Electric airplanes currently can give 15 or 20 minutes of intense aerobatics, or about an hour of more sedate cruising.\u00a0 What if you had a lovely little airplane that invited flinging it about the sky, but you still wanted to visit distant places?\u00a0 In 2005, Mike Friend owned a Silence Twister, a Spitfire-like single-seater registered as N787M, a nod to Mike\u2019s employer, Boeing. \u00a0He thought about making it a hybrid craft.<\/p>\n
An early effort around 2010 by a German company to electrify the Twister did not produce a surge of orders, and Mike presented a 2011 symposium feature on making a hybrid out of the Twister to reduce its fuel burn while retaining its frisky character.\u00a0 That approach would have used a pod under the belly of the Twister, making it look like a fighter with an auxiliary fuel tank.\u00a0 Aerobatics combined with long-range seemed like a potential winner.<\/p>\n
Cute as it was, the concept was still a single-seat aircraft \u2013 and many of us enjoy taking our friends and family for flights.\u00a0 The major barrier to making a pure electric craft is still, after a decade of breathless announcements of great progress, the battery.\u00a0 Mike Friend explains,\u201d I have been involved in the design of electric airplanes since 2001, when I first proposed that Boeing build a fuel cell demonstrator aircraft powered by a hybrid electric power plant. 15 years ago, I was assured that within ten years the power density of batteries (and the cost of fuel cells, but that is another story\u2026) would improve to the point where electric flight could become practical. Here we are 15 years later, and the energy density of batteries that you and I can go out and purchase is only slightly better than it was at the turn of the century. So what do we do about this?\u201d<\/p>\n