Recently, a new precedent was established concerning sustainability within the aviation industry. Greg McDougall, the owner of a seaplane charter company by the name of Harbour Air, based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, piloted an all-electric de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver (Wikipedia) for a short test flight over the Fraser River (Selkirk).
While the flight only lasted a couple of minutes, this groundbreaking experience served as a proof of concept for McDougall and his partner, magniX, the manufacturer of the engine, and a “technology firm” (Selkirk).
One major improvement upon traditional engines is the fact that, “electrical motors have fewer moving parts, meaning there’s less maintenance and less maintenance cost” (Selkirk). Furthermore, “the efficiency of a typical combustion engine for a plane like this is fairly low” (Selkirk), and due to the fact that an electrical engine does not produce any bi-products as a result of combustion, the plane will ultimately operate at a higher performance level (Selkirk).
One major drawback of electrical engines at this moment is the current power state of lithium ion batteries (Selkirk). Erika Holtz, “Harbour Air’s engineering and quality manager” (Selkirk), when interviewed within the article, she states that “the power density in aviation fuel is quite high, in the neighbourhood of 1,200 watt hours per kilogram…meanwhile in a lithium ion battery, it’s in the range of 200 watt hours per kilogram” (Holtz qtd. in Selkirk). However, due to the short flying distances encompassed by Harbour Air’s services, an all-electric engine has the range and ability to accomplish any flight formerly completed by combustion engines (Selkirk).
In my opinion, if the technology of batteries continues to advance, I can see all-electric flight dominating the aviation field in the near future. I believe that this development will not only redefine powered flight as humans understand it today, but has the potential to open new pathways to advancements within this industry.
Source:
“Is this the Start of an Aviation Revolution?” by Diane Selkirk (BBC News)(BBC Future Planet): https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200211-the-electric-plane-leading-a-revolution
“de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver” (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_DHC-2_Beaver
My hope is that sustainability migrates to many other industries as well. Climate change is present global problem that needs to be addressed with full force. Unfortunately, there are some companies that feel they are not accountable for the environment. However, corporate social responsibility in the business world is becoming more and more normal.
Take Starbucks for example. They are employing so many systems and technologies in order to reduce their footprint and benefit society. With over 31,000 stores and about 100 million customers, the processes they have to come up with must be quite complex and sophisticated.
Their efforts: ethical sourcing, innovative production lines, packaging redesigning and so on. More businesses need to pioneer ontologies and internet-of-things concepts to tackle global warming head on. We have the advanced technology so why not?
Source: https://www.starbucks.com/responsibility
My hope is that sustainability migrates to many other industries as well. Climate change is present global problem that needs to be addressed with full force. Unfortunately, there are some companies that feel they are not accountable for the environment. However, corporate social responsibility in the business world is becoming more and more normal.
Take Starbucks for example. They are employing so many systems and technologies in order to reduce their footprint and benefit society. With over 31,000 stores and about 100 million customers, the processes they have to come up with must be quite complex and sophisticated.
Their efforts: ethical sourcing, innovative production lines, packaging redesigning and so on. More businesses need to pioneer ontologies and internet-of-things concepts to tackle global warming head on. We have the advanced technology so why not?
I think that making eco-friendly vehicles is the next big step in transportation. While electric cars have been around for a few years now, it is finally moving to the skies. Electric planes are a unique idea. But there are a few issues I am concerned about.
First being battery life. Are they going to be able to develop batteries that are going to be able to power a whole airplane for a few hours? I wonder how big the battery would have to, also about heat dispersion assuming the batteries are going to heat up throughout the flight.
My second concern is about weight. The battery that is going to be powering this plane is going to have to be fairly large. So how much would this battery weigh? A couple hundred pounds? A couple thousand pounds?
But aside from these problems, I think electric planes are a very cool idea. I think eventually we could have electric planes that are able to take us to the moon.
Electric planes are quite honestly not something I had ever considered, but reading this post opened my mind to the amount of flights that take off per day, every day of the year. The amount of emissions is currently on the rise, even for countries with overall depleting amounts of pollution (Wilkes).
Upon doing some further reading, I saw that some countries plan to completely have electric domestic flights. This is Norway’s goal by 2040 (Dowling). This would be a great step in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, the article states that the only current electric planes are not commercial sized (Dowling).
I think that this would be a very possible reality, especially given the speed that the technology of electric cars is improving. Methods like what has been done for smaller planes and ground vehicles can all be used to help create something more powerful. It is promising to know people are looking out for issues like these, that an average person like me would overlook.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-10/airline-pollution-is-soaring-and-nobody-knows-how-to-fix-it
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180814-norways-plan-for-a-fleet-of-electric-planes