this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Kinda, although an aircraft that operates exclusively in ground effect is explicitly not an aircraft as far as CAA is concerned, so they're outside their rules.
As far as recharge time is concerned, I assume they would be able to fast charge in half an hour or so, like any other electric vehicle.
Interesting!
For EVs to charge in 30 mins, you need some pretty beefy power infrastructure, it's not something available at residential houses. So if the battery capacity is a lot higher, you might not be able to get charged in that short amount of time. I'd expect power usage to be much higher for this plane than an EV, given it's a lot larger.
But now I think about it, it might not be that much larger. Having just read up on the concept of ground-effect I guess it may be more efficient than an EV, so perhaps you'd get away with batteries about twice as large as a long-range EV? Given the right setup you could probably still do an 80% charge in under an hour, so flying each way on a 2 hour schedule would be pretty doable. Run a second one to double the frequency.
They're operating from the CBD, so getting power to a charging station is relatively straightforward, and there are technologies available to recharge a vehicle quite fast, there is a standard being developed for trucks that will be over a megawatt of charging capacity. The east by West electric boat uses two chargers, from my understanding.
Haha can't believe I didn't think of that. I guess there is a battery pack in each wing, no reason not to plug in two chargers.
I also didn't consider that while EV hyper chargers pull a lot of power, the sites often have multiple, so a larger amount of power is available than what is going through one charger. Charging is probably not as big of a deal as I originally assumed.
Probably the only limitation is how they prevent the battery getting too hot during charging, but I'm pretty sure a lot of EVs already have active battery cooling so an extension of that is probably fine as well.
I don't know if they split the pack, or just have multiple chargers working side by side. I know Tesla have done similar when testing the Semi, just use multiple chargers at once.
The vehicle being charged already tells the charger what to do anyway.