Certainly the plan for a lot of the high duty cycle e-VTOLs. However, there's a lot of cash tied up in batteries and if your duty cycle can get away with not doing it, you're*probably* better off going for fast charging given how advanced car tech has become on that front. Example - if you can afford 20min between sorties you could probably take on 55ish kWh of juice if you're matching car speeds. Given that Pipistrel's battery is only 25ish kWh capacity in the first place (noting charging speeds won't be optimised against that pack size) you can see how you might skip the swap and go for a charge instead.

if the batteries catch fire through thermal runaway, there is only one boldface drill. Try hard to get out. Really hard. I do hope a BRS will not be used to mitigate away occupant parachutes.

Mostly batteries are not removable as they're built in to wing and nose spaces in most electric designs at this scale. There may be requirements around thermal cycling and the number of fast charges that can be carried out over the life of the battery.

If you wanted removable batteries you'd put them in pods or panniers, not within the aircraft.

Battery packs
 

Having seen a small Li Ion pack on fire I'd like an electric aircraft to have jettison able batteries - so a drop tank style thing to get it away from you whilst maintaining CG.

The fires are ferocious -

"We'll buy 40 if they have 'easy-change' batteries as standard.", ought to do the trick.

CG

I've been wondering about this too, since the Ethiopian 787s with battery fires damaging the fuselage and more recently fires on electric cars. As for the e-bikes and scooters which are burning down houses ...

More likely we'll pay extra to have them made non-removable if normal MoD procurement processes are followed.......

From the film ‘Planes’ by the ‘Pixar’ design studios ?

That’s what it looks like to me….

Electric cars are significantly less of a fire risk than combustion or hybrid vehicles. About 61x less.likely to catch fire

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour..._MswQqe8pU_WGu

Are electric car fires really that common? - The Car Expert

But when they do catch fire.....

Of course AVGAS burns pretty well too! As this chap found out when his light aircraft in Florida caught fire in flight.



https://www.ladbible.com/community/i...-body-20210517

I'd like to know where all this electricity is going to come from? The UK doesn't have energy security now, and no realistic, believable plan to create it. There is just this lemming-like mentality that expects everyone will buy electric cars (and where is the infrastructure, never mind the energy, for them?), and other assorted green nonsense, when as it is, there is barely enough electricity generation to cover lighting, computers, phones, tablets, the millions of other battery powered items, the Cloud, Bitcoin, blah-flipping-blah.

This battery powered utopia is pie-in-the-sky, and the most likely eventual outcome is a population scavenging around in the dirt for food scaps, surrounded by toxic piles of expensive, unuseable electronic junk. And all because there isnt enough electricty generation to run, or charge, any of it, never mind manufacture anything vaguely useful. You'll have to harness your children to a plough just to attempt growing a few vegetables. 🙄

An airfield could be a giant solar panel farm, of course. Might discourage the birds too...

Let me help you with that....

National Grid FAQ

But if you talk to people who actually work for National Greed and are responsible for patching up the creaking electricity generating and supply system you will discover it is not the sunlit uplands described in the official FAQs at all.

A cold, cloudless winter night followed by a windless day (standard high pressure scenario) means no wind power and very little solar - the UK hasn't invested in tidal power so where in fact is the electricity going to come from?

When you factor in how few charging points there are and how many houses have only on-street parking, there is nothing like the required infrastructure in UK to support full EV ownership at all.

The demand would stay low simply because there aren't enough charging points.

Isn't there a thread on JB where you can park the EV debate and we can get back to talking about aeroplanes?

No one has ever laid out how your can charge all the vehicles owned by people in a multi storey block of flats for example

This. Every argument you're going to have here has been had on jet blast a thousand times.

I’d hate to think what jettisoning a battery pack would do to the C of G and along with the chute operation, I also wouldn’t fancy a burning Li Ion battery dropping out of the sky.