October 23, 2020, ©. Leeham News: In our series on Hydrogen as an energy store for airliners we look deeper at the safety of a hydrogen airliner.
Do the safety rules for the aircraft or the airport need to be written new or can the existing ones be used with changes?
By Scott Hamilton
Sept. 25, 2020, © Leeham News: Commercial aviation has had 70 years to use jet fuel safely. It’s unclear how long it will take to reach the same level of safety with hydrogen, say Boeing.
In a briefing Tuesday, the day after Airbus revealed its hydrogen powered concepts for three potential airliners, the vice president and general manager of product development expressed caution about hydrogen as a fuel source.
September 18, 2020, ©. Leeham News: In our series on hydrogen as an energy store for airliners we analyze the conversion of the present Turbofan and Turboprop airliner engines to hydrogen as fuel instead of carbon-based fuels.
We know it’s possible as the world’s first jet engine from 1937 ran on hydrogen, Figure 1. But what are the problems and how good are the hydrogen-fueled engines in efficiency and emissions?
March 13, 2020, ©. Leeham News: In this week’s Corner, we address an often forgotten aspect of Electric and Electric-Hybrid aircraft design.
The battery as an energy source, as the only or assisting source, has the same weight during the whole flight. A fuel (alternate, fossil, or hydrogen) consumes during the flight. You gradually fly a lighter aircraft. Let’s see how this affects the aircraft’s efficiency.
March 6, 2020, ©. Leeham News: We use this week’s Corner to discuss the safety hazards a change to an Electric or Hybrid-Electric airliner introduces.
The trigger is two battery fires in six weeks for the electric aircraft prototypes which are now flooding the market.
January 31, 2020, ©. Leeham News: We now look at ways to increase the fuel efficiency of our airliner and by it, improve the CO2 situation for our environment.
Let’s start with understanding where we are with the efficiency of our present air transport system. To get a feel for where we are we will compare it to our road transport system.
December 13, 2019, ©. Leeham News: The first all-electric commercial aircraft, a Harbor Air DHC-2 Beaver, flew over the Fraser River near Vancouver in the week (Figure 1). It was powered by a magniX electric engine fed with energy from batteries.
Despite this progress, this Corner series is about why the e in our future ePlanes should stand for environment and not electric.
By Bryan Corliss
April 22, 2019, © Leeham News: Electric aircraft motor builder MagniX will celebrate Earth Day today by announcing it has been chosen as one of two powerplants for Eviation Aircraft’s proposed nine-seater Alice passenger plane.
“We have been successfully testing the MagniX system with our Alice aircraft propeller for quite some time now with great results,” Eviation Chief Executive Omer Bar-Yohay said in a statement.
The MagniX motor has more than 1,500 hours on a test stand, according to Roei Ganzarski, who is CEO of the suburban Seattle engine-builder.
The Alice is a clean-sheet electric aircraft design developed by Eviation, an Israeli company that has established a testing/production facility in Prescott, AZ. Eviation has announced plans to fly the Alice at Le Bourget this summer.
September 22, 2017, ©. Leeham Co: After 12 articles about electric aircraft, it’s time to wrap up. We will go through what we have learned and discuss future developments.
Our designs were aimed for the next decade and the result was sobering. Electric aircraft have important challenges to traverse. As had electric cars, and they have turned the corner.
By Bjorn Fehrm in Dublin
Introduction
June 1, 2016, ©. Leeham Co: We report from the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) Annual General Meeting running in Dublin Thursday and Friday this week, where all the world’s airlines meet to report on a number of initiatives and decide on things to do going forward.
The first briefing from IATA was on the level of safety in the air for 2015, measured through the IATA Operational Safety Audit, IOSA. 2015 was a good year, not quite to the level of 2014 which was the safest year in history, but close at 0.32 jet hull losses per one million flights instead of 0.27 recorded for 2014, Figure 1.
As a reference, the the 2013 rate was 0.41 hull losses over one million flights. The 2015 rate was a 30% improvement over the average rate of the years 2010-2014. The turboprop level was worse at 1.29 hull losses per million flights but it was a large improvement compared to previous years at 3.13 and 3.95. It shall be cautioned that the sample size for Turboprops is much smaller than for Jets, therefore one hull loss will affect the statistics quite a lot. Read more