Originally Posted by
Machdiamond
What percentage of Cape Air routes are under 100 miles? How do you think they will like near zero maintenance cost on the propulsion system and cheap electric recharge at a small fraction of the fuel cost? Isn't that also going to make more routes commercially viable?
What about the competitiveness of an emissions free aircraft servicing cities that are progressively banning internal combustion engine cars (mostly in Europe for now)? Once such an aircraft becomes available, are those cities going to expand that mandate to airplanes of that size?
All-electric small regional aircraft is a small aircraft / small distances marke, and being all-electric changes the economics of the operations quite a bit.
For longer ranges, there is hybrid propulsion. Up to 600 nm range maybe. Further than that the fuel saving gets cancelled out by the weight of the system, with today's battery energy density. So it will be a long while before we see all-electric Boeings and Airbus.
I suspect the average route for Cape Air is about 100 miles. The aircraft of course needs to have the range to fly that 100 miles plus power to divert to another airport and maintain reserves. Cape Air has purchased a new aircraft for the next 20 years the Tecnam P2012 traveler. The business case for Tecnam to design and build the traveler was based on a expected demand for 11,000 aircraft in its class.