I missed this one in the news, back in early October:
NASA Awards $1.35 Million For Efficient Flight
A Slovenian company, Pipistrel, designed, built and flew an electric aircraft and won a bucket of money from NASA. The Taurus G4 is a Rutan-esque double-fuselage design modeled on sailplanes, featuring a two-prop engine pod on the centerline. It was able to fly 200 miles at 107 MPH, and achieve the equivalent of 403 “passenger miles per gallon.”
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Getting this sort of performance out of an electric *car* would be one hell of an achievement. If this sort of aircraft could be made commercially available at a reasonable price, it could revolutionize air travel by making the operational cost of private aviation almost trivially cheap (at six bucks per av-gas gallon, the Taurus G4 could carry a passenger 2,000 miles for about thirty bucks. Sure, it’d take 20 hours to go that 2,000 miles, but it’s faster than a train or a car by a wide margin. Range seems to be about 300 miles, by which point it would have to land and recharge. That is of course the weak point… recharging could take hours, unless the battery pack can be simply and quickly swapped out.
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Of course, if this or a similarly-performing aircraft *can* be made safely and cost effectively… expect the FAA to do whatever it can to prevent wide adoption. The last the the FAA wants is for private air travel to become more popular in the US…