rest of his $12 million compensation is stock, stock options, and incentive pay based on company performance. Delta also has a profit sharing program that doles out hundreds of millions to its employees each year so all these calculations are all entirely hypothetical and invalid anyway.
@@EnDSchultz1 yeah, delta pilots are taking home 121% OVER the national average for pilots. but at the same time, the CEO is still getting a total of 67 times what the average delta pilot is getting.
There is one other factor in all of this and that is "development" cost for both the aircraft and the pilots flying them. Development costs for a new aircraft are very high and they need to be factored into the per unit cost of the end product. The actual cost of material and manpower to build the aircraft is really only part of the price it is sold for. The millions of dollars or euros spent in development and prototyping has to be amortized on a per unit basis and needs to be factored into the sale price. There has to be enough demand for the final product to justify designing and building it. For example: $100,000,000 spent on development with a sales of 100 aircraft means that this factor is $1,000,000 per unit, but if you can sell 500 aircraft it drops to $200,000 per unit, making it more affordable and attractive to buyers. The same applies to the pilot factor in a slightly different way. If it costs someone $50,000 to get their ATP certificate and they only can expect to earn $15,000 as a pilot it would take almost 7 years to earn back what it cost them to get there, but if the pay was $20,000 then it would be only 5 years. This make pursuing the career more attractive and maybe get more people into the pilot pool. This can be why both aircraft projects or people going into aviation can suddenly stop. No sensible manufacturer will continue to develop a product that nobody will buy because of cost or usefulness. The same might deter a pilot because spending the money for training and find out the pay is bad or nobody is hiring would not make sense for many people.
The main problem with hydrogen is that it is very energy intensive to produce and store cryogenically. Also, if used for direct combustion on a jet engine, much larger volumes of it are required as compared to regular jet fuel to achieve the same range. This has been well studied and documented for decades.
Well kinda no. SAF is much more energy intense compared to hydrogen or to say it in other words: less efficient. We will need to stop burn fossile fuels and these are the only option ( apart from something like synthetic methane, ammonia etc ). Otherwise aviation has to be heavly restricted or banned outright. Climachange - sadly - does not joke around.
@@charlesreid9337massive reserves of what? Water? Air? Because that's what hydrogen needs to be produced out of to make it 0 emissions, as is the goal here. Burning natural gas won't get 0 emissions, it'll just move them elsewhere
I live in Moses Lake, WA where some of this footage is from. We have not only hydrogen test aircraft testing here, but full electric aircraft, and Boeing does a ton of aircraft testing out here. Mentour, try to make it out here sometime to see some amazing tech in person, especially at the Moses Lake airshow every June when companies show these prototypes off!
4:48 There's your problem right there. Those batteries stay exactly as you see them through the entire flight. With liquid fuel the aircraft gets more efficient as it goes. The aircraft loses weight as it flies, whereas the battery airplane stays exactly the same weight throughout the flight. Liquid fuel gives you as much power with the last drop as it gave you with the first drop. Batteries don't.
Ask a cargo pilot, what he considers the highest risk load. They will all say BATTERIES because if the fire risk. Not sure electric aircraft and batteries are feasible right now.
Love these two comments. Batteries are primitive technology that humanity has stubbornly held onto in hopes of reinventing the wheel. Ancient batteries were even found buried in ruins, they’re literally Stone Age!
@@johnchristmas7522 depends a lot on the batterie technology. Solid State Batteries or LFP are way safer then jet fuel. I think there is a lot of Potential left but it will take some decades til we see Battery powered Transatlantic Flights.
Love the show and watch all the time. I truly enjoy the technical break down which has really kicked off my interest in commercial aviation. I have a question for you and your fellow aviators! Whith the work load you all carry in with aircraft set up checklist and actual flying! My question is how do you mange stressful situations in heavy traffic and god forbid a aircraft problem ? I am fascinated with cockpit footage but I am just a lay person, but it often looks like a third officer in the cockpit could be helpful. I’m just curious of what you and your fellow flyers think
Any mention of jet engines getting more efficient should also include that air travel is growing, at a faster rate than the efficiency gains. This means CO2 emissions from the airline industriy are increasing, not decreasing. This trend is set to continue, according to the industry itself. While some other industries are decreasing their emissions while increasing their production, there is no clear path forwards for aviation to achieve this. One partial solution is to do what France did: ban short haul flights where high speed rail exists. And of course extend the HSR network. This works at least in places where the terrain allows railway construction at reasonable cost. Bonus: It's a far more pleasant way to travel. Better seats, more space, bigger bathrooms, onboard restaurants, sleeper cars, less noise, you can get up and walk whenever you want, nicer views out the windows, and the trip starts and ends in city centres, not out in the countryside where airports are.
I think that taxes are a solution for this, a fixed tax on every flight will make short trip expensive while still adding not to much on longer flight.
Yes, the induced demand through "every efficiency gain is used to get further passengers to fly longer routes" is very real. BTW a short-haul ban can actually also make overall emissions worse by freeing short-haul airport slots for long-haul connections that wouldn't be able to pay for them previously.
@@matejlieskovsky9625 I don't have an answer for that. I would like to see aviation to transition to zero emissions because travel is a good thing, but there's currently no technology that would do that for long-distance flights. 🙁 (Hydrogen means pumping water into stratosphere which means long enough linger time to have effectively same effect like CO₂ itself, other lack the energy density)
What is really interesting in the tech world right now is sodium ion batteries, they’re safer than lithium, (they don’t explode when damaged) can be run flat without danger, and are able to be manufactured with very little rare earth metals. They have a comparable energy density to lithium with far less risk. They’re now hitting the market, and I wouldn’t be shocked if in the near future we see electric planes being developed with modular battery packs that can be hot swapped at airports. I think that will be the tech that will flip the future electric aircraft market into the feasible territory.
Sodium can not beat the energy density of lithium, it is literally impossible, just look at a periodic table. Sodium is heavier and its redox reaction is a single electron process just like lithium.
@@realGBx64 they’re producing batteries that literally output equivalent charge capacity to lithium batteries in the exact same form factor. I have a box of them on my desk. Something about the effective charge staying higher for longer, I’m not a scientist. All I know is the tech is there and it’s being manufactured right now in compatible form factors and charge capacities and is able to power devices where lithium was traditionally used.
As Boeing discovered, eliminating the risk of thermal runaway with lithium batteries is not easy. It will be even more challenging with much larger and heavier batteries powering a plane. There is also the possibly of battery damage in a crash landing. Adequate battery protection will be an extra weight penalty.
@@ewenewen4060 You are correct that nuclear energy has a lot more fuel density. If I remember correctly, the Soviet Union tried that once. It did not end well for the flight crews.
Correct. Chemistry and physics. Without higher density and lighter weight battery technology this cannot scale to large commercial aircraft. Hydrogen is also not practical for large aircraft.
My only issue with the CFM Rise engines is how much more dangerous they will make it for ground crew. The engine cowling serves as a protective barrier to an extent, and that is not existent in the rise engines.
Great video, as always. For all of us who are used to work with hydrogen, and who are aware of the sheer technological challenges of doing so, the idea that someone really thinks about putting hydrogen containers onboard a flying thing gives me chills…
The limitations of only a few airports having hydrogen infrastructure not only affects which routes can be flown, it also means likely complications when there are weather diversions, because it's quite possible that the airport being diverted to will not have hydrogen available. In other words nearly every weather diversion will become the equivalent of a mechanical diversion, resulting in an unflyable airplane. The plane will possibly be stranded for one to two days waiting for a shipment of hydrogen to be delivered by truck from possibly hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile the airlines will have to find alternate methods to get the passengers on to their destination.
Thank you Petter, but I still believe that there are lower hanging fruits than air transportation if you want to reduce CO2. After all, petrolium products are very suitable for powering automotive applications. Easier to concentrate on replacing coal power plants with nuclear dito. More bang for the bucks....
@@faranger ohh you are one of those special idiots… if you really wanted to know you looked it up on the internet… you are just a ragebating guy, getting their nutrition from oil corporation see-man if you know what I mean.
There's also another problem with switching from one big plane to several small ones. Airport slots. They're already in limited supply on the busier airports.
But hydrogen can be produced without CO2 emissions. The problem is a lack of alternatives. Batteries are to heavy, E-fuels need even more energy and bio-fuels are not available on the needed scale.
People don't even want to hear the "just stop oil" bs anymore. Uneducated morons that never touched the grass think that world will turn upside down everytime they demand it.
@@Phantom-mg5cg And hydrogen is very low density. You either need heavy 400 bar tanks to haul it around or enormous and not very light cryotanks, as Liquid Hydrogen is 14 times less dense than water. Heavy as in 195 pounds for a 400 bar tank holding 13,000L of H2 or a roughly a kilo of hydrogen.
I live in New Zealand and and we often take a 30 seater plane to hop islands from Wellington to Nelson, that's a 30 minute flight. Hydrogen or electric airplanes could probably service that role well. Most of our City to City routes are under an hour flight too.
My Dad worked for Contential Airlines for almost 30 years. I even had a summer job with them. Every time you show a United aircraft tail, all I see is Continental, and I love the memories.
Hi Petter, great content as always👍Would love to hear about scrapping aircraft - how would it make sense to scrap a giant rather than getting it maintained to a top level or even just selling the AC to an airliner (from a lessor point of view)?
Every time we get a new video on this channel I'm thankful, because I feel like Petter's experience, temperament and holistic viewpoint would make him a great airline exec. Then again it's probably way more fun and less stress to talk about the industry than to run it! Thanks for your insight Petter! I wish every industry had a "Mentour" like you
There are some problems with H2, which are not that obvious at first glance. H2 is the smallest mollecule in existence and it makes the choice of material for tank quite challenging. Materials that are impervious for other substances, can be poroštva for H2. Temperature is another big challenge, at low temperatures materials become more brittle. And we haven't even touched H2 production, storage and distribution. There are no silver bullets as a lot of people think nowadays.
@@colinosborne3877 blimps for inflight refueling????!!! How? Compare the speeds, blimp's higher speed is just over a halo of airliner's speed. So, that's a bit of a problem. And it would have to be enormous to carry a useful quantity of H2. I hope you didn't think they would transfer the H2 they would be filled with. And there are no old blimps around.
It’ll be very interesting to see which hydrogen option they go for! But it seems the electric hype is really coming to an end. Electric cars have been around a fair while now and we’re starting to see sales drop and many people returning to normal fuel. I think there needs to be a very significant break through for these projects to really become a feasible reality. As always, fantastic video! Thank you 🙂🙂
Great Vlog, I like the theory of alternative means of propulsion, but certainly in Australia electric propulsion in cars is not feasible due to the distances between recharging points. Hybrid is the only way forward, same as planes at this stage in time, but nevertheless a reduction in complete reliance on pure petroleum-based fuel.
I think that if the battery tech gets to where you could charge up say 2000 nm of range in 30-45 minutes , basically standard turnaround time, electric aircraft are going to get widely spread, at least for the short haul. Until then airlines will have no incentive to switch to battery powered aircraft as it will be a huge ding on the efficiency, with which they operate. It is also the same reason BEVs sales plumeted once subsidies got cut. Everyone who wanted an EV, had the funds to get one and had the facilities to charge it got one. However, for most people it's just an extra hassle, that they are not willing to put up with, me being one of those people. Right now I work from home and most of the time I use my car maybe twice a week for 10-15 kilometers to go shopping, so a BEV would fit my use case perfectly. However I live in an apartment with street parking only and the nearest charger is a kilometer away. There are chargers at the shops where I buy my groceries, but they are expensive. So I either have to spend a lot more money on charging, which negates the point of an EV or deal with the hassle of driving to a charger, plugging in, walking home and then picking the car up an hour or two later. Not to mention having to spend a lot more money on a BEV as they are still more expensive than cheap ICE city cars.
You only need 400-500 nm and the rest can be handled via a range-extender/onboard generator. The efficiency of such a hybrid setup is vastly greater than a traditional jet engine and saves a massive amount on fuel as well. For really short flights, use EV only, for longer, turn on the range extender. Also, no costly engine rebuilds and half the maintenance. The fuel for the generator can be whatever works best.
Chemistry has figured out the safest, easiest and cheapest way to use hydrogen in an engine a long time ago. To make it as compact and energy dense per volume as possible, just put your hydrogen on a carbon backbone structure. No pressure and stable at room temperature, more density. There's more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of supercooled liquid hydrogen. It's really that simple. And as long as nobody overcomes the concept of energy density, that's where it's at.
I'm a 68 years old Airline Captain ( Ret ). Bean Counters will try to pressure Pilots to take the minimum of minimums fuel ...to the point of being Dangerous. That's how much Important weight is , in the Aviation Efficiency Equation . I don't think going " Electric " is an option. Plus , just remember what happened to that Cargo B 747 carrying batteries from Dubai. Kindest Regards
Electric will always be filled to capacity, though, as there is zero savings from under-filling them. The only issue is weight. My guess is that the solution will be to have flights with only carry-ons allowed and NO cargo hold - it will all be tanks/fuel cells/batteries. Or perhaps something like that blended wing design where it's basically the front half that's available, and maybe 2 levels/double level seating as well due to the same "no cargo hold" restriction. You fit 50-70 passengers in the front half and the entire rear is energy or hydrogen storage.
The weight of the batteries is the real killer. The only reason renewable industry started looking at hydrogen in the first place is that batteries offer such a poor store of energy at large scale. I am not advocating for hydrogen either; poor volumetric LHV still (implies range will still be limited), difficult to handle / high storage cost anf general safety means it will take a long time to approve / certify as fuel, not to mention that it would require a complete redesign of the aircraft systems. There will probably be a push for more SAF and it ll stay at that. There are easier / cheaper sectors to decarbonise first.
@@charlesreid9337 The issue is simply one of energy density. We aren't going to find something massively more efficient than current batteries or fuel cells. Not the 5-10x that we need to compete with fossil fuels for aviation. Not in our lifetimes at least. Maybe there is some edge case for small planes, but hauling tens of thousands of pounds of batteries everywhere isn't going to work for larger commercial flights. And certainly not for cargo. I don't need to explain the chemistry or physics when it's this far away from where we need to be. Currently the maximum is about 9700mn with conventional aircraft and electric models barely reaching 250nm. A hybrid system might work, though, for shorter flights.
Two issues that create a significant engineering challenge (1) hydrogen has low energy denisty - you have to carry a lot of it to have long range (2) hydrogen seeps its way into material making the material weaker - hydrogen embrittlement (HE). This is a problem impacting both air and ground transportation. In a single use rocket going into orbit, neither of these is an issue - but as a "fuel tank" and for "range" this is a problem - not to mention the cost associated with hydrogen production and the current difficulty of producing and transporting green hydrogen.
Aww it doesnt understand physics. It's so cute. It is tired of being laughed at for not understanding physics. Or how orbital hydrogen rockets work. But it watched a video and it's hoping not to be laughed at the way it was in grade school before it dropped out. It's trying s ohard
You forgot issue number 3: hydrogen creates combustible mix with air, that is quite easy to ignite, so having a storage of pure hydrogen on board is safety hazard.
Tjänare! Before even starting the video I can answer the question: No, reality is killing the electric aircraft. (And I can debate this issue if someone really wants to learn about or discuss the background, all the factors)
Right. Last I saw....battery capacity would need to increase about 18x before matching the energy density of jet A and even if this was achieved by some miracle...you have the issue of landing at take-off weight adding to the structures needed to be carried in the aircraft which reduces the efficiency. Just like with EV automobiles....short hops only and when the long term emissions are examined of the entire supply chain...they aren't nearly as 'clean' as their proponents claim. And...let's not even get into the debate about 'climate change' which is a red herring intended to supply an emotional reason to increase taxes on the world.
Is there really a debate about the electrification or hydrogen of plane? I mean, outside this channel and the manufacturers PR, the conversation is more about using less plane, using more train and electrifying car.
@@richardlehoux According to whom? Using less planes is just commies talking their usual nonsense, creating damage to society until they're finally voted out. Trains cannot replace planes except in very few cases, and even then it's the leftists themselves who have already sabotaged the possibilities for their optimisation. And they mismanage everything so trains provide a worse service and on top of it all are more expensive! Electrifying the car is not a solution to anything, it only increases emissions and bankrupts society. It hurts people, impoverishes people, helps evil nations gain hegemony in the geopolitical situation.
The problem I see with subsidized regional air routes is that a subsidized rail service will likely fill the same job and more cheaply. In my opinion, hydrogen is too dangerous to use as fuel given its strict temperature requirements. Methane could be a cleaner fuel with a looser temperature requirement than h2, but a loss of the fuel temperature control system can still cause an overwhelming explosion.
You mention that you made a 40 minute flight in a plane with only 45 min of autonomy. This seems to cut pretty tight in case of unforseen problems. Are there no requirements for "electricity" reserves ? Even on a VFR flight there are reserve requirements.
Nobody seems to bring up just how expensive hydrogen is. In my area which is pushing it, it cost $36/kg. Real world cost for driving a Marai is $0.79/mile making operation extremely expensive. I just don't see much future for hydrogen.
This whole notion of hydrogen being zero emissions is LAUGHABLE. To create hygrogen takes various energy conversions, each having an energy cost. Next, the typical source for hydrogen right now is oil, and getting oil out of the ground is ANYTHING BUT zero emissions.
Actually, the nature of hydrogen now is not oil. It’s natural gas. Theoretically, you can make hydrogen from renewable energy, which is basically a missions free but currently that’s very expensive
I can see some of these early 30-seat battery/electric designs working well to replace some very small airliners (eg. Saab 340, Embraer 110/120, Beechcraft 1900D, Fairchild Metroliner). There's plenty of those operating here in Australia, so there would be a market for them. But yes replacing a single Q400 with 3 of them would be uneconomic. As far as storing it in spherical/cylindrical tanks, I can't help but wonder if a design similar to the Learjet 35 would work - with larger 'tip tanks' on the ends of the wings (or even under them) and rear engines - you'd get some decently sized cylindrical tanks without hogging seat space.
@@UnsolicitedContextnuclear fusion to use as power source to create more portable fuels, I would assume. It takes a lot of energy to get methane from our atmosphere. Same goes for storing and moving hydrogen
I think so, the biggest obstacle against any battery based technology aircraft, the fact an aircraft loose a lot of weight while airborne. If not then you have to design every component to land with full takeoff weight which means a lot of reinforcement which reduce the payload quite significant. And because the physics won't change, the battery electric technology will stay maximum at the superlight short range birds, where it looks working pretty good. For a beginner training in perfect weather conditions it's great. Reduce the flight crew? Because of the salarys? What if we reduce all the chairmen of boards? Nowadays at mostly every big companies more managers are then actual productive workforce, most of them make strong 6 figures pretty often as monthly payment.
Hello Peter, It is something amazing the work that you do to provide a quality media product and insightful professional opinions regarding aviation on your channel. What an example seeing your dedication and professionalism inspiring people to take an interest in aviation. Thank you so much for that! I tend to think of aviation as the perfect ideal example of the modern means of transport with all its solutions and principles and its safety consciousness, where the industry has developed so far that it is maybe more closely related to space technology today than to any other industry in terms of public transport. Would you perhaps be interested in showing us your opinion on the beginnings of the time when any lighter than air flying, airships were imagined to be the only possible technological answer to technological challenges of flying? It would be very interesting to hear your storytelling on a technology that built the foundation of flying and ushered in the age of aeroplanes whilst it also quickly came to its limits technologically to hand it over to the modern aeroplane as we know it today. Thank you so much again, Patrik
looking forward to 2 things in aviation... 1 - it finally becomes ALL metric 2 - battery energy density will approximate fuels. Not sure which one is more difficult to reach..
You make some very good points, as do many of the comments. Electric airliners are a pipe dream for multiple reasons and the physics surrounding this is not likely to change for a long time. While hydrogen is quite energy dense on a weight basis - 120 MJ/kg compared to gas let's say, at 44 MJ/Kg, on a volumetric basis, which is equally important on an aircraft the situation is reversed - 8 MJ/l for liquid hydrogen versus 32 MJ/L for gas. This means it would take four times the space to store the fuel which, as you point out, would have to be at the expense of passenger or cargo space. Probably the most important issue however is that there is absolutely NO hard data to suggest that the extraordinarily high cost of making this conversion would have any effect on the climate temperature. I'm not talking about computer model predictions, every one of which is seriously flawed, and none of which have been validated by observational data, but I'm talking about real hard data. Any government that would subsidize this type of budget-breaking program with the information currently available, or rather with the absence of real information on the true impact on the future climate temperature change would be guilty of gross mismanagement of funds. And let's not even get started on the potential benefits of global warming on developing nations.
One solution is a hub and spoke network where buses are used instead of small airliners. This is already happening at PHL. I have been going to Transportation Research Board for over 30 years and there is still absolutely zero interest by aviation committees in working with us ground transit low life.
As an Aerospace Engineer, I think hydrogen is a CRAZY idea! There will be accidents. One of the great benefits of Jet A-1 jet fuel is that it has a high auto ignition temperature (210°C) and is relatively hard to ignite. That is one reason why gasoline is not used on jets. Have you seen hydrogen burning?
It really sucks that Jet A is such a good and relatively safe fuel. Hydrogen for aircraft seems like a steep hill to climb, the only steeper hill is the use of batteries.
> Have you seen hydrogen burning? Yes, in aircraft (or rather, airships) of the last century. Safety is one of the reasons why these are not used anymore...
@@Mentaculus42 It is perfect as it is (at least for now). Aviation has become some sort of a boogie man in the discussion on climate change. This industry is probably the highest drive for efficiency, while we still have ships running on crude oil... Don't get me wrong, I am no climate change denier! I just think this is not the battle to pick.
You essentially reference this, but I think about the challenges of airport throughput. Can H2 refueling and battery recharging be as quick as existing refueling, can the gate times be reduced? I’m not sure there’s much economy left, even with smaller quicker-to-board planes.
LH can be fuelled easily as fast as jet fuel - large rockets have to fuel up with more hydrogen than there is plane in an airliner, and they do it just before launch to minimise how much insulation the rocket needs. Battery charging is much more difficult, though.
1. China and Mongolia have plenty of lithium and they would provide it for free, if we are nice to them and would also befriend them and help them achieve goals. 2. Once we liberate lithium-rich Ukraine, we will have limitless supply of free lithium and therefore production of Li-ion batteries will also be free as thousands of volunteers can be mandated to work for free in production facilities. 3. Emissions to produce them are also net zero, because even though there are some emissions, they don’t count, because Li-ion batteries are intended to be the solution for clean air and stopping climate change. Thus emissions, if any, are cancelled out by benevolent and heroic intent. If my explanation doesn’t make sense, it’s because it’s based on very complex and deep analysis in economics, scientific data and obligatory altruism.
Orders of magnitude less than mining and burning fossil fuels. However, lithium ion batteries just don’t have the energy density to replace jet engines and fossil fuels for long distance flight. Whatever battery tech does eventually make long haul flights possible, ask this question again in 50 years.
As an engineer working in the electronics field I can state that electric flight is way up there with the most difficult problems and most of it is down to power source. For example it is possible to design a power back that will last for 2000 cycles easily if weight is not an issue. All you have to do is reduce the maximum charging threshold by 200mV and increase the discharge limit to about 3.2V. Unfortunately that will half the capacity. Lion cell capacity is slowly creeping upwards. It was just 3Wh per cell originally and now we are nudging 13. 3.7V x 3400mAh = 12.5 roughly. I cant see 15 in the near future and you would really need 25 for a 6 seater to do 1 hour flights. The good news is some cell technologies could nudge 40 in about 5 years EG solid state cells. That is with a 5000 cycle lifetime too.
I've often wondered what would happen if you eliminated flaps and thrust reversers on an airliner. Just LOOK how much weight and complexity you eliminate by doing so. Just make larger wheel brakes which seems possible by lowering the weight of the aircraft. Flaps and slats, and thrust reversers are enormously complex systems requiring lots of maintenance, plus adding danger when they fail. There is a LOT to consider there.
I understand what you are saying, but the fuel savings of 50% is still potentially far greater than the salary increases. The trick will be to see if they can scale up the electric models with maybe some sort of hybrid system up to the 50-70 passenger range. I personally think they will be able to do so when they figure out how to make sodium batteries a bit more efficient. Then you have a very long lifetime and wide operating/temperature range. Filling a jet up for a few hundred dollars per flight and no costly engine rebuilds is.. who cares about crew cost if you can still fit 50 people on it? So I think we are close to making this all work. Maybe 10 years. It is a shame that so many companies are stopping research, though.
There's no need for electric or hydrogen powered aircraft because you can use electricity to get hydrogen from water, and then combine that hydrogen with carbon extracted from CO2 to make jet fuel via the Fischer-Tropsch process. The two expensive parts of the process are extracting CO2 and making hydrogen. But you can extract dissolved CO2 from seawater more effectively than from the air, and the cost of hydrogen depends on the ever reducing costs of wind and solar power. The US Navy did some research on this many years ago. The problem they have is that while a carrier fleet is at sea then have no easy way to maintain fuel for the jets. So they looked into using electricity generated by the nuclear reactors in the carrier to make hydrogen, and extract CO2 from seawater. They estimated that jet fuel supplied that way would cost just twice as much as jet fuel from traditional means. But the price of jet fuel has gone up since then. There are many companies exploring the idea of synthetic jet fuel made from CO2 extracted from non-fossil sources, combined with H2 made from sustainable sources. A quick Google search shows e.g. Neste is just the one. The advantage of using synthetic get fuel is that it's an easy replacement for ordinary jet fuel.
I wish people would think ! ANY FUEL renewable or fossil will only end up costing the customer more and more ! YOU ARE NOT IMPORTANT ! And they will have their fossil fuel PRIVATE JETS , CARS , GAS STOVES and everything they want you to give up ! It's a scam people so WAKE UP !
Note also that the newest types of nuclear reactors can use part of the reaction process itself to aid in the manufacture of e-fuels, increasing the efficiency of the process even further. Modern nuclear reactors could produce large amounts of cheap hydrogen and e-fuels if the manufacture of nuclear plants in larger numbers wasn't politically sabotaged by anti-science 'green' loons and other corrupt people.
Advantages of synthetic fuel are the energy density and the ability to use it on currently existing aircraft. However, creating synthetic fuel and scaling the process is often times depicted as a way too easy task. We know how to do it on lab scale and we can even create enough fuel for one or two aircraft with it as a general proof of concept. However, replacing all jet fuel that is currently being burned requires a massive build up of facilities for creating synth fuel and we need to get the energy also from somewhere. On a car, you get 20% efficiency at best with synthetic fuel and I don't see a reason why I should be better on aircraft. So, we would require four times as much energy. Given that roughly half of the loss happens after filling it into the tank, we can derive that half of the loss is happening during production, so we need to put in twice the energy that is actually then stored in the produced fuel. Every year, we use over 300 mio. m³ of kerosene worldwide. That is 2.6 PWh of energy. Double that to accomodate for the losses during synth fuel production, so we are above 5 PWh. That's more energy than the annular electrical energy output of 400 commercial nuclear reactors. That's a lot of energy. I am not saying that we will see a lot of hydrogen, let alone batteries, in aviation in the future. They have their own technical challenges. I just want to raise some awareness that synthetic fuel is also not such an easy solution as some people like to believe. If it was easy, we would already be doing it.
@@fr89k "On a car, you get 20% efficiency at best with synthetic fuel and I don't see a reason why I should be better on aircraft." Which 'synthetic fuel' are you talking about? You're mixing and matching cherry-picked made-up properties of different fuels, my friend.
The best solution for the pilot shortage is better, faster and cost effective training. airline sponsored cadet programs are a must! so before we start reducing safety by reducing the number of pilots operating an aircraft. we should be working towards a more sustainable training pipeline for new pilots to reach higher standards of safety!
What the airlines dont understand yet is with Li-Ion Batteries colder temps = Less Range the reason being is the are less efficient at colder temps. Inorder to get the proper proformance you will need a heat pump to keep the batteries at the required temp and that means less range as well look at plug in EV's in colder climates. There range is halved in winter compared to summer
The solution is of course, a smaller battery set and an onboard generator to extend the range. With safety margins, naturally. Sodium batteries, while less energy dense are extremely safe and can operate in the temperature range that is required. Once they figure out how to get them to 70-80 percent the capacity, I think we will see widespread adoption. They also have the advantage of a dramatically lower cost to buy and replace.
When is the next time you go for hypoxia training? Take us with you. It would be a fun RUclips short, trying to do simple mathematics problems under the effects of hypoxia
Reduced crew operation could work…replace four pilots with two. The relief crew on long oceanic flights aren’t much more than seat warmers. That part of the flight could be done autonomously while the flight crew rests.
Nope, batteries just don't have the safety and fuel density, same reason they're not used in other places. Not to mention sheer cost as well. Not really complicated.
@MentourNow Embraer also has been working on its own line electric, hybrid electric and hidrogen fuel cell turboprop, it has already certified the E-Jet E2 to run on 100% SAF and is also working on a future iteration if the E2 to run Hydrogen Fuel Cells, so it might be interesting to see what are your thoughts on that. Also It's line of crop dusters can run on both AvGas or on Ethanol.
Something needing government subsidies to exist is another way of saying that people don't see it as a good value proposition, and thus it can't stand on it's own. If i had to guess, though, between hydrogen and straight electric, hydrogen is probably the most likely to be economically viable. Even if the battery tech was there, what would the charging times look like vs. uploading LH2?
I wonder if there is a way of possibly recharging the batteries during flight much like an F1 car uses KERS to convert kinetic energy and store it in the onboard battery packs for later use. Granted you’d use more electricity than you’d create but if you can use the spinning fans to create 5/10/15% of the original charge which can be directed back into the batteries the endurance problem could be lessened somewhat especially on longer flights
It is crazy to me how Americans fly 70 seater jets for short regional trips… for those kinds of trips we already have fully electrified modes of transport with low driver to passenger ratios… they are called trains…
A very good train infrastructure is available only in highly developed regions, even in Europe. For any government is far cheaper to build some airports then a comparable train infrastructure
What about a Chevy Volt airplane? A series/parallel hybrid technology but in airplanes? Use electric propulsion to get to cruise then use a regular engine and use a small portion of power to recharge the batteries during flight then use that power during descent, charge the batteries while it’s on the ground, then use batteries to taxi and lift off, and repeat. Maybe add solar to help improve efficiency during cruise where there it’s always sunny during the daytime? Yes it would add weight but I think the solar could help with that? A system like this would need minimal additional infrastructure besides chargers at the gates of airports. And the airplane could have two regular engines and two electric engines. In case of failure of the regular engines you could revert to the electric ones and vice versa. And I imagine this system could be retrofitted to existing planes, at least those with 4 engines, fairly easily?
Subsidy : an explicit admission that a business has access to funds forcibly extracted from taxpayers because the model cannot attract anyone who is willing to risk his of her own money. As any student of history knows, neither politicians nor civil servants have a good record when it comes to "the white heat of technology" (a now historic reference in itself). Additional costs? The eventual disposal of highly toxic components such as batteries and composite materials.
Hybrid power plants are like pumped storage generation: they are great for peak lopping. You can see a use case for electric boost for TOGA, but in steady state, modern gas turbines are unbelievably efficient. I love the fact that aircraft are proving the physics. I guess the game changer will be be single pilot operation.
Yes, it really does come down to “economics”! But some groups are “predicting” that hydrogen could be reasonably cost effective “someday”! It is definitely a “We will see” issue.
Some of these factors are moot points depending on who exactly is running various countries. If the United States re-elects DJT as president and then executes on an infrastructure-first police: Step 1: Nuclear Deepwell batteries to augment electrical infrastructure Step 2: Pipe seawater inland and construct reservoirs Step 3: use the "New" power infrastructure to drive desalinization plants to render the seawater potable for irrigation and consumption Step 4: Leverage the reservoirs as HydroBatteries to "store" the energy produced by the Nuclear Batteries, which also strengthens the electrical grid resiliency as gravity-driven hydropower is relatively resistant to EMP shutdowns. This puts the US in a position where attaching Sulfur-Iodine plants to the Nuclear Facilities to produce Hydrogen for use in fuel cells becomes dramatically less expensive due to sheer volume. Not saying SI plants are the best way to manufacture Hydrogen Fuel Cells, but they are one of the most efficient proven methods of deriving the required hydrogen. Cratering the energy costs to produce electricity, then cratering the costs to produce Hydrogen Fuel Cells, and then backstopping that electrical grid with HydroBatteries, whilst simultaneously creating irrigation paths and croplands FROM those Hydrobatteries which in turn craters FOOD costs... That turns everything upside down. Most of the predictions made on power generation and power consumption today are framed around the JB/USDem policy of Infrastructure-Last, Destruction-First. In turn that means airlines have to expect the absolute worst conditions and rising costs with falling supplies. To be fair, it could be Argentine's Javier Milei that gets an infrastructure-first policy implemented first. It could be Russia's Putin that succeeds in implementing infrastructure-first before other nations. Whichever country/nation gets infrastructure-first implemented will be the beacon that draws research and development and upends the status quo. Or the status quo could just be maintained. Not likely as more people suffer under that status quo, but it is possible.
Well, short-sighted airlines fired all their pilots during the couf (what could possibly go wrong?). Now that the couf is over, they can't get their pilots back because they retired or moved on to other careers. And now they can't get enough pilots to meet demand. So they have to pay through the nose to hire new inexperienced pilots.
First question that comes to mind: "What happens if the cryogenic cooling fails for some reason?" At some point it won't be about what the airlines want... It just needs to happen...
Blaming pilot pay for stalling development of electric aircraft is so dystopian. It's a corporate knee jerk blaming other entities to cover their own failings. It's like blaming a RUclips review for killing companies.
100%, modern battery technology is simply impractical for large scale flight. The batteries are too big, too heavy, and generate for too much heat to be usable in aircraft. Hydrogen might theoretically work, but others have already pointed out the flaws in that approach. Namely, the only way to produce fuel grade hydrogen on a large enough scale requires burning fossil fuels.
That means zero emissions from the vehicle's operation. But the manufacturing of the vehicle and all its components probably resulted in a lot of emissions! (Not to mention the fact that electrically powered systems are only zero-emission if their power source is 100% renewable, which very few power grids currently are.)
The production of EVs and lithium ion batteries in general is extremely detrimental to the environment. The burning of fossil fuels and the modern practice of sustainable wood harvesting has essentially reached an equilibrium, where Earth’s lungs are kept at an acceptable level, filtering our air. Even the extraction of oil & natural gas has been so rigorously scrutinized & regulated (at least in the West) that it has also been fine tuned to an equilibrium state with minimal environmental impact
I suspect part of the answer isn’t in the air, but rather on the ground. If it becomes impossible to decarbonise short haul regional flights in a cost-effective way, then perhaps the answer is in electrified rail transportation.
A lot on my work is involved with the handling, safety, shipping and disposal of rechargeable lithium batteries, and having experienced the very sudden explosive effects of an unstable lithium battery more times than I can count I won't even get into a hybrid or fully electric car. So, there is no way in hell I'll ever board any electric aircraft. Hell, you can't even check spare batteries into hold luggage so the airlines are already aware of the dangers these things present.
I think electric aircraft will never exist since batteries are heavy and range is a nightmare. The answer to emissions problems is to be emission neutral, not necessarily emission free, and that's what SAF is about: if a flight emits X tonnes/CO2 and making the amount of fuel for said flight captures (X+ a bit more) tonnes of CO2 from atmosphere you are still cutting emissions. Also SAF can be used in existing engines and fuel plumbing with little or no modifications and that's obviously a huge advantage. Not everything can or needs be electric
"never" is a big word, but as is obvious, they already exist as short range aircraft. They may not be practical for airliners in the near future, but never say never.
Emission neutral has been a scam in every industry it has appeared in, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same case in aviation. There's just too much money in lying, so when you're the only one providing the numbers, the incentive is clear.
Battery tech. is still in early stages. I agree big airliners will not run on batteries in the near future, but work on new technologies like solid-state batteries could eventually lead to a battery energy dense enough to power a long range aircraft. That aircraft might look much different and might be much smaller than today’s airliners. Think Otto Aviation’s work in “laminar flow” designs for planes that will seat 8-18 passengers.
Type rating costs, for type rated alternative fuel pilots.... firstly they will be rare and highly desired, if any new fuel goes live... especially because from pilot perspective it will limit the pilots job application envelope, to be certified on something that is not widely available, that in turn will rise their prices
Beyond niche applications, both hydrogen and electric are about as likely for mass market as teleporting Star Trek style. As Scotty would say "You canna break the laws of physics"
@@davejohn3820 You know, there was such project. But it was cancelled for safety reasons - we don't need any aircraft crash site turning into radioactive fallout zone.
Hello, and thanks for all you do. I enjoy your channel very much, and find flight to be super interesting. Having said that, I feel compelled to comment on this piece. First, the very idea that it's reasonable for humans to travel 3000 miles to attend a wedding of birthday party for a day or two is ridiculous. I know this view is highly unpopular, but with the low "cost" of air transportation, usage of this capability has gotten completely out of control. But more on this later. The basic issue is that whenever a resource has no cost, in this case, clean air, businesses will use it as much as possible. In economics terms this is called an externality. The problem is, the cost of using this resource is substantial, and the population as a whole is paying the price. As you are no doubt aware, as global warming advances, insurance costs are increasingly rapidly, disaster repairs costs are increasing rapidly, whole populations are starving, low lying areas are spending a fortune on keeping the water out, etc. etc. But the airline industry, although wanting to reduce its carbon footprint, contributes very substantially to this problem, more so because these emissions are released high in the atmosphere. While more efficient engines and non-fossil fuels will help, there's simply no getting around that this simply won't be enough. While the discussion about pilot pay is interesting, the simple fact is that as Joby and Archer start flying commercially within the next couple of years, they will begin to offload some portion of the short haul traffic. For routes like San Francisco to LA, and many routes within Europe, these small electric flying machines will be an excellent solution. This is why United Airlines (and others) have invested heavily in these companies. While moving away from flying jets for routes of less that 250 miles will certainly help...and the Archer/Joby vehicles can potentially operate from non-airport facilities, we simply have to "internalize" the current "externality" that makes jet travel so cheap. Essentially, the cost of remediating the damage being done to the planet from this travel needs to be borne by those who use this service, not society at large. While I don't claim to know what this number is, I suspect it's substantial. If a $200 fare becomes a $500 fare in order to pay for the damage being done, then folks may think twice about using air transportation as though it's an unlimited resource with no usage constraints. Capitalism works, but only when resources are fairly valued. In the case of the airline industry, they are currently not. As for the argument that it's not economically viable to have smaller planes due to pilot costs, this assumes that the status quo remains. But I don't think this is a likely state of affairs. As you are no doubt aware, we are rapidly moving towards robot taxis for surface transportation. While there have been some setbacks (as will always be the case with new technologies), consumers have shown a willingness to accept these advances. While it may take a while, I suspect that as part of the transition to battery powered aircraft, increased automation will be a big part of the deal. Thinking about it, while it's actually very hard to design software to address the essentially chaotic environment that a car operates in, the environment that commercial aircraft operate in is very well controlled. Designing software to deal with this environment is orders of magnitude less challenging. Bottom line is that it's time to take a broader look at air transportation. We need to both internalize externalities, and accept that smaller short haul (potentially automated) aircraft are soon going to be a reality. And the world will be better for it.
@@lordnobady The issue is that's a huge "if". A modern short haul aircraft will consumes around 2.5 tonnes of fuel per hour, at 43MJ/kg that's almost 30MWh per hour of flight. Assuming a 50% thermodynamic efficiency that means an electric plane would need 15MWh/h for the same frame & travel, which would require a 5MW link to charge a plane for a 1h trip in 3h. *Per plane*. That's a lot more electricity than airports have available, and it would still only charge some of the more efficient planes at a rate of 20mn flight per hour. And it's assuming the battery chemistry can even handle that sort of charge.
what is happening around utilising Green Ammonia .. after all if you can get around the clean burn issue it is the best way to store hydrogen at ambient temperature and pressure (after all it is NH3) and can utilise existing fuelling methods.
One thing people tend to forget (or conveniently overlook) is that the carbon emissions created by the mining and construction of lithium-ion batteries are actually worse than that created by the burning of carbon based fuels. And as for autonomous aircraft, I wouldn't get on one. I wouldnt trust technology with my life.
Similar issue with hydrogen as well. Yes, burning hydrogen (or running it through a fuel-cell) only produces water as a by-product so in that sense it's perfectly clean, hydrogen still has to be manufactured and currently, most hydrogen is made by burning natural gas, thus releasing more carbon emissions per unit of energy than just burning aviation fuel. It's possible to manufacture 'green' hydrogen using renewable energy (through electrolysis) but that takes *a lot* of energy and as such, is very expensive. Considering that a change like that could only reasonably be achieved if it wasn't that much more expensive than current methods, I think we're still very far away from hydrogen powered airliners being a commercially viable option. As for autonomous aircraft, I'm with the rest of the crowd - no thanks!
Would love a deep dive into issues at Qantas. The are the only airline (touch wood) without mass fatalities and bankruptcy but the they are out of favour with Australians.
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I'm sure you saw those Boeing whistleblowers hearing, how shocking was that?! 🥲🤯
random question. Why not use electric energy for cruising? I mean engine are basically turbines already. So you can charge electric energy there & use fuel for lift up/ landing
Doesn't GDPR legislation mean that the service isn't so applicable in Europe though? Just wondering 😊
Excellent episode! We all hope that the aviation industry can decarbonise itself for the sake of the planet. I would include one blasphemous comment. Perhaps the industry should consider totally dropping the regional market in favor of high speed rail. They could then emphasize larger planes which would continue to use more pilots with larger passenger loads. Airlines would then be profitable providing service where they are needed most.
Well Captain.. considering that hydrogen detonates worse than C4😳as you can see »» ruclips.net/video/vSDmlj-u6QM/видео.html .... instead of burning outside the plane letting you passengers out like in British Airways flight 2276 and others 🤔........... and that after all.. to get hydrogen you need to use energy AKA Oil.. AKA Greenhouse Gases🤷♀........ if "pilot pay is threatening to KILL the future of electric or hydrogen-powered aircraft?".. I hope so 😠...
Reduce the pay of the board of directors first
That's not how capitalism works
@@konstantintokarev6133 Europe doesn't pay the top company executives so highly.
They are overpaid thieves
So relieved to see someone pointing out the actual problem.
@@konstantintokarev6133Then destroy capitalism.
Yes. 12 BoD members vs 500-2000 pilots. Yep, definitely will make a dent.
If something (inevitably) goes wrong with a plane, I want an experienced and passionate airman to handle the situation.
I don't want to decrease the person's pay as i trust my life in them ....
Thank you. Jeg har argumentert for akkurat det du sier til folk som mener at batterifly er tingen. Godt at jeg finner ut at jeg faktisk har rett. ❤
Is pilot pay a problem? Sure. There needs to be more of an incentive to encourage a lot more pilots to spend the money to get certified. Boeing's numbers say that the world needs 650,000 pilots. That is a lot of money spent training. I would know.
I don't like incentives, as they tend to encourage people who aren't natural pilots or have the necessary skills to force themselves through the process...or the companies then feel the need to let them through even when they shouldn't.
@@pistonburner6448psychologically, rewards do work badly as you describe. Reinforcements can work, the difference is essentially timing. What is really needed is inspiration/promotion: the x-files made applications to the FBI increase a ton, as a silly example.
But also people outside of the normal pool of people need help getting started/ deciding to continue, financially, socially, even. That’s not the same thing as paying the non interested
Then maby they should start employing pilots with low flight hr that are certified but need more flight hr to be able to fly passenger planes thats the biggest reason why they have no pilots and most people give up on the pilot job.
Or just lower the prices lol
I agree with @pistonburner6448 and @ghost4fly659-we don’t want to incentivize people who only see a paycheck and otherwise don’t care about flying when hundreds of lives will be in their hands. But at the same time, the 1500-hour rule deters those who genuinely do want to fly. Getting 1500 hours in a small aircraft is so different than flying massive planes that it’s pretty pointless. The crash that resulted in that rule had two pilots who had more hours than that. I honestly think the reason for that rule comes down to forcing airline-hopefuls to have to be CFIs if they can’t afford to rent planes for 1,500 hours which results in bad CFIs and bad training (I dealt with a bad CFI who was just trying to get hours and didn’t care about training).
Hour-requirements need to be reasonable. Don’t lower the standard a pilot much reach to be signed off to fly a passenger plane, but don’t keep the minimum to be hired so absurdly high either.
Not a new project, but a fascinating one: the US Naval Research Lab did a series of carbonic acid- based carbon capture fuel synthesis experiments that was able to synthesize multiple different types of jet fuel from normal seawater. No infrastructure change for the users, same engines and aircraft, but the source is already-emitted CO2.
The main challenge is energy input, which gets better the hotter the reaction chambers are, with a specific call or to using waste heat from a nuclear reactor on top of using it as an electrical source for maximum efficiency.
They even were able to produce an array of olefins (the building blocks of plastics) for solids manufacture, and bunker fuel for ships!
This is not special. The chemical reactions necessary have been known for years and I had the foundations in high school. The problem is always THE ENERGY IT TAKES TO MAKE ANY AMOUNT OF FUEL!
Hydrogen is really difficult to handle. As is obtaining it in the first place... Hydrogen being no more than energy storage. Quite inefficient at that.
handling? yes
obtaining it? not so much -
its more or less just electrodes in water, there is a basic experiment that we did in school when I was 14.
if youre interested in how its done google for hydrogen electrolysis
If you use a renewable form of energy like solar to crack water to get hydrogen, then process that hydrogen with atmospheric CO2 to form methane, we already have robust storage and transportation methods for this fuel, and converting existing engines and platforms is much easier. This still ends up carbon neutral with a much easier transition that can be accomplished sooner.
@@JQLiFiCE Hydrogen today is obtained from Methane. Electrolysis of water takes far more energy than you get back. Manufacturers are working on the assumption that politicians will regulate hydrocarbon fuel out of the market. This will not happen and as soon as early next year we will see a return to sensible economics and electric and hydrogen will be sidelined once more.
How the Hydrogen burns and generates all that pressure and heat as H2O ?
Hydrogen is difficult to store (If you don't go the cryogenic route, there is no container it doesn't slowly leak out because of the small molecule/atom size. If you do go the cryogenic route, the energy cost of keeping it at such low temperatures is again going to take an awful lot of energy, that you can't use for flying in this case, Hydrogen is difficult to handle (It explodes in any mix with Oxygen). But Hydrogen isn't difficult to obtain (I can make it at home, just electrolyze water with a separation between the poles).. It just costs more energy than you will ever get out of the produced Hydrogen.. so it isn't all that economical. And Methane pyrolysis isn't great in terms of efficiency either (it's the best way we know of, and the most commonly used)... Better than electrolysis of water, but not great.. And that energy consumption (of producing and storing Hydrogen) also has to be taken in account. That energy is still being used..
Also Hydrogen and aviation are historically a bad mix...
Something that is not discussed enough is that almost all hydrogen in the world is produced by chemically reforming natural gas, which essentially partially burns it into H2 and CO2. This is the cheapest way of making hydrogen on an industrial scale, and making it from water and electricity is multiple times as expensive, and unless you are in France or Norway where most of the power is nuclear or hydroelectric, that power is coming from burning stuff. So basically the same issue as anything electric.
I was about to make almost exactly this comment. Even battery power doesn’t really count as zero emissions if you burn coal to generate.
I think the overall aim to make it carbon neutral is to use excess renewable energy to make hydrogen from water via electrolysis
Obviously a long way away from that point atm.
But hydrogen can be produced without CO2 emissions. The problem is a lack of alternatives. Batteries are to heavy, E-fuels need even more energy and bio-fuels are not available on the needed scale.
Of course today hydrogen, electric cars, heat pumps and so on are today not emission free, but electricity can easily be produced without emission and it just takes time to scale up. As long as we don´t have enough emission free produced electricity, there is no point in using it to produce hydrogen, but many countries will soon at least temporarily produce more renewable electricity than they need and then it becomes interesting. I think we won´t see a significant amount of hydrogen planes before the late-2030s or 2040s.
Yet another reason the fear mongering against nuclear needs to stop. Hydrogen can be easily produced using nuclear power, on top of the grid electricity it produces.
Don't we already have a solution for this?
In most places today we already have the problem of "extra electricity" on the grid and because of large scale solar panel use this tends to be even more problematic with each passing day (basically, we produce more in the time of day that we consume less and have trouble consuming the electricity or shutting down the producers in that period). If we find industrial usage for hidrogen at the scale we now have for oil/gas, then we can start using industrial solutions to produce hidrogen to basically normalize/balance the power consumption of the grid.
The cost would basically be offset (not in full, but it's still something) by the gains we'd have in electricity production/distribution cost by finally being able to balance the grid at the consumption level, rather then at the production level. From nuclear powerplants that produce constant energy to not having powerplants that "burn stuff" just because they're the fastest to shutdown/startup, to enabling every single house to have a solar panel and tie it to the electricity grid even if they aren't predictable sources.
a quick google search shows that CEO pay falls into the neighborhood of 195 times what pilot pay is.
Pilot pay is not the problem. prioritizing short term profit is nearly always the problem in any situation where management is saying employee wages are the problem.
Most of that is stock options, not salaried income. But let's assume it was all cash. Delta as an example has 15,000 pilots. Fire that CEO and don't even replace him, and give his salary *only* to thy pilots, and you've increased their compensation by 1.3%.
@@EnDSchultz1 now, if you take away the CEO's pay to hire ONE more pilot, how much does that reduce the CEO's pay? I'll give you a hint: it would probably disappear in rounding.
@@kenbrown2808 well if the CEO's pay were all cash (it's not) you could add a total of 195 pilots if there were no CEO. Or probably less, because I'm guessing whatever inflammatory article you read just took the flat income for that "195x" figure and didn't include all the other costs (training, benefits, etc) involved in hiring and employing a pilot for an airline.
So I'm still lost as to your point.
For the record, I just checked and the salary of Delta's CEO is just under $1 million per year. The rest of his $12 million compensation is stock, stock options, and incentive pay based on company performance. Delta also has a profit sharing program that doles out hundreds of millions to its employees each year so all these calculations are all entirely hypothetical and invalid anyway.
@@EnDSchultz1 yeah, delta pilots are taking home 121% OVER the national average for pilots. but at the same time, the CEO is still getting a total of 67 times what the average delta pilot is getting.
There is one other factor in all of this and that is "development" cost for both the aircraft and the pilots flying them. Development costs for a new aircraft are very high and they need to be factored into the per unit cost of the end product. The actual cost of material and manpower to build the aircraft is really only part of the price it is sold for. The millions of dollars or euros spent in development and prototyping has to be amortized on a per unit basis and needs to be factored into the sale price. There has to be enough demand for the final product to justify designing and building it. For example: $100,000,000 spent on development with a sales of 100 aircraft means that this factor is $1,000,000 per unit, but if you can sell 500 aircraft it drops to $200,000 per unit, making it more affordable and attractive to buyers. The same applies to the pilot factor in a slightly different way. If it costs someone $50,000 to get their ATP certificate and they only can expect to earn $15,000 as a pilot it would take almost 7 years to earn back what it cost them to get there, but if the pay was $20,000 then it would be only 5 years. This make pursuing the career more attractive and maybe get more people into the pilot pool. This can be why both aircraft projects or people going into aviation can suddenly stop. No sensible manufacturer will continue to develop a product that nobody will buy because of cost or usefulness. The same might deter a pilot because spending the money for training and find out the pay is bad or nobody is hiring would not make sense for many people.
The main problem with hydrogen is that it is very energy intensive to produce and store cryogenically. Also, if used for direct combustion on a jet engine, much larger volumes of it are required as compared to regular jet fuel to achieve the same range. This has been well studied and documented for decades.
Well kinda no. SAF is much more energy intense compared to hydrogen or to say it in other words: less efficient.
We will need to stop burn fossile fuels and these are the only option ( apart from something like synthetic methane, ammonia etc ). Otherwise aviation has to be heavly restricted or banned outright. Climachange - sadly - does not joke around.
massive reserves have been found in france and elsewhere but keep talking and hoping you wont get laughed at online the way you are in rl
@@charlesreid9337massive reserves of what? Water? Air? Because that's what hydrogen needs to be produced out of to make it 0 emissions, as is the goal here. Burning natural gas won't get 0 emissions, it'll just move them elsewhere
@@charlesreid9337 Massive reserves of what?
So no joy on electrical or hydrogen aircraft then, just better performing jet and jet - prop engines(?)
I live in Moses Lake, WA where some of this footage is from. We have not only hydrogen test aircraft testing here, but full electric aircraft, and Boeing does a ton of aircraft testing out here. Mentour, try to make it out here sometime to see some amazing tech in person, especially at the Moses Lake airshow every June when companies show these prototypes off!
4:48 There's your problem right there. Those batteries stay exactly as you see them through the entire flight. With liquid fuel the aircraft gets more efficient as it goes. The aircraft loses weight as it flies, whereas the battery airplane stays exactly the same weight throughout the flight. Liquid fuel gives you as much power with the last drop as it gave you with the first drop. Batteries don't.
Ask a cargo pilot, what he considers the highest risk load. They will all say BATTERIES because if the fire risk. Not sure electric aircraft and batteries are feasible right now.
Love these two comments. Batteries are primitive technology that humanity has stubbornly held onto in hopes of reinventing the wheel. Ancient batteries were even found buried in ruins, they’re literally Stone Age!
@@johnchristmas7522 depends a lot on the batterie technology. Solid State Batteries or LFP are way safer then jet fuel. I think there is a lot of Potential left but it will take some decades til we see Battery powered Transatlantic Flights.
Love the show and watch all the time.
I truly enjoy the technical break down which has really kicked off my interest in commercial aviation.
I have a question for you and your fellow aviators!
Whith the work load you all carry in with aircraft set up checklist and actual flying!
My question is how do you mange stressful situations in heavy traffic and god forbid a aircraft problem ?
I am fascinated with cockpit footage but I am just a lay person, but it often looks like a third officer in the cockpit could be helpful.
I’m just curious of what you and your fellow flyers think
Any mention of jet engines getting more efficient should also include that air travel is growing, at a faster rate than the efficiency gains. This means CO2 emissions from the airline industriy are increasing, not decreasing. This trend is set to continue, according to the industry itself.
While some other industries are decreasing their emissions while increasing their production, there is no clear path forwards for aviation to achieve this. One partial solution is to do what France did: ban short haul flights where high speed rail exists. And of course extend the HSR network. This works at least in places where the terrain allows railway construction at reasonable cost.
Bonus: It's a far more pleasant way to travel. Better seats, more space, bigger bathrooms, onboard restaurants, sleeper cars, less noise, you can get up and walk whenever you want, nicer views out the windows, and the trip starts and ends in city centres, not out in the countryside where airports are.
I think that taxes are a solution for this, a fixed tax on every flight will make short trip expensive while still adding not to much on longer flight.
CO2 is fine, we need it and we need more of it unless you want to eat rocks. 🙄
Yes, the induced demand through "every efficiency gain is used to get further passengers to fly longer routes" is very real.
BTW a short-haul ban can actually also make overall emissions worse by freeing short-haul airport slots for long-haul connections that wouldn't be able to pay for them previously.
@@JasaDavidHuh, interesting point! So the answer is to also restrict the airport capacity?
@@matejlieskovsky9625 I don't have an answer for that. I would like to see aviation to transition to zero emissions because travel is a good thing, but there's currently no technology that would do that for long-distance flights. 🙁 (Hydrogen means pumping water into stratosphere which means long enough linger time to have effectively same effect like CO₂ itself, other lack the energy density)
Ooh, Tecnam! P2006t is a lovely aircraft to fly. Great little multi-engine trainer. Lacks prop sync though but its still comfortable.
What is really interesting in the tech world right now is sodium ion batteries, they’re safer than lithium, (they don’t explode when damaged) can be run flat without danger, and are able to be manufactured with very little rare earth metals. They have a comparable energy density to lithium with far less risk. They’re now hitting the market, and I wouldn’t be shocked if in the near future we see electric planes being developed with modular battery packs that can be hot swapped at airports.
I think that will be the tech that will flip the future electric aircraft market into the feasible territory.
Sodium can not beat the energy density of lithium, it is literally impossible, just look at a periodic table. Sodium is heavier and its redox reaction is a single electron process just like lithium.
@@realGBx64 they’re producing batteries that literally output equivalent charge capacity to lithium batteries in the exact same form factor. I have a box of them on my desk. Something about the effective charge staying higher for longer, I’m not a scientist. All I know is the tech is there and it’s being manufactured right now in compatible form factors and charge capacities and is able to power devices where lithium was traditionally used.
As Boeing discovered, eliminating the risk of thermal runaway with lithium batteries is not easy. It will be even more challenging with much larger and heavier batteries powering a plane. There is also the possibly of battery damage in a crash landing. Adequate battery protection will be an extra weight penalty.
Great Vid - Its still a chemitry problem not an engineering one- Nothing comes close to energy density of Carbon fuel.
Exactly. Not to mention with batteries, we're carrying around the weight even once the energy has been spent.
Well, Nuclear fuel has a still much greater energy density, but its also even more complex, especially to balance eight and safety
@@ewenewen4060 You are correct that nuclear energy has a lot more fuel density. If I remember correctly, the Soviet Union tried that once. It did not end well for the flight crews.
Correct. Chemistry and physics. Without higher density and lighter weight battery technology this cannot scale to large commercial aircraft. Hydrogen is also not practical for large aircraft.
@@jamiesuejeffery The Americans started work on a nuclear powered plane. The mass of shielding is one of the reasons it's totally impractical.
My only issue with the CFM Rise engines is how much more dangerous they will make it for ground crew. The engine cowling serves as a protective barrier to an extent, and that is not existent in the rise engines.
Great video, as always. For all of us who are used to work with hydrogen, and who are aware of the sheer technological challenges of doing so, the idea that someone really thinks about putting hydrogen containers onboard a flying thing gives me chills…
The limitations of only a few airports having hydrogen infrastructure not only affects which routes can be flown, it also means likely complications when there are weather diversions, because it's quite possible that the airport being diverted to will not have hydrogen available. In other words nearly every weather diversion will become the equivalent of a mechanical diversion, resulting in an unflyable airplane. The plane will possibly be stranded for one to two days waiting for a shipment of hydrogen to be delivered by truck from possibly hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile the airlines will have to find alternate methods to get the passengers on to their destination.
Another factor is the time it takes to prepare an aircraft for takeoff after a landing, especially for electric ones.
Thank you Petter, but I still believe that there are lower hanging fruits than air transportation if you want to reduce CO2. After all, petrolium products are very suitable for powering automotive applications. Easier to concentrate on replacing coal power plants with nuclear dito. More bang for the bucks....
Just replace the “regionals” in the US with electrified rail running on nuclear…
We have to replace everything.
Why would we want to reduce the Co2 levels?
@@faranger to kill the plants to annoy the vegans
@@faranger ohh you are one of those special idiots… if you really wanted to know you looked it up on the internet… you are just a ragebating guy, getting their nutrition from oil corporation see-man if you know what I mean.
There's also another problem with switching from one big plane to several small ones. Airport slots. They're already in limited supply on the busier airports.
Problem is that most hydrogen comes from oil, so it's not really zero CO2 and takes a lot of energy to produce and therefore not really clean fuel.
But hydrogen can be produced without CO2 emissions. The problem is a lack of alternatives. Batteries are to heavy, E-fuels need even more energy and bio-fuels are not available on the needed scale.
People don't even want to hear the "just stop oil" bs anymore. Uneducated morons that never touched the grass think that world will turn upside down everytime they demand it.
Hydrogen can be produced from ocean water
@@SRN42069Sure, but it’s much more energy intensive, hence why almost all hydrogen is produced from methane.
@@Phantom-mg5cg And hydrogen is very low density. You either need heavy 400 bar tanks to haul it around or enormous and not very light cryotanks, as Liquid Hydrogen is 14 times less dense than water. Heavy as in 195 pounds for a 400 bar tank holding 13,000L of H2 or a roughly a kilo of hydrogen.
I live in New Zealand and and we often take a 30 seater plane to hop islands from Wellington to Nelson, that's a 30 minute flight. Hydrogen or electric airplanes could probably service that role well. Most of our City to City routes are under an hour flight too.
My Dad worked for Contential Airlines for almost 30 years. I even had a summer job with them. Every time you show a United aircraft tail, all I see is Continental, and I love the memories.
Brit here, have to agree, used to fly Continental quite a lot, with a lasting memory of Christmas celebrations on board!
Hi Petter, great content as always👍Would love to hear about scrapping aircraft - how would it make sense to scrap a giant rather than getting it maintained to a top level or even just selling the AC to an airliner (from a lessor point of view)?
Every time we get a new video on this channel I'm thankful, because I feel like Petter's experience, temperament and holistic viewpoint would make him a great airline exec. Then again it's probably way more fun and less stress to talk about the industry than to run it! Thanks for your insight Petter! I wish every industry had a "Mentour" like you
There are some problems with H2, which are not that obvious at first glance. H2 is the smallest mollecule in existence and it makes the choice of material for tank quite challenging. Materials that are impervious for other substances, can be poroštva for H2. Temperature is another big challenge, at low temperatures materials become more brittle.
And we haven't even touched H2 production, storage and distribution.
There are no silver bullets as a lot of people think nowadays.
What about using old blimps for in-flight refueling?
@@colinosborne3877 blimps for inflight refueling????!!! How? Compare the speeds, blimp's higher speed is just over a halo of airliner's speed. So, that's a bit of a problem. And it would have to be enormous to carry a useful quantity of H2. I hope you didn't think they would transfer the H2 they would be filled with.
And there are no old blimps around.
It’ll be very interesting to see which hydrogen option they go for! But it seems the electric hype is really coming to an end. Electric cars have been around a fair while now and we’re starting to see sales drop and many people returning to normal fuel. I think there needs to be a very significant break through for these projects to really become a feasible reality. As always, fantastic video! Thank you 🙂🙂
Great Vlog, I like the theory of alternative means of propulsion, but certainly in Australia electric propulsion in cars is not feasible due to the distances between recharging points. Hybrid is the only way forward, same as planes at this stage in time, but nevertheless a reduction in complete reliance on pure petroleum-based fuel.
Pilotless planes are a danger IMHO, IT is not the same as a person who can think on their feet when Sh1t hits fan.
I think that if the battery tech gets to where you could charge up say 2000 nm of range in 30-45 minutes , basically standard turnaround time, electric aircraft are going to get widely spread, at least for the short haul. Until then airlines will have no incentive to switch to battery powered aircraft as it will be a huge ding on the efficiency, with which they operate.
It is also the same reason BEVs sales plumeted once subsidies got cut. Everyone who wanted an EV, had the funds to get one and had the facilities to charge it got one. However, for most people it's just an extra hassle, that they are not willing to put up with, me being one of those people. Right now I work from home and most of the time I use my car maybe twice a week for 10-15 kilometers to go shopping, so a BEV would fit my use case perfectly. However I live in an apartment with street parking only and the nearest charger is a kilometer away. There are chargers at the shops where I buy my groceries, but they are expensive. So I either have to spend a lot more money on charging, which negates the point of an EV or deal with the hassle of driving to a charger, plugging in, walking home and then picking the car up an hour or two later. Not to mention having to spend a lot more money on a BEV as they are still more expensive than cheap ICE city cars.
You only need 400-500 nm and the rest can be handled via a range-extender/onboard generator. The efficiency of such a hybrid setup is vastly greater than a traditional jet engine and saves a massive amount on fuel as well. For really short flights, use EV only, for longer, turn on the range extender. Also, no costly engine rebuilds and half the maintenance. The fuel for the generator can be whatever works best.
Chemistry has figured out the safest, easiest and cheapest way to use hydrogen in an engine a long time ago. To make it as compact and energy dense per volume as possible, just put your hydrogen on a carbon backbone structure. No pressure and stable at room temperature, more density. There's more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of supercooled liquid hydrogen. It's really that simple. And as long as nobody overcomes the concept of energy density, that's where it's at.
I'm a 68 years old Airline Captain ( Ret ).
Bean Counters will try to pressure Pilots to take the minimum of minimums fuel ...to the point of being Dangerous.
That's how much Important weight is , in the Aviation Efficiency Equation .
I don't think going " Electric " is an option.
Plus , just remember what happened to that Cargo B 747 carrying batteries from Dubai.
Kindest Regards
Electric will always be filled to capacity, though, as there is zero savings from under-filling them. The only issue is weight. My guess is that the solution will be to have flights with only carry-ons allowed and NO cargo hold - it will all be tanks/fuel cells/batteries. Or perhaps something like that blended wing design where it's basically the front half that's available, and maybe 2 levels/double level seating as well due to the same "no cargo hold" restriction. You fit 50-70 passengers in the front half and the entire rear is energy or hydrogen storage.
Just remember MH370.
you dont think electric is an option. Oh do please explain the chemistry and physics you dont understand
The weight of the batteries is the real killer. The only reason renewable industry started looking at hydrogen in the first place is that batteries offer such a poor store of energy at large scale. I am not advocating for hydrogen either; poor volumetric LHV still (implies range will still be limited), difficult to handle / high storage cost anf general safety means it will take a long time to approve / certify as fuel, not to mention that it would require a complete redesign of the aircraft systems.
There will probably be a push for more SAF and it ll stay at that. There are easier / cheaper sectors to decarbonise first.
@@charlesreid9337 The issue is simply one of energy density. We aren't going to find something massively more efficient than current batteries or fuel cells. Not the 5-10x that we need to compete with fossil fuels for aviation. Not in our lifetimes at least. Maybe there is some edge case for small planes, but hauling tens of thousands of pounds of batteries everywhere isn't going to work for larger commercial flights. And certainly not for cargo. I don't need to explain the chemistry or physics when it's this far away from where we need to be. Currently the maximum is about 9700mn with conventional aircraft and electric models barely reaching 250nm.
A hybrid system might work, though, for shorter flights.
You’re the best. I look forward to your videos all week.
Two issues that create a significant engineering challenge (1) hydrogen has low energy denisty - you have to carry a lot of it to have long range (2) hydrogen seeps its way into material making the material weaker - hydrogen embrittlement (HE). This is a problem impacting both air and ground transportation. In a single use rocket going into orbit, neither of these is an issue - but as a "fuel tank" and for "range" this is a problem - not to mention the cost associated with hydrogen production and the current difficulty of producing and transporting green hydrogen.
Aww it doesnt understand physics. It's so cute. It is tired of being laughed at for not understanding physics. Or how orbital hydrogen rockets work. But it watched a video and it's hoping not to be laughed at the way it was in grade school before it dropped out. It's trying s ohard
You forgot issue number 3: hydrogen creates combustible mix with air, that is quite easy to ignite, so having a storage of pure hydrogen on board is safety hazard.
@abumohandes4487 Somehow it didn't help zeppelins not to burn.
Just superb world class content from Petter time after time 🎉
Tjänare! Before even starting the video I can answer the question: No, reality is killing the electric aircraft.
(And I can debate this issue if someone really wants to learn about or discuss the background, all the factors)
Right. Last I saw....battery capacity would need to increase about 18x before matching the energy density of jet A and even if this was achieved by some miracle...you have the issue of landing at take-off weight adding to the structures needed to be carried in the aircraft which reduces the efficiency. Just like with EV automobiles....short hops only and when the long term emissions are examined of the entire supply chain...they aren't nearly as 'clean' as their proponents claim. And...let's not even get into the debate about 'climate change' which is a red herring intended to supply an emotional reason to increase taxes on the world.
Is there really a debate about the electrification or hydrogen of plane? I mean, outside this channel and the manufacturers PR, the conversation is more about using less plane, using more train and electrifying car.
@@richardlehoux According to whom? Using less planes is just commies talking their usual nonsense, creating damage to society until they're finally voted out. Trains cannot replace planes except in very few cases, and even then it's the leftists themselves who have already sabotaged the possibilities for their optimisation. And they mismanage everything so trains provide a worse service and on top of it all are more expensive!
Electrifying the car is not a solution to anything, it only increases emissions and bankrupts society. It hurts people, impoverishes people, helps evil nations gain hegemony in the geopolitical situation.
Energy density of batteries is getting better by year over year
Larger heavier batteries is not the answer@@michalandrejmolnar3715
The problem I see with subsidized regional air routes is that a subsidized rail service will likely fill the same job and more cheaply.
In my opinion, hydrogen is too dangerous to use as fuel given its strict temperature requirements. Methane could be a cleaner fuel with a looser temperature requirement than h2, but a loss of the fuel temperature control system can still cause an overwhelming explosion.
You mention that you made a 40 minute flight in a plane with only 45 min of autonomy. This seems to cut pretty tight in case of unforseen problems. Are there no requirements for "electricity" reserves ? Even on a VFR flight there are reserve requirements.
he said it's 45 minutes of use with typical vfr reserves
Nobody seems to bring up just how expensive hydrogen is. In my area which is pushing it, it cost $36/kg. Real world cost for driving a Marai is $0.79/mile making operation extremely expensive. I just don't see much future for hydrogen.
I remember watching an interview with Elon Musk where he said batteries need to get better before they’ll be realistic for aviation
The weight of a fully charged battery is actually a bit more than a discharged one.
However the difference is insignificant, a microgram or less.
This whole notion of hydrogen being zero emissions is LAUGHABLE. To create hygrogen takes various energy conversions, each having an energy cost. Next, the typical source for hydrogen right now is oil, and getting oil out of the ground is ANYTHING BUT zero emissions.
Actually, the nature of hydrogen now is not oil. It’s natural gas.
Theoretically, you can make hydrogen from renewable energy, which is basically a missions free but currently that’s very expensive
I can see some of these early 30-seat battery/electric designs working well to replace some very small airliners (eg. Saab 340, Embraer 110/120, Beechcraft 1900D, Fairchild Metroliner). There's plenty of those operating here in Australia, so there would be a market for them. But yes replacing a single Q400 with 3 of them would be uneconomic. As far as storing it in spherical/cylindrical tanks, I can't help but wonder if a design similar to the Learjet 35 would work - with larger 'tip tanks' on the ends of the wings (or even under them) and rear engines - you'd get some decently sized cylindrical tanks without hogging seat space.
fusion reactors are probably coming before good enough batteries 🤣
would be dope ngl
I hate to be that guy, but are we talking about fission powered planes or nuclear fusion as a power source?
well, considering fission reactors power several military ships, and a large swath of the world, today, that's a pretty high probability.
Fission reactors have been around since the 40’s. I believe you mean fusion.
@@UnsolicitedContextnuclear fusion to use as power source to create more portable fuels, I would assume. It takes a lot of energy to get methane from our atmosphere. Same goes for storing and moving hydrogen
I think so, the biggest obstacle against any battery based technology aircraft, the fact an aircraft loose a lot of weight while airborne. If not then you have to design every component to land with full takeoff weight which means a lot of reinforcement which reduce the payload quite significant. And because the physics won't change, the battery electric technology will stay maximum at the superlight short range birds, where it looks working pretty good. For a beginner training in perfect weather conditions it's great.
Reduce the flight crew? Because of the salarys? What if we reduce all the chairmen of boards? Nowadays at mostly every big companies more managers are then actual productive workforce, most of them make strong 6 figures pretty often as monthly payment.
Electric commercial planes make zero sense. And yes, the battery breakthrough has just been around the corner for the last 30 years.
Hello Peter, It is something amazing the work that you do to provide a quality media product and insightful professional opinions regarding aviation on your channel. What an example seeing your dedication and professionalism inspiring people to take an interest in aviation. Thank you so much for that! I tend to think of aviation as the perfect ideal example of the modern means of transport with all its solutions and principles and its safety consciousness, where the industry has developed so far that it is maybe more closely related to space technology today than to any other industry in terms of public transport. Would you perhaps be interested in showing us your opinion on the beginnings of the time when any lighter than air flying, airships were imagined to be the only possible technological answer to technological challenges of flying? It would be very interesting to hear your storytelling on a technology that built the foundation of flying and ushered in the age of aeroplanes whilst it also quickly came to its limits technologically to hand it over to the modern aeroplane as we know it today. Thank you so much again, Patrik
Hi Captain Petter, how surprising was that Boeing whistleblowers hearing from yesterday? 🤯😳
looking forward to 2 things in aviation...
1 - it finally becomes ALL metric
2 - battery energy density will approximate fuels.
Not sure which one is more difficult to reach..
You make some very good points, as do many of the comments. Electric airliners are a pipe dream for multiple reasons and the physics surrounding this is not likely to change for a long time. While hydrogen is quite energy dense on a weight basis - 120 MJ/kg compared to gas let's say, at 44 MJ/Kg, on a volumetric basis, which is equally important on an aircraft the situation is reversed - 8 MJ/l for liquid hydrogen versus 32 MJ/L for gas. This means it would take four times the space to store the fuel which, as you point out, would have to be at the expense of passenger or cargo space. Probably the most important issue however is that there is absolutely NO hard data to suggest that the extraordinarily high cost of making this conversion would have any effect on the climate temperature. I'm not talking about computer model predictions, every one of which is seriously flawed, and none of which have been validated by observational data, but I'm talking about real hard data. Any government that would subsidize this type of budget-breaking program with the information currently available, or rather with the absence of real information on the true impact on the future climate temperature change would be guilty of gross mismanagement of funds. And let's not even get started on the potential benefits of global warming on developing nations.
One solution is a hub and spoke network where buses are used instead of small airliners. This is already happening at PHL. I have been going to Transportation Research Board for over 30 years and there is still absolutely zero interest by aviation committees in working with us ground transit low life.
As an Aerospace Engineer, I think hydrogen is a CRAZY idea!
There will be accidents.
One of the great benefits of Jet A-1 jet fuel is that it has a high auto ignition temperature (210°C) and is relatively hard to ignite. That is one reason why gasoline is not used on jets.
Have you seen hydrogen burning?
It really sucks that Jet A is such a good and relatively safe fuel. Hydrogen for aircraft seems like a steep hill to climb, the only steeper hill is the use of batteries.
> Have you seen hydrogen burning?
Yes, in aircraft (or rather, airships) of the last century. Safety is one of the reasons why these are not used anymore...
Ever heard of the Honda clarity?
@@alexgallagher4594there's a reason no one knows about it even though it's been around for at least a decade.
@@Mentaculus42 It is perfect as it is (at least for now). Aviation has become some sort of a boogie man in the discussion on climate change. This industry is probably the highest drive for efficiency, while we still have ships running on crude oil...
Don't get me wrong, I am no climate change denier! I just think this is not the battle to pick.
You essentially reference this, but I think about the challenges of airport throughput. Can H2 refueling and battery recharging be as quick as existing refueling, can the gate times be reduced? I’m not sure there’s much economy left, even with smaller quicker-to-board planes.
LH can be fuelled easily as fast as jet fuel - large rockets have to fuel up with more hydrogen than there is plane in an airliner, and they do it just before launch to minimise how much insulation the rocket needs. Battery charging is much more difficult, though.
Energy density will be the main concern for many years to come.
The big limiting factor at the end of the day is still battery technology.
What are the costs and emissions to produce and subsequently recycle a li-ion battery?
1. China and Mongolia have plenty of lithium and they would provide it for free, if we are nice to them and would also befriend them and help them achieve goals.
2. Once we liberate lithium-rich Ukraine, we will have limitless supply of free lithium and therefore production of Li-ion batteries will also be free as thousands of volunteers can be mandated to work for free in production facilities.
3. Emissions to produce them are also net zero, because even though there are some emissions, they don’t count, because Li-ion batteries are intended to be the solution for clean air and stopping climate change. Thus emissions, if any, are cancelled out by benevolent and heroic intent.
If my explanation doesn’t make sense, it’s because it’s based on very complex and deep analysis in economics, scientific data and obligatory altruism.
Orders of magnitude less than mining and burning fossil fuels. However, lithium ion batteries just don’t have the energy density to replace jet engines and fossil fuels for long distance flight. Whatever battery tech does eventually make long haul flights possible, ask this question again in 50 years.
For something like a plane the emissions for producing the batteries are effectively zero.
@@linvesel lol
@@markmuir7338 Oh, really? Can you enlighten us with some data about the costs of li-ion battery recycling?
As an engineer working in the electronics field I can state that electric flight is way up there with the most difficult problems and most of it is down to power source. For example it is possible to design a power back that will last for 2000 cycles easily if weight is not an issue. All you have to do is reduce the maximum charging threshold by 200mV and increase the discharge limit to about 3.2V. Unfortunately that will half the capacity. Lion cell capacity is slowly creeping upwards. It was just 3Wh per cell originally and now we are nudging 13. 3.7V x 3400mAh = 12.5 roughly. I cant see 15 in the near future and you would really need 25 for a 6 seater to do 1 hour flights. The good news is some cell technologies could nudge 40 in about 5 years EG solid state cells. That is with a 5000 cycle lifetime too.
Tech is not there yet. Pilot less planes should not even be considered. Thanks Cpt.
I agree
Pakistan Airlines tried a kind of a 'pilotless flight' with devastating consequences (flight 8303)...
And yet, pilotless F16s are already capable of dogfighting. I still don't think computers will replace pilots for passenger haul, but for cargo...
@@pistonburner6448Pakistan airlines isn’t good at flights with captains either though
@@solarissv777; hundreds of tons of cargo crashing into a city?
No thanks.
I've often wondered what would happen if you eliminated flaps and thrust reversers on an airliner. Just LOOK how much weight and complexity you eliminate by doing so. Just make larger wheel brakes which seems possible by lowering the weight of the aircraft. Flaps and slats, and thrust reversers are enormously complex systems requiring lots of maintenance, plus adding danger when they fail. There is a LOT to consider there.
Battery-powered aircraft suffer due to the very low energy density of batteries versus kerosene.
I understand what you are saying, but the fuel savings of 50% is still potentially far greater than the salary increases. The trick will be to see if they can scale up the electric models with maybe some sort of hybrid system up to the 50-70 passenger range. I personally think they will be able to do so when they figure out how to make sodium batteries a bit more efficient. Then you have a very long lifetime and wide operating/temperature range. Filling a jet up for a few hundred dollars per flight and no costly engine rebuilds is.. who cares about crew cost if you can still fit 50 people on it? So I think we are close to making this all work. Maybe 10 years. It is a shame that so many companies are stopping research, though.
There's no need for electric or hydrogen powered aircraft because you can use electricity to get hydrogen from water, and then combine that hydrogen with carbon extracted from CO2 to make jet fuel via the Fischer-Tropsch process.
The two expensive parts of the process are extracting CO2 and making hydrogen. But you can extract dissolved CO2 from seawater more effectively than from the air, and the cost of hydrogen depends on the ever reducing costs of wind and solar power.
The US Navy did some research on this many years ago. The problem they have is that while a carrier fleet is at sea then have no easy way to maintain fuel for the jets. So they looked into using electricity generated by the nuclear reactors in the carrier to make hydrogen, and extract CO2 from seawater. They estimated that jet fuel supplied that way would cost just twice as much as jet fuel from traditional means. But the price of jet fuel has gone up since then.
There are many companies exploring the idea of synthetic jet fuel made from CO2 extracted from non-fossil sources, combined with H2 made from sustainable sources. A quick Google search shows e.g. Neste is just the one.
The advantage of using synthetic get fuel is that it's an easy replacement for ordinary jet fuel.
That sounds awesome!
I wish people would think ! ANY FUEL renewable or fossil will only end up costing the customer more and more ! YOU ARE NOT IMPORTANT ! And they will have their fossil fuel PRIVATE JETS , CARS , GAS STOVES and everything they want you to give up ! It's a scam people so WAKE UP !
Note also that the newest types of nuclear reactors can use part of the reaction process itself to aid in the manufacture of e-fuels, increasing the efficiency of the process even further.
Modern nuclear reactors could produce large amounts of cheap hydrogen and e-fuels if the manufacture of nuclear plants in larger numbers wasn't politically sabotaged by anti-science 'green' loons and other corrupt people.
Advantages of synthetic fuel are the energy density and the ability to use it on currently existing aircraft. However, creating synthetic fuel and scaling the process is often times depicted as a way too easy task. We know how to do it on lab scale and we can even create enough fuel for one or two aircraft with it as a general proof of concept. However, replacing all jet fuel that is currently being burned requires a massive build up of facilities for creating synth fuel and we need to get the energy also from somewhere. On a car, you get 20% efficiency at best with synthetic fuel and I don't see a reason why I should be better on aircraft. So, we would require four times as much energy. Given that roughly half of the loss happens after filling it into the tank, we can derive that half of the loss is happening during production, so we need to put in twice the energy that is actually then stored in the produced fuel. Every year, we use over 300 mio. m³ of kerosene worldwide. That is 2.6 PWh of energy. Double that to accomodate for the losses during synth fuel production, so we are above 5 PWh. That's more energy than the annular electrical energy output of 400 commercial nuclear reactors. That's a lot of energy.
I am not saying that we will see a lot of hydrogen, let alone batteries, in aviation in the future. They have their own technical challenges. I just want to raise some awareness that synthetic fuel is also not such an easy solution as some people like to believe. If it was easy, we would already be doing it.
@@fr89k "On a car, you get 20% efficiency at best with synthetic fuel and I don't see a reason why I should be better on aircraft."
Which 'synthetic fuel' are you talking about?
You're mixing and matching cherry-picked made-up properties of different fuels, my friend.
The best solution for the pilot shortage is better, faster and cost effective training. airline sponsored cadet programs are a must!
so before we start reducing safety by reducing the number of pilots operating an aircraft. we should be working towards a more sustainable training pipeline for new pilots to reach higher standards of safety!
What the airlines dont understand yet is with Li-Ion Batteries colder temps = Less Range the reason being is the are less efficient at colder temps. Inorder to get the proper proformance you will need a heat pump to keep the batteries at the required temp and that means less range as well look at plug in EV's in colder climates. There range is halved in winter compared to summer
The solution is of course, a smaller battery set and an onboard generator to extend the range. With safety margins, naturally. Sodium batteries, while less energy dense are extremely safe and can operate in the temperature range that is required. Once they figure out how to get them to 70-80 percent the capacity, I think we will see widespread adoption. They also have the advantage of a dramatically lower cost to buy and replace.
And it naturally gets colder, higher you get, so such planes will have much lower operational ceiling compared to current ones.
When is the next time you go for hypoxia training?
Take us with you.
It would be a fun RUclips short, trying to do simple mathematics problems under the effects of hypoxia
I heard of a startup experimenting with rubber band power, but the wings kept falling off when the plane landed.
Reduced crew operation could work…replace four pilots with two. The relief crew on long oceanic flights aren’t much more than seat warmers. That part of the flight could be done autonomously while the flight crew rests.
Nope, batteries just don't have the safety and fuel density, same reason they're not used in other places. Not to mention sheer cost as well. Not really complicated.
“Batteries don’t have the safety”
Oh god
Batteries can work on short routes that are currently done with helicopters like an air taxi from Manhattan to JFK
@MentourNow Embraer also has been working on its own line electric, hybrid electric and hidrogen fuel cell turboprop, it has already certified the E-Jet E2 to run on 100% SAF and is also working on a future iteration if the E2 to run Hydrogen Fuel Cells, so it might be interesting to see what are your thoughts on that. Also It's line of crop dusters can run on both AvGas or on Ethanol.
Something needing government subsidies to exist is another way of saying that people don't see it as a good value proposition, and thus it can't stand on it's own.
If i had to guess, though, between hydrogen and straight electric, hydrogen is probably the most likely to be economically viable. Even if the battery tech was there, what would the charging times look like vs. uploading LH2?
The fossil fuel industry is drowning in subsidies. Its subsidies and government help all the way down.
Subsidies are usually meant to transition from one technology to another, but it's difficult to stop funding once it has started
I wonder if there is a way of possibly recharging the batteries during flight much like an F1 car uses KERS to convert kinetic energy and store it in the onboard battery packs for later use. Granted you’d use more electricity than you’d create but if you can use the spinning fans to create 5/10/15% of the original charge which can be directed back into the batteries the endurance problem could be lessened somewhat especially on longer flights
It is crazy to me how Americans fly 70 seater jets for short regional trips… for those kinds of trips we already have fully electrified modes of transport with low driver to passenger ratios… they are called trains…
America is addicted to creating as much inefficiency and greenhouse gases as possible.
I agree between moderate or large cities. But there are routes to smaller towns where trains don’t make sense but a commuter jet might.
A very good train infrastructure is available only in highly developed regions, even in Europe. For any government is far cheaper to build some airports then a comparable train infrastructure
@@Decarbonize11 that’s where you’re wrong. This is American cope.
@@Decarbonize11So what do you consider "moderate" and "small?"
What about a Chevy Volt airplane? A series/parallel hybrid technology but in airplanes? Use electric propulsion to get to cruise then use a regular engine and use a small portion of power to recharge the batteries during flight then use that power during descent, charge the batteries while it’s on the ground, then use batteries to taxi and lift off, and repeat. Maybe add solar to help improve efficiency during cruise where there it’s always sunny during the daytime? Yes it would add weight but I think the solar could help with that? A system like this would need minimal additional infrastructure besides chargers at the gates of airports. And the airplane could have two regular engines and two electric engines. In case of failure of the regular engines you could revert to the electric ones and vice versa. And I imagine this system could be retrofitted to existing planes, at least those with 4 engines, fairly easily?
Subsidy : an explicit admission that a business has access to funds forcibly extracted from taxpayers because the model cannot attract anyone who is willing to risk his of her own money.
As any student of history knows, neither politicians nor civil servants have a good record when it comes to "the white heat of technology" (a now historic reference in itself).
Additional costs? The eventual disposal of highly toxic components such as batteries and composite materials.
Hybrid power plants are like pumped storage generation: they are great for peak lopping. You can see a use case for electric boost for TOGA, but in steady state, modern gas turbines are unbelievably efficient.
I love the fact that aircraft are proving the physics.
I guess the game changer will be be single pilot operation.
Yeah, I don't really see us moving away from flying by burning dead dinosaurs for a while.
*dead ferns
It's not even dead dinosaurs. It's dead bushes and shrubs and such.
Hydrogen is clean but it is an extremely expensive fuel
And extremely flammable...
Yes, it really does come down to “economics”! But some groups are “predicting” that hydrogen could be reasonably cost effective “someday”! It is definitely a “We will see” issue.
@@Mentaculus42 If only producing it would be costly, we could work with it. But it's also very costly to store, unlike regular jet fuel.
Some of these factors are moot points depending on who exactly is running various countries. If the United States re-elects DJT as president and then executes on an infrastructure-first police:
Step 1: Nuclear Deepwell batteries to augment electrical infrastructure
Step 2: Pipe seawater inland and construct reservoirs
Step 3: use the "New" power infrastructure to drive desalinization plants to render the seawater potable for irrigation and consumption
Step 4: Leverage the reservoirs as HydroBatteries to "store" the energy produced by the Nuclear Batteries, which also strengthens the electrical grid resiliency as gravity-driven hydropower is relatively resistant to EMP shutdowns.
This puts the US in a position where attaching Sulfur-Iodine plants to the Nuclear Facilities to produce Hydrogen for use in fuel cells becomes dramatically less expensive due to sheer volume. Not saying SI plants are the best way to manufacture Hydrogen Fuel Cells, but they are one of the most efficient proven methods of deriving the required hydrogen.
Cratering the energy costs to produce electricity, then cratering the costs to produce Hydrogen Fuel Cells, and then backstopping that electrical grid with HydroBatteries, whilst simultaneously creating irrigation paths and croplands FROM those Hydrobatteries which in turn craters FOOD costs...
That turns everything upside down.
Most of the predictions made on power generation and power consumption today are framed around the JB/USDem policy of Infrastructure-Last, Destruction-First. In turn that means airlines have to expect the absolute worst conditions and rising costs with falling supplies.
To be fair, it could be Argentine's Javier Milei that gets an infrastructure-first policy implemented first. It could be Russia's Putin that succeeds in implementing infrastructure-first before other nations. Whichever country/nation gets infrastructure-first implemented will be the beacon that draws research and development and upends the status quo.
Or the status quo could just be maintained. Not likely as more people suffer under that status quo, but it is possible.
Well, short-sighted airlines fired all their pilots during the couf (what could possibly go wrong?).
Now that the couf is over, they can't get their pilots back because they retired or moved on to other careers.
And now they can't get enough pilots to meet demand.
So they have to pay through the nose to hire new inexperienced pilots.
With no money coming in and no flights, paying pilots to sit was impossible
First question that comes to mind: "What happens if the cryogenic cooling fails for some reason?"
At some point it won't be about what the airlines want... It just needs to happen...
Blaming pilot pay for stalling development of electric aircraft is so dystopian. It's a corporate knee jerk blaming other entities to cover their own failings.
It's like blaming a RUclips review for killing companies.
Exactly. A product cannot blame the market for its failure.
100%, modern battery technology is simply impractical for large scale flight. The batteries are too big, too heavy, and generate for too much heat to be usable in aircraft. Hydrogen might theoretically work, but others have already pointed out the flaws in that approach. Namely, the only way to produce fuel grade hydrogen on a large enough scale requires burning fossil fuels.
eeey, MKBHD Refference.
@@bionicseaserpentMKBADHD
Unfortunately, Incogni does not work in Asia or Australia.
Remember when anyone says "ZERO EMISSIONS" they are playing a shell game on you...
That means zero emissions from the vehicle's operation. But the manufacturing of the vehicle and all its components probably resulted in a lot of emissions! (Not to mention the fact that electrically powered systems are only zero-emission if their power source is 100% renewable, which very few power grids currently are.)
The production of EVs and lithium ion batteries in general is extremely detrimental to the environment. The burning of fossil fuels and the modern practice of sustainable wood harvesting has essentially reached an equilibrium, where Earth’s lungs are kept at an acceptable level, filtering our air. Even the extraction of oil & natural gas has been so rigorously scrutinized & regulated (at least in the West) that it has also been fine tuned to an equilibrium state with minimal environmental impact
I suspect part of the answer isn’t in the air, but rather on the ground. If it becomes impossible to decarbonise short haul regional flights in a cost-effective way, then perhaps the answer is in electrified rail transportation.
A lot on my work is involved with the handling, safety, shipping and disposal of rechargeable lithium batteries, and having experienced the very sudden explosive effects of an unstable lithium battery more times than I can count I won't even get into a hybrid or fully electric car. So, there is no way in hell I'll ever board any electric aircraft. Hell, you can't even check spare batteries into hold luggage so the airlines are already aware of the dangers these things present.
Great video ! You can have a look at what Aura Aero is doing ! Very promising ! Era project and their lighter electric aircraft integral
I think electric aircraft will never exist since batteries are heavy and range is a nightmare. The answer to emissions problems is to be emission neutral, not necessarily emission free, and that's what SAF is about: if a flight emits X tonnes/CO2 and making the amount of fuel for said flight captures (X+ a bit more) tonnes of CO2 from atmosphere you are still cutting emissions. Also SAF can be used in existing engines and fuel plumbing with little or no modifications and that's obviously a huge advantage. Not everything can or needs be electric
"never" is a big word, but as is obvious, they already exist as short range aircraft. They may not be practical for airliners in the near future, but never say never.
Emission neutral has been a scam in every industry it has appeared in, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same case in aviation. There's just too much money in lying, so when you're the only one providing the numbers, the incentive is clear.
@BobHannent I mean as airliners , that's why I said never. Those small trainers are good online for, well, training
Battery tech. is still in early stages. I agree big airliners will not run on batteries in the near future, but work on new technologies like solid-state batteries could eventually lead to a battery energy dense enough to power a long range aircraft. That aircraft might look much different and might be much smaller than today’s airliners. Think Otto Aviation’s work in “laminar flow” designs for planes that will seat 8-18 passengers.
You can believe anything you want
Type rating costs, for type rated alternative fuel pilots.... firstly they will be rare and highly desired, if any new fuel goes live... especially because from pilot perspective it will limit the pilots job application envelope, to be certified on something that is not widely available, that in turn will rise their prices
Beyond niche applications, both hydrogen and electric are about as likely for mass market as teleporting Star Trek style.
As Scotty would say "You canna break the laws of physics"
Jap. Batteries be heavy.
Another great video. Thank you!
I'm waiting for Mr Fusion to use Hydrogen for planes. 😂
Just install a small nuclear power plant... 🤣🤣
@@davejohn3820 You know, there was such project. But it was cancelled for safety reasons - we don't need any aircraft crash site turning into radioactive fallout zone.
Hello, and thanks for all you do. I enjoy your channel very much, and find flight to be super interesting. Having said that, I feel compelled to comment on this piece.
First, the very idea that it's reasonable for humans to travel 3000 miles to attend a wedding of birthday party for a day or two is ridiculous. I know this view is highly unpopular, but with the low "cost" of air transportation, usage of this capability has gotten completely out of control. But more on this later.
The basic issue is that whenever a resource has no cost, in this case, clean air, businesses will use it as much as possible. In economics terms this is called an externality. The problem is, the cost of using this resource is substantial, and the population as a whole is paying the price. As you are no doubt aware, as global warming advances, insurance costs are increasingly rapidly, disaster repairs costs are increasing rapidly, whole populations are starving, low lying areas are spending a fortune on keeping the water out, etc. etc.
But the airline industry, although wanting to reduce its carbon footprint, contributes very substantially to this problem, more so because these emissions are released high in the atmosphere. While more efficient engines and non-fossil fuels will help, there's simply no getting around that this simply won't be enough.
While the discussion about pilot pay is interesting, the simple fact is that as Joby and Archer start flying commercially within the next couple of years, they will begin to offload some portion of the short haul traffic. For routes like San Francisco to LA, and many routes within Europe, these small electric flying machines will be an excellent solution. This is why United Airlines (and others) have invested heavily in these companies.
While moving away from flying jets for routes of less that 250 miles will certainly help...and the Archer/Joby vehicles can potentially operate from non-airport facilities, we simply have to "internalize" the current "externality" that makes jet travel so cheap. Essentially, the cost of remediating the damage being done to the planet from this travel needs to be borne by those who use this service, not society at large. While I don't claim to know what this number is, I suspect it's substantial. If a $200 fare becomes a $500 fare in order to pay for the damage being done, then folks may think twice about using air transportation as though it's an unlimited resource with no usage constraints. Capitalism works, but only when resources are fairly valued. In the case of the airline industry, they are currently not.
As for the argument that it's not economically viable to have smaller planes due to pilot costs, this assumes that the status quo remains. But I don't think this is a likely state of affairs. As you are no doubt aware, we are rapidly moving towards robot taxis for surface transportation. While there have been some setbacks (as will always be the case with new technologies), consumers have shown a willingness to accept these advances. While it may take a while, I suspect that as part of the transition to battery powered aircraft, increased automation will be a big part of the deal. Thinking about it, while it's actually very hard to design software to address the essentially chaotic environment that a car operates in, the environment that commercial aircraft operate in is very well controlled. Designing software to deal with this environment is orders of magnitude less challenging.
Bottom line is that it's time to take a broader look at air transportation. We need to both internalize externalities, and accept that smaller short haul (potentially automated) aircraft are soon going to be a reality. And the world will be better for it.
Aside from producing a powerful enough battery, I see charging time as another major obstacle. It’s essentially the same problem as EV’s.
if you can refule in about 2 to 3 hr it is not that much more time than a stop takes now. and that is possible without damaging the battery.
@lordnobady wrong. Most aircraft turn around in 45 minutes to 1 hour
@@lordnobady The issue is that's a huge "if". A modern short haul aircraft will consumes around 2.5 tonnes of fuel per hour, at 43MJ/kg that's almost 30MWh per hour of flight. Assuming a 50% thermodynamic efficiency that means an electric plane would need 15MWh/h for the same frame & travel, which would require a 5MW link to charge a plane for a 1h trip in 3h. *Per plane*.
That's a lot more electricity than airports have available, and it would still only charge some of the more efficient planes at a rate of 20mn flight per hour.
And it's assuming the battery chemistry can even handle that sort of charge.
@@lordnobadyfuelcell doesn’t need a recharge
@@UnbeatenPath1 ok will need a bit more time but not enough to be a big problem.
what is happening around utilising Green Ammonia .. after all if you can get around the clean burn issue it is the best way to store hydrogen at ambient temperature and pressure (after all it is NH3) and can utilise existing fuelling methods.
Ammonia is very dangerous and even more so after it's burned.
One thing people tend to forget (or conveniently overlook) is that the carbon emissions created by the mining and construction of lithium-ion batteries are actually worse than that created by the burning of carbon based fuels. And as for autonomous aircraft, I wouldn't get on one. I wouldnt trust technology with my life.
Similar issue with hydrogen as well. Yes, burning hydrogen (or running it through a fuel-cell) only produces water as a by-product so in that sense it's perfectly clean, hydrogen still has to be manufactured and currently, most hydrogen is made by burning natural gas, thus releasing more carbon emissions per unit of energy than just burning aviation fuel. It's possible to manufacture 'green' hydrogen using renewable energy (through electrolysis) but that takes *a lot* of energy and as such, is very expensive. Considering that a change like that could only reasonably be achieved if it wasn't that much more expensive than current methods, I think we're still very far away from hydrogen powered airliners being a commercially viable option.
As for autonomous aircraft, I'm with the rest of the crowd - no thanks!
Would love a deep dive into issues at Qantas. The are the only airline (touch wood) without mass fatalities and bankruptcy but the they are out of favour with Australians.