You may not like physics, but it is the law. Battery technology is mature technology and the most optimistic improvement possible is about a factor of 2, which will be fantastic for cars and trucks but will do little to nothing for airplanes. That issue was, more or less, solved by putting smart controllers inside the battery, not though any astounding break through in electrochemistry or materials. The first attempt at lithium batteries a hundred years ago was abandoned because no one could figure out how to keep a battery of any decent size from self destructing. The issue is energy density which needs to increase by roughly an order of magnitude for batteries to be viable and replace fossil fuel, and that is never going to happen.īattery technology is about 200 years old and lithium battery technology is about 100 years old. There may be some niche aircraft where it will be viable, but neither battery powered airliners or even practical trainers will ever exist. Flick said that earlier this year researchers discovered a problem with the technology that would make flying the plane unsafe and there wouldn’t be enough time to fix it before the scheduled end of the program.īattery technology will never be advanced enough for economically viable aircraft. In 2021 the team decided to fund the research through the end of 2023, and they thought they’d get the plane into the air. “What we learned is that many of those necessary subsystems were not sufficiently mature for safe flight,” he said. He said the researchers discovered those assumptions were incorrect. In the conference, Bradley Flick, director of NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, said NASA based the program on assumptions that existing electric propulsion technology was advanced enough to be incorporated into the Maxwell.
The announcement comes on the heels of Tecnam’s announcement that it was suspending its own electrification project, the P-Volt, because battery technology isn’t advanced enough for economically viable aircraft. NASA officials said in a streamed news conference on Friday they can’t do it safely in the time available. The plan was to modify a Tecnam P2006 with an array of small electric motors on the leading edge of a high-lift wing for vertical takeoff and shift the power to two larger wingtip motors and props for cruise flight.
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