![]() Eventually, you stop having to make conversions, but as a novice, I still multiply kilowatts by 4/3 to get back to familiar territory. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts and equals 1 1/3 horsepower. The watt is a unit in the metric system-our light bulbs have been metricated all along-and is the power of one volt at a current of one ampere. The fuel of electric airplanes is kilowatts. Well, I thought, that was fun-except for the end. Luckily, the landing gear is pretty stout-DeVault says that Beierle, the airplane’s designer, demonstrates it by veering around on rough ground like an SUV in a TV ad. After I collide with the runway, an inept dance on the heel brakes ensues. Forgetting I’m not supposed to stall it on, I let the plane develop too much of a sink rate and then find I don’t have the elevator authority to arrest it. After 40 minutes in the air, I am there and do. DeVault told me to come back when I’m around 30 percent of charge. But at least in the electric airplane you know precisely, to two decimal places, where you stand there’s none of that “Does the width of the needle count?” feeling. Flying an electric airplane is like flying a conventional airplane when you’re down to the last hour’s fuel. Search for “Gabriel DeVault electric airplane” on YouTube.)Įlectric cars added the phrase “range anxiety” to our vocabulary. (DeVault has posted a bunch of in-flight videos that give a good idea of it. You imagine an electric motor will be practically silent, and maybe it is, but the propeller, chopping its way through the disturbed wake of the pod and wing, isn’t. There is no vibration, but the airplane is noisier than I expected. It’s a beautiful day, the scenery is lovely, Santa Cruz serenely puffs cannabis in the middle distance. I climb straight out to 1,000 feet and turn northward along the coastline of Monterey Bay in California. He’s right the angle of climb is impressive, as is the deck angle, and I’m not even using full power. I retain the first of these warnings and forget the second. “Ultralight taking Runway 20 for takeoff, straight-out departure,” I report, with a persistent feeling that something is missing.ĭeVault has told me that the full-power climb is unexpectedly steep, and the airplane is somewhat nose-heavy, and so, when landing, I should fly it on rather than attempt to stall it on. Not only that-the airplane, being an ultralight and beneath the notice of the FAA, has no N number. Having arrived at the runway, I am briefly frustrated by the lack of anything to do before takeoff. The flight instruments are the minimum required and conventional the powerplant instruments, on the other hand, consist of digital displays showing how much power you have left, how fast you’re using it, and how hot various parts of the system are. It can silently spring to life at an inadvertent bump of the throttle. You have to be careful of people standing around because when the master switch (or “kill switch”) is on, the motor is on as well, even when the propeller is not moving. One of them is, on the ground, if you pull the throttle-well, power lever-all the way back, the prop stops. This is the first electric airplane I’ve been in, and I’m learning its peculiarities. The airplane is a pod-and-boom single-seat ultralight converted by Mark Beierle and Gabriel DeVault to electric power using components from a Zero electric motorcycle. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the shadow of the prop stop. ![]() I give a little burst of power, then pull the throttle lever back to idle. ![]() ![]() As I taxi out, a crisp shadow follows on the taxiway beside me. ![]()
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