
Eviation's Electric-Propelled Commuter Airplane Debuts at Paris Air Show - prostoalex
https://www.flyingmag.com/eviation-debuts-alice/
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jillesvangurp
Electrical aviation is starting to look like a serious business opportunity;
especially for short haul. The premise is very similar to electrical cars:
they are a lot simpler to manufacture, the electricity is comparatively cheap
(and getting cheaper), the maintenance cost is much lower, and they are a lot
simpler and cheaper to operate.

I see a lot of articles pointing out that this does not scale to large
aircraft due to various physical constraints. This is both true and
irrelevant. The only reason large aircraft exist is that they make better use
of a very expensive resource: fuel. Because of their size, they need big
airports as well, which is why we have the hub and spoke model where most long
distance travel requires traveling to a hub before you can start your journey
to another hub where you hop on another spoke (unless the hub was your
destination). This makes an already expensive journey even more expensive
because you are forced to burn fuel to get to a place from where you can start
your journey.

This problem completely goes away with electrical aviation. Big electrical
airplanes would still be nice to have. But they are not essential. Mass
produced small electrical planes enable people to fly from tiny airstrips;
even roof tops if you consider planes with vtol capabilities. The Eviation has
enough range (650 miles) that it can compete with most short haul flights.

I live in Germany. This plane can easily service the whole of Germany and many
destinations outside of it as well. Better still, it can actually fly to any
of the dozens of airports in Germany rather than only the handful of bigger
airports that are currently taking most of the domestic travel (e.g. Berlin-
Munich is a busy route). This massively improves how quickly you get from any
point in Germany to any other point in Germany. It actually competes with both
trains and planes for price and speed. A lot of domestic flights here compete
on both with high speed rail.

Here's some back of the envelope math. The price of 1 airbus A319 (~110M) pays
for around 30-35 Eviations (~3M). An A319 transports carries 160 passengers,
30 eviations can carry 270 passengers. A typical journey for the Eviation will
be a fraction of what it cost to fly a single A319. It's tens vs. thousands of
euros, i.e. two orders of magnitude. You can fly hundreds of eviations over
the same distance for the same price as a single A319 journey (excluding the
pilots). The main cost bottleneck is actually the pilots: there won't be
enough of them and they cost a lot per hour.

That is of course until we automate them away, which is likely to start
happening over the next decades. IMHO this will happen with electrical planes
first because they are much simpler to automate. And of course, autonomously
flying planes are another thing Eviation is working on.

It's a very logical strategy. I can be off by quite a large factor with these
numbers and it would still be an extremely compelling business case. IMHO my
numbers are long term actually extremely conservative and there is room for an
order of magnitude improvement just through cost savings, already validated
research around batteries, etc.

This first generation electrical plane completely destroys the business case
for one of the most economical traditional planes flying today. As soon as
they start producing this plane in volume, planes like the A319 are a thing of
the past. I predict many traditional planes shipping today will be retired
years or decades ahead of their currently scheduled end of life for this
reason.

