Electric planes!
Two words to you, yeah, range anxiety. Hah! [Music] This is a Pipistrel Alpha Electro this
is the first electric plane ever as far as I'm aware to have come down here to my home airport of
Moorabbin and to be available hopefully for people like you if you've ever thought about getting into
flight training but maybe costs has been a bit of a barrier to entry for you [Music] thank you
now people talk about things like lower maintenance costs lower running costs obviously
you're not paying for gas because these things don't take gas there are two batteries in this
aircraft that you just plug in and recharge just like you would with a Tesla but is this the future
of Aviation are we all going to be learning to fly in things like electric planes in the future I'm
going to take this for a flight today with Quorum the owner of the aircraft because I want to find
out if this actually is going to be the plane that someone like you is going to learn to fly in
all right foreign thing I noticed your startup procedure is literally to close the door and
to put the power on pretty much we do have a couple of things to check and I did check a
few things while you're doing setup in terms of engine checks there's very little because
everything's reported on the screen so if there's anything that's outside of our regular parameters
we can instantly see it on there of course you don't need to do running so you're not
warming the engine up nothing to warm up you've already done all your pre-flight six previously
yeah because I'm in the Runa Bay for on a good day I can do it in maybe five six minutes yeah
but uh on a cold day I could be sitting there waiting for it to warm up something maybe about
for a while eight nine ten minutes sometimes no we're just taxing towards the holding point and
our battery now is at 95 95 and 99 so it will draw from both batteries this is the thing I
love you're at the holding point you've pulled the power back to cut off and the prop stop so
if you're stuck at a holding point for a while you're not burning any energy and it's nice you
don't have exhaust flowing over you and you're not getting heat in the engine and is that clear
to take off Electro 2091 A4 reviews take off configuration one stage of flat full power
and uh climb out of here all right off we go
uh the performance is amazing that's a quick takeoff huge wings and the
equivalent of 100 horsepower motor are very light we're probably only at about
um 550 kilos or 540 kilos here with our weight today
all right I'm gonna say two words to you yeah range anxiety so this gets mentioned when it comes
to Electric aircraft yeah and what about people who say well what happens if you go out flying and
you just run out of battery yeah yeah well the range anxiety is there but it's not dissimilar
really to any aviator who will understand range anxiety already with fuel because if you're
planning a couple hour mission and you've only got so much fuel on board and weight's really really
critical so you always keep as little fuel as you really need for your mission just enough for your
required reserves usually and uh so range anxiety has been around in aviation for all time yeah it's
just a little bit more critical and that's part of what gets taught in the curriculum with this
aircraft is critical energy management I think when you're deciding on an aircraft to fly it's
really important to look at some actual raw data so I've got this from the official pipestrel
website they say the alpha Electro can cruise at 98 knots now I think that's probably Max Cruise
speed that it can possibly do I realistically when we're flying the alpha Electro it feels
like you get between 85 and 99. so let's say on a good day you can do 90 knots Cruise beat max
range on their website is stated to be 50 minutes now I believe as well that's probably a low power
setting if you're going to be high power doing a lot of climbs maybe doing some air work you're not
going to get 50 minutes on top of the reserves and we'll talk about reserves in a second I'd
probably say something like 40 minutes flying time is a bit more realistic so for 40 minutes flying
time at a 90 knots Cruise speed that means on one charge you can cover about 60 nautical miles range
and that becomes important when you look at some of the general aviation airports especially here
in Australia and you look at the training areas associated with those airports and you start to
look at the distances between between the two so you just need to be more planned about the
exercises the missions you're going to achieve in the aircraft for the training session yep but
then also the pilot from a very early stage is learning about there's a finite amount of time
that any aircraft has of course 100 it's just the time which is the variable and a little
bit of extra planning and communication like we just did with the tower a moment ago we're maybe
planning an odd approach so that we can come in a little bit more direct so you plan it ask it call
ahead and and have a nice energy efficient route to go back in on let's have a look at some of the
popular airports here in Australia where people generally do Flight Training so this is moorabbin
airport where we are now and this area here this is the training area and the distance between the
two is basically say to the middle of the training area 17 nautical miles that means there and back
is 34 nautical miles meaning it gives you about 26 say 25 26 nautical miles of flying in the training
area but that's of course based on no headwinds no delays getting in and out of mirabi this is
Sydney this is bankstown Airport another popular training airport this is the training area and the
distance to that it's about the same it's about 17 miles up near Brisbane you've got Archer field now
this one's slightly different because the training area is actually here 11 12 miles it's only about
a 20 25 mile round trip to and from the airport so theoretically yes you could fly this aircraft from
a training airport to a training area especially here in Australia do a bit of practice Flight
Training and then get back to the airport without any issues but if there's one thing that I've
learned from my flying it's that you don't plan for the 95 of times when things go well you plan
for the five percent these are training airports after all so you plan for the fact that the towers
sometimes get so busy they don't let you into their airspace and that's happened to me on
many occasions in the past you plan for the times when there could be an aircraft that's disabled
on the runway which actually closes the airport and again that's happened to me in the past you
even planned for the times when the weather just doesn't do what it's forecast and those headwinds
are a lot stronger than you thought and it takes you maybe another five or ten minutes extra time
to get home from the training area and those are the times when words like contingency and reserves
become really important how much juice do you have to have before you land at the airport yeah
great question there's we need to keep 30 percent reserve on our indicated battery capacity that's
extrapolated from the way the framework of regulations is already we don't actually
fit particularly in some of the written framework now but we keep in line with the performance of a
rotax engine aircraft and the reserve requirements they require to operate safely and that gives us
plenty of time and options for holding patterns and an emergency go around if required so the
emergency Reserve that we're Landing with with which is 30 of the onboard energy is plenty to
safely integrate to a busy circuit pattern even when we do sometimes get forced into
a holding pattern people always ask me why can't you put solar panels on the week like technically
good uh however there'd be a weight penalty and again we're always weight Critical with Aviation
there'd also be a cost penalty at that cost to the aircraft and realistically the amount of energy it
reclaims is not making a viable cost attribution to the energy we're consuming we just don't
have the surface area on the aircraft to make a meaningful contribution yeah plus the weight and
cost penalty very glamorous charger out the window situation so what's that connected to at the other
end uh that is the flopping a box is the AC to DC converter and it's connected to three-phase
power outlet yeah okay yeah and then you just plug that in here yep and how long for a full
charge about 90 minutes yeah that's from 30 to 95 but we're at only 50 so it'd be less than an hour
so the perfect use case of electric Aviation now and and probably ongoing in the future
um one of its key niches will be in Ebony show pilot training even uh PPL and CPL consolidation
is still an excellent tool the modest range of an electric aircraft means they're not a great
long Transit device it's not a transport device but for recreational aviating and pilot training
absolutely stunning uh you get that up to one hour flight time which is a typical lesson anyway
and that's typical of a lot of flight schools they're usually doing 0.7.8 is is pretty normal
for training flights uh all those lights can be done electric so it massively reduces costs for
operators so we've been buzzing around in the air for like about 10 minutes now we're on the
ground for a bit as well we were kind of doing all the filming and everything but we're still on 75
Battery endurance left now that we're up at this nice height we're just cruising around doing some
mellow turns and in enjoying the space we're not fighting much wind up here at the moment either
yeah coming back to a really modest power setting of about 16 17 kilowatts to maintain strength the
display is handling anything else we could fly for another 42 minutes at uh this power level
there's only a handful of electric aircraft in the whole country yeah and there's only really a
handful in the world there's about there's less than 300 active electric aircraft on Earth so
this is an extremely unique experience and not your first in the electric well it's my second
time in an electric aircraft yeah but it's my first time at my home airport and it's really
quiet it's really nice up here it's a beautiful experience yeah yeah it is so smooth it is very
smooth because it's such a nice slippery low drag airframe you it feels good through the years not
disrupting a lot of air it's very smooth it's got a really nice directional feel now we're
just going to do a little bit of a turn here yeah slightly Steep and head back on down to four hour
I'd like to 20 29 Cleveland Show 2091 all stations getting a little
bit closer at the moment up to one zero knots from the left a little bit
ready Runway 35 that's halfway departure to airport
nice so we've come down well above minimum I love the world of technology and that world
is the reason why I'm lucky enough to be able to fly a fantastic aircraft like this one behind me I
built a career and a business out of the world of tech so when the innovation of Technology
combines with the world of Aviation to produce something like an electric aircraft I get really
excited for the future of Aviation but you as a future pilot or an existing pilot you are going
to have to decide if this is a viable aircraft for you to achieve your Aviation objectives or
whether it's just a really good prototype for what we might see in the future of Aviation
when you are looking at aircraft I think it's really important to understand the
technical specifications behind that aircraft as well which is why I think
you'll really like this video taking a bit more of a detailed dive into things
like the batteries and the power plant that actually makes this electric aircraft work