This is Australia’s only certified commercial electric plane
It’s pretty quiet for a plane Bobby is on a record breaking distance flight
around regional South Australia
Bascially it's a very small electric motor in it, virtually no moving parts and it's
powered by two batteries.
They're putting out about 400 volts and if you can imagine your car battery is 12, so
it's a lot of power.
That's around about 58 kilowatts of power going to the aeroplane so it's quite a powerful
little plane.
The plane needs recharging every hour We're sort of ranging between 35 and 45 minutes,
and there are a lot of factors in that in terms of battery consumption.
One of those is really, wind has a lot to do with it.
We're still learning about the aeroplane on a trip like this as well.
We landed at Corunna and Nonning stations, basically out the back of Iron Knob, up the
north-west over the last couple of days and really finding a thousand feet of dirt runway
in the middle of a million acres of scrub was very interesting.
It's a challenge finding anywhere to land on a trip like this when your airports are
so far apart.
There is no aircraft recharging infrastructure at any airport in the country at the moment
and certainly that’s one of the outcomes of this particular trip will be to identify
likely locations and advise our government about the possibility for infrastructure upgrades
at airports such as Port Lincoln and Whyalla and so on.
Bobby has two small batteries And takes about an hour to recharge
Support vehicles tow generators that power a charger carried in a larger support plane
and it’s connected to Bobby While it’s recharging, there’s plenty
of time to meet the locals
It looks big, but then it’s pretty small.
It looks like a helicopter slash plane.
It looks pretty small but we couldn’t really hear it.
It was like a drone noise.
Inside, you’d probably be able to have a sleep, because it was so quiet.
It was great to share this vision, this technology with the younger kids because basically they
are our future as well.
It’s electric and it doesn’t use fuel and it’s going to save the environment.
They’re going to make more but they’re going to be bigger and it might help save
the planet.
Bobby set a new distance record of almost 1400 km
As well as speed and distance over water records