An electric plane with no moving parts has made its first flight

The military will be all over this too?

 

It doubles as a bug zapper but has problems in rain, fog, and clouds.

Bob Wilson

 

Envisioning a device a couple hundred feet above the passenger compartment, EMF is a problem.

 

Coming soon: Passenger with no brains books flight with no ticket on pilotless plane with no moving parts.

We perfected that first one decades ago, the rest just took a little while.

 

is this more efficient than battery operated propellors?

 

Article is in Nature and authors would be unlikely to refuse your request for a free copy. From free stuff we already know it has a 230-gram battery being drained at a rate of 620 watts.

Seems very likely that 2.45 kilograms of airplane including electric motor and propeller would have higher performance. But one ought not judge new technology by early prototypes.

Wright brothers' Flyer was a piece of crap, frankly, but that is not a very important statement.

 

With a flight distance of just 60 meters, that would be a 'no'. For now. But since this is still just v1.0, it is much too early to project future results.

I thought the wires should be running DC, so EMF ought not be an issue.

 

cool

 

No doubt 50 years ago people were goofing on the idea of using your finger to poke a piece of glass to read a magazine....or light and glass to transmit information....cooking with a radar set.....

"No Moving Parts" is non-trivial.....and worth tinkering with.

I WILL however......wait for more adventuresome souls to stow their luggage and ensure that their seat backs and tray tables are properly positioned.........a BUNCH of times...... before I fly in one.

 

Jet engines were notoriously good at spontaneous disassembly in early iterations. Have since become far more reliable than piston-based engines. Electric motors are even better, so much so that it seems surprising to read of anyone fearing flying that way.

But any such flights will be very brief until batteries get 10 times better*, or supplanted by another technology.

Propelling flight by pushing ions around won't replace turbines, propellers or ducted fans in any foreseeable future. One might imagine niche markets like stratospheric drones that substitute for satellites as electromagnetic relay stations. Or balloon exploration of Venus' upper atmosphere. One might imagine a lot of things. But perhaps not commercial aviation.

*A very vague term as used here.

 

<AHEM> Ozone.

In high school, I had a Tesla coil and took great delight in running arcs through the contents of my home chemistry kit. Then after a week or so, everyone seemed to develop a 'smoker's cough.' ... Ozone.

BTW, it smells fresh and will neutralize flatulence.

Bob Wilson

 

Ozone is also produced in photocopying rooms but be quick because your olfactory sensors quickly saturate and stop 'reporting'.

You can buy ozone generators that lack useful side function of producing photocopies. It is New-Age-y, but net biomedical benefits elude me.

==
Like for having a Tesla coil. No idea what you hoped to accomplish by zapping chemicals. Yet, some scientific insights (and many explosions) were preceded by "let's just see what happens"

 

Neutralize - OMG this could be 18th century chemistry or 21st century Goop website ad copy.

Ozone reacts with volatile compounds containing reduced* nitrogen or sulfur, that smell bad, converting them to oxidized* forms you cannot smell.

*both words used in elitist chemical sense. I don't apologize for that.

 

Pretty colors and sad to say, no explosions.

Bob Wilson