Battery Powered Plane Gets Some Daylight Under Its Wings
Our friends at Sonex Aircraft tell ANN that their E-Flight
Initiative proof-of-concept electric-powered Waiex aircraft
achieved its first flight Friday, at Wittman Regional Airport in
Oshkosh, WI.
Piloted by Sonex Founder and E-Flight team leader John Monnett,
N270DC made a short hop on runway 27, intended to be a conservative
non-pattern flight to break ground-effect and analyze in-flight
system performance as the next step in testing. This short flight
punctuates four years of development by the E-Flight design team in
engineering, building and testing one of the most advanced electric
flight packages ever conceived.
"We are very proud of this achievement. The core design team of
Pete Buck, Andrew Pearce, John Monnett, and myself would like to
thank our staff, families, business partners, and friends in all of
their help and understanding through this incredibly challenging
project." Said Jeremy Monnett, CEO and General Manager of Sonex
Aircraft. "We have a flight envelope expansion plan and will be
working on this in the coming weeks and months. We have also
already started our motor v4.0 design and motor controller v12.0 to
be integrated on N270DC. Many more great things to come on this
project!"
"Every first flight of a new aircraft or powerplant design is an
interesting experience," said John Monnett, "but with N270DC more
than any other aircraft we've built, I experienced just a glimpse
of what the Wright Brothers must have felt like flying an unproven
system for the first time. The flight was uneventful, as expected,
but it represents a huge emotional victory for our team to check
this item off the list."
Data from today's flight will be carefully analyzed by the
design team and compared to high power ground run data to determine
any necessary firmware adjustments before proceeding to full
traffic pattern and extended-duration test flights. N270DC is a
standard Waiex kit aircraft modified with the installation of
proprietary E-Flight electric power components: The E-Flight 54kw
brushless DC electric motor, E-Flight electronic motor controller,
a 14.5kw-hr lithium polymer battery system, the E-Flight battery
management system, and E-Flight cockpit instrumentation and
controls.
The E-Flight Initiative electric flight project was first
announced to the public at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2007, and many
major milestones have been reported in the years to follow as the
E-Flight design team worked on this exceedingly challenging
project, designing and testing electric power components at the
leading-edge of technology. There are many technical obstacles that
the team has had to overcome along the way, learning valuable
lessons about the technology at each step.
ANN's Daily Aero-Term (05.10.24): Takeoff Roll
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