Llewellyn King: The electric-plane era gains altitude

NASA developed the X-57 Maxwell electric plane from a Tecnam P2006T.

The aviation industry — from the backyard inventors to the giants like Boeing and Airbus — are all feverishly working on electric airplanes. The sparks are flying. The new age of flight has taken off.

Erik Lindbergh, grandson of Charles Lindbergh, calculates that 200 firms of all sizes are working on electric aircraft, reminiscent of the early days of both flight and automobiles.

Lindbergh, an accomplished pilot, who replicated his ancestor’s 1927 Atlantic solo crossing in 2002, in a single engine plane, is an avid electric aircraft proponent and developer.

Across the Atlantic in Lausanne, Switzerland, another aviation giant, Andre Borschberg, famous for his around-the-world flight in the solar-powered Solar Impulse in 2016, has just demonstrated an electric flight trainer, the H55, that is operational and being offered to flight schools around the world. It was rolled out at a press event last month.

The destination is always the same, but the paths differ.

The goal is to say farewell to noisy, polluting planes and to usher in environmentally acceptable ones. Even The Economist, a pro-business, pro-personal choice magazine with a global readership, has recently railed against the pollution from airliners and criticized the use of private jets and first-class travel. Aviation is estimated to add up to 5 percent to the greenhouse gas being pushed into the atmosphere. The real problem is that jets lay it down where it does the most damage: at 30,000 feet and above.

To those who live near airports whether it is in Arlington, Va.,, San Diego or London, noise is a real and constant problem.

It will be decades before large jet liners are replaced with electric propulsion, but for light aircraft and for a new kind of flying, involving what Lindbergh calls “flying cars,” the future begins now.

Lindbergh tells me he is working with a major automobile company on what will be a vertical takeoff and landing, flying car, aka airplane. Enthusiasts have dreamed about such a vehicle since the Wright Brothers.

Borschberg, with an enormous amount of firsthand knowledge about using electricity in propulsion, acquired in his spectacular around-the-world flight with co-pilot Bertrand Piccard, is using the experience gained with Solar Impulse in the H55. It is the first generation of trainer: good today, better tomorrow. It also gives suppliers, like Siemens — which is developing electric aviation-specific motors — to evolve their products. The H55 buys its components.

Borschberg says the flight trainer market for a two-seater simple aircraft is large and expanding, particularly in Asia. “There is a pilot shortage all over the world,” he told me.

The limitation of the H55 and other light electric airplanes, including those made in Slovenia, is range. The H55 has only 90 minutes of endurance because of the limits of battery technology. You had better have landed or you will be out of juice; up, up and away having become down, down and dismay. OK for one-hour flight training, but not for those cross-country flights that trainee pilots must make, at least in the United States.

For that reason, Lindbergh is promoting, through his company VerdeGo Aero, a hybrid with a gasoline engine and electric motors. While not a pure electric play, this will perform bridging, much as hybrids have in the car market.

Elsewhere, there is huge excitement about all-electric air taxis and many companies, including Uber, are concentrating on these. In fact, Uber ties eventual financial success to driverless air taxis.

Lindbergh says money is pouring into the electric aircraft field with rich individuals, including Larry Page, co-founder of Google, leading the way. Pure electric drones (like the air taxis, but not designed to carry passengers) are the darling of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The new airplanes are of various shapes and sizes. Electricity allows you to have many propulsion points, many propellers or one; propellers at the back or the front, and even to have jet equivalent with propellers forcing air into a tunnel to create thrust.

The sky’s the limit, you might say, if batteries catch up with soaring hopes.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Utopian dreaming and environmental brio

There are hopes that electric-powered airplanes will help advance the move away from carbon-based fuels. Mr. King writes: “Boeing, for one, is working hard on electric airplanes. Electric air taxis are being experimented with in Dubai and about to be tried in Frankfurt.’’

The newly seated Democrats in the House have lessons to learn, but none more than not to tell people what you’re going to take away from them.

That was the great mistake that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made when she laid out her Green New Deal. It sounds like big stick from big government.

She said everything should be done, from rebuilding the entire stock of American housing (which can’t be done) to phasing out air transport (which would never happen) to tackling cow flatulence (which is a smelly challenge). Dreamy nonsense is nonetheless nonsense, and nonetheless has a political price.

It is a bad posture to say to people that you’re going to take things away from them — whether it’s their money in taxes or their way of life — to achieve environmental goals.

The problem with Ocasio-Cortez’s statements is that she’s seen, wrongly, as the new face of the new, far-left Democratic Party. Come the election, Democrats will have to spend time distancing themselves from the Ocasio-Cortez brand of utopian dreaming while capitalizing on their environmental brio.

Foolish extreme suggestions neither woo those who are going to decide the next election nor are they in the dynamic tradition of successful politics. You tell people you are going to fix things, not take them away.

Underlying the Ocasio-Cortez argument, which was codified in a non-binding joint resolution, is the basic idea that the only way to save the planet is to cut all carbon emissions in a very short time and to substitute solar, wind and hydro energy.

Omitted from the statements by Ocasio-Cortez and her Senate collaborator, Edward Markey, D-Mass., is any mention of nuclear, which is still the largest carbon-free source of electricity and hardly scars the face of the earth compared to wind and solar. Maybe that is because Markey has spent his whole career in public life trying to shut down nuclear.

In fact, the environmental movement spent long years fighting nuclear. When I would ask, in conferences in the 1980s, what they would use in lieu of a robust nuclear regime, they would answer coal. But to make it sound environmentally acceptable, they said it should be burned in circulating fluidized bed boilers. These offer some advantage, using limestone to precipitate out sulfate.

Missing from the Green New Deal is any sense of the new, i.e. how technology can help.

Take aircraft. They are in the early stages of development, but an electric airplane is in the sights of the big airframe manufacturers. Boeing, for one, is working hard on electric airplanes. Electric air taxis are being experimented with in Dubai and about to be tried in Frankfurt.

The Green New Deal, which is short on details, only endorses one technology outside of wind and solar: high-speed rail. Unfortunately, Ocasio-Cortez is boosting it at a time when California is drastically cutting back on the U.S. entry into the high-speed rail game. The United States sat that one out, and it may be too late to get into the game.

But there is hope.

The success of Amtrak’s electrified Northeast Corridor points the way: People will use regular trains if they are available and the track is good enough for them to travel at a reasonable speed of about 150 mph. The immediate answer is better track allowing more express trains, like Washington to Boston or Los Angeles to San Francisco without stops.

Nearly all the problems of the climate are amenable to technological solutions. The new fusion of high technology across the board in smart cities will, among other things, reduce the carbon footprint through efficiency and electrified transportation.

Ocasio-Cortez is a fresh voice in the nation: brave and as yet unbeholden to special-interest groups. If she can grasp that we are on the threshold of a brave new world of technology, called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, she’ll see how it can solve many problems, including those it seems to create in climate. Then she’ll have a political product to sell that people will buy.

The one place where technology seems to offer no solutions is with cows and the challenge of Flatulence Arriving Regularly Today (FART).

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.