John Mason said, "I will go one further and offer 81JM as a test bed to anyone who can put together a credible plan to electrify her. She is currently flying with all basic instruments working."
That's a generous offer and surely will be of interest to any number of innovators in the electric world. Poking through the forums on that subject I've seen these folks build wood and composite structures as testbeds for their projects - pretty crude looking compared to a KR. I've seen KR-sized firewalls with an electric motor mounted. How much further along they would be with an already flying plane like your KR! Harbour Air in BC has converted one of their Beavers for commercial operations and plan to convert the rest of their fleet. A Caravan was recently electrified https://tinyurl.com/ybwzz7wa and huge strides are being made in Europe, China, here in the US and surely many other places. Tesla recently bought Maxwell who itself is involved in development of electric aircraft so Tesla is obviously involved in this enterprise as they are in so many others. Musk moving to the U.S. was surely a huge loss for South Africa, but oh well. If it wasn't for their communist and thoroughly corrupt ANC government he might have stayed. Anyway, this direction towards electric flight is not hard to understand when you see an 80 HP motor that weighs 20 pounds and doesn't need overhaul until 10 thousand hours. Lots of homegrown individuals with electrical skills are putting together these motors with controllers, batteries, and monitoring panels - mostly on ultralight/LSA sized airframes at this point. Clearly there's a mad dash going on to develop higher energy density/lighter batteries. Musk is shooting for 400wh/kilogram within 5 years but with so much effort going into this project, breakthroughs will likely arrive much sooner. It's a really interesting subject and one the upper atmosphere sorely needs since at current rates carbon emissions from airliners are scheduled to double by 2050. Here's a media overview of recent developments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHApAWHO_bc _______________________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/. Please see LIST RULES and KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html. see http://list.krnet.org/mailman/listinfo/krnet_list.krnet.org to change options. To UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to [email protected]
