SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

Much was made of the new electric glider option from Pipistrel - the company which won the last PAV challenge - for instance, described by CNET in visionary terms:

The first batch of two-seater aircraft to fly on electricity rather than fossil fuels could reach more than a dozen buyers by year's end... that's a step closer to a gridlock-free future when relatively ordinary folks will hop to work in small, carbon-neutral planes... [the] Taurus Electro can climb to 6,000 feet after taking off on a 30-kilowatt motor. Recharging the glider's lithium-polymer battery is meant to take about as long as powering a cell phone. Depending upon the weather and skills of the pilot, the glider can travel 1,000 miles in a day.

Much has also been made lately of Boeing's long-delayed but ultimately successful effort to prove that a motor-glider airframe can fly straight and level with one person aboard - though not climb - driven by hydrogen fuel cells alone.

It's perfectly true, of course, that adding a battery to the fuel cell can give you climb power, much as the battery or ultracapacitor in a fuel-cell car allows it to get up hills and overtake. The San Francisco conference was full of people planning electric/hybrid planes and gliders of one kind or another. CNET even tell us that there might soon be "a light aircraft that would fly on a battery at 15 kilowatts per hour" - though we'd hazard a guess that the manufacturer didn't actually say that.

The trouble with this is that all you get is a somewhat worsened motor glider. This kind of gear offers no serious potential to be roadworthy, and very little chance of powering or perhaps even lifting the super-autopilot systems and actuators that a flying car would need. Most of these planned aircraft would be doing well just to get into the air and stay there.

Ultimately the engineering realities of practical aircraft are well understood. Flying cars are difficult enough to achieve using nice energy-dense fossil fuel powerplants - indeed the problems are sufficient to have kept the idea totally marginal to date, though we continue to wish we had enough money to own a Terrafugia Transition. But a green flying car, with its power-to-weight ratio slashed - that's not just marginal, that's outright silly.

Let the road car industry work on green tech for goodness' sake, people. They're the ones who aren't bound hand and foot by aviation's strict safety standards; they're the ones who have a comparatively easy technical feat to achieve, with the issue of weight so much less pressing. Frankly, the motor industry are the ones - compared to aircraft in general, let alone general aviation - causing the pollution and carbon emissions, the ones wasting expensive, imported crude oil as though it was going out of fashion.

Let's not hang another millstone round the flying car's neck before it's even born. Let's get it working first, or at least get the roadable light aircraft working first - and make it green later, when doing so would actually matter. ®

Bootnote

Caveat: As the CAFE people point out, there's always the chance of something surprising out of left field. Such as miracle ultracapacitors, able to store 100 times more power than batteries of the same weight - and deliver it as fast as you like. As it might be, when spinning electric ducted fans at maximum thrust for a quiet, vertical driveway takeoff before moving to a less power-hungry forward flight mode... it's a lovely dream, anyway. We wouldn't mention it, but Lockheed seems to be getting caught up in the excitement to some degree.

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery