!934? For the last 150 years the comments from sellers of electric vehicles has been: “As soon as battery technology improves…” Day-to-day aviation has driven by fuels, not electrons. There is a niche for electric airplanes in GA just as there is a niche for hot air balloons, gyro-copters, Ultralights, and other short range personal craft.
The more I look at the Maxwell, the more dangerous it looks if there is a partial power outage or especially if there is a total outage. Things can go wrong really fast in that design and I hope no one gets hurt.
In 1934, there were knowledgeable people that, based on the technology they saw in front of them, came to the conclusion that jet propulsion will never be practical/efficient/safe/etc. Quite obviously they were very much on the wrong side of history, and jet propulsion completely revolutionized aviation.
You’re looking at the technology you see in front of you and are concluding that electric propulsion will never be practical/efficient/safe/etc exactly the same way that the Under-Secretary of State for Air did with jet propulsion in 1934. So you’re dismissing it.
The technology definitely has potential from an engineering standpoint, and that’s proven by the number of organizations (public and private sector) that are researching and experimenting with it. Corporations don’t throw research money at a concept unless they think it’s going to produce something useful.
Are there potential safety issues in the design of this aircraft? Yeah there are. There are on literally every aircraft design ever conceived. Risks are managed. Testing is done. Backups are put in place. Maintenance and inspection requirements are set. Procedures are developed. And in the end, before a product makes it to market, there’s an assessment that it is “safe enough” in the form of certification. These days, they almost always get it right, and where they don’t get it right, they incrementally improve what’s there.
I think you would be well served to spend some time marveling at the LyConTax under your cowling and how many moving parts manufactured and assembled by an imperfect human being thrash around with varying tolerances under high cyclical stresses with vast thermal gradients for thousands of hours on end to produce a very precarious chemical balance controlled by thousands of lines of code (if you have a FADEC) or barely controlled at all (if you don’t) to result in thousands of explosions per minute in order to convert dead dinosaurs into predictable amounts of thrust. The complexity is immense. There are a huge number of opportunities for things to go instantly wrong there, and thousands upon thousands of people have died when they have gone wrong. But since you’ve been accepting all those risks for years without thinking about it and you don’t have much of a choice because there is currently no alternative, so those risks become invisible to you, or “just the way it is”. When something new comes up and you do try to assess the risks, it automatically looks riskier because it’s not as familiar as the 4000+ explosions per minute you’re used to.
I have no doubt that NASA and Scaled Composites have evaluated and approached the risks of this system carefully and incrementally, and will continue to do so as flight testers have done for decades. I guarantee they’ve thought of partial or complete power failures. Your inability to comprehend and compare the risks associated with flying this aircraft is not an indication of NASA’s.
In 1934, after just 2 years of development, knowledgeable people came to the conclusion that jet propulsion will never be useful/practical in warplanes in the coming war. They were 100% CORRECT.
In 2019, after 85 years of further military propulsion development, knowledgeable people don’t conclude that electric power will be useful/practice for the next generation fighter. …and the Maxwell is still using good-old motor/air-screw/combinations to fly.
