• ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    12 days ago

    This article is idiotic.

    $5 cost. 25,000 pounds. BUT OVER WHAT FUCKING DISTANCE?

    $5 gets me 23 miles in my Delica. It gets me 100 miles on my motorcycle. It gets me 30 miles in my Porsche 914. But the article says nothing about distance.

    • Taldan@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      The “article” is just corporate propaganda. Literally.

      It’s just blindly regurgitating what the company’s press release said, with no journalistic input anywhere

      • ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 days ago

        Thanks. That’s what I figured. To date, I think only ultralight aircraft that would normally just be high altitude vehicles have viably used electricity for long distances.

    • fizzle@quokk.au
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      12 days ago

      Literally the first sentence:

      The first flight of the largest battery-electric aircraft to take to the skies lasted nearly half an hour while costing just $5 of electricity.

      Can your Porsche 914 fly for half an hour on $5 of fuel ?

          • sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip
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            12 days ago

            If humans can hang glide I don’t see why we couldn’t use those aerodynamic principles to try to glide a car hooked up to glider wings. It’s a real engineering challenge, but I feel like it would be possible to get some distance in a scenario where a car uses its wheels to go fast, drives off a cliff, deploys some kind of glider wings (or drive with the glider wings timed out to where the car gets to the cliff edge right at the point where the wings plus updraft provide enough lift) to get the vehicle to glide a substantial distance.

            Seems horribly dangerous but not impossible.

            • fizzle@quokk.au
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              11 days ago

              Is there a lift vs drag problem that precludes making a glider with such a heavy payload? It might not be as simple as bigger wings to support the heavier weight.

      • Taldan@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        I can fly a glider for half an hour for $0 in fuel or electricity

        In the right conditions I can fly a Cessna 150 for $5 in fuel. Just have to shop around the whole country for cheapest fuel and best flight cknditions. So exactly like they did

        These guys have the cheapest electricity in the country considering they advertise 1MW power output that apparently only ends up coating $5 over 27 minutes

        EVs make a lot of sense. This plane does not, nor does any currently proposed design for an all-electric plane

      • ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        12 days ago

        My 1975 was tuned for distance. When I drove it from Key Largo to Seattle, it did 35mpg average over the 3500 miles I drove. That car was lost in an accident, sadly.

        25 miles per gallon. 30 minutes would be 12.5 miles on half a gallon.

        My current one does about 25-30 mpg. It weighs 1950 pounds. So, yes. It can comfortably do half an hour on one gallon or so and have fuel left to get me to a refill.

        They have flat 4 two liter VW engines. Extremely efficient if tuned correctly. One top of that, there is a direct 1 to 1 drop-in electric kit for these. When my current engine dies, I have an electric kit I’ll put into it to make it an 914E.

        • fizzle@quokk.au
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          11 days ago

          Sorry boss. You missed my point. Cars can’t fly so it’s not really a comparison.

        • fizzle@quokk.au
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          11 days ago

          LOL.

          “ErRrR pOiNt tO Me iN yOuR…,.”

          Let me spell it out for you.

          The achievement being reported is that the plane performed a 30 minute flight. The implied details being that it took off, flew around in circles, and landed again at the same air port.

          The distance the plane traveled is not the achievement and it’s not relevant.

    • Mereo@piefed.ca
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      12 days ago

      The first flight of the largest battery-electric aircraft to take to the skies lasted nearly half an hour while costing just $5 of electricity. That aviation feat comes at a time when jet fuel prices have skyrocketed because of the US war with Iran.

    • Deebster@infosec.pub
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      12 days ago

      I’m guessing it mostly flew in circles, since it’s a test flight that happened “at Plattsburgh International Airport” instead of between two locations. 27 minute flight, whatever that’s worth.

      • Zarobi@aussie.zone
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        12 days ago

        $10 an hour still seems really good though right? I’m not sure how much Airlines pay currently for fuel though.

        Only article I could find was this: https://flyinginsight.com/2026/02/14/how-much-does-it-cost-to-fuel-an-airplane/

        On average, a 737 or A320 consumes between 2,500 and 3,000 litres of fuel per hour

        Take a typical two-hour flight, such as Amsterdam to Barcelona. The total fuel burn would be approximately 5,500 litres. At a reference price of $0.59 per litre, that translates to around $3,200 in fuel costs.

        So that’s $10 an hour down from $1600 an hour? Seems decent.

        • mierdabird@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          12 days ago

          The X1 demonstrator is more comparable in weight and power to an EMB 120 Brasilia, a 30-seat turboprop. Forum chatter seems to indicate those burn around 1000 lbs per hour, or $335/hr in fuel using the $0.59/liter price you mentioned.

          Dropping down to $10 is still pretty decent lol