EV experience so far

TT, no argument from me. You are right on the added time and expense of ground transportation. That has been the most significant issue for my wife and I to overcome when we got the airplane.

We have a variety of ground transport solutions. Day trips. Backpack gear and folding scooters. Many lodges and hotels will pick you up.

Im too cheap to rent a car at current rates, but Uber is fast and works pretty well.

Our plan for the Chinook is to leave it as a base of operations in an area we want to explore and fly there for a few days. We'll see how that works out.

Little rural airports aren't like big commercial ones. Often they are right where you want to go or close. Theres no traffic and few people, and they're part of the aviation community. We all help each other with repairs, recommendations, rides into town. Theres often courtesy cars you can borrow if you can get them started.

But the real question is why speed and travel time are even a consideration for retired ppl. In our case it's because we keep animals so can't be away from home for more than a few days. That meant that after we bought the little farm when we still had the rpod we never went anywhere. It took too long to get to any destination we were interested in.

Now we go to the beach for the day if we want to. Land and walk over the dune from the airstrip. It's life changing in a way. Something the math behind the travel time misses completely.

Aviation is certainly not for everyone. It's expensive, weather dependent, there's lots of time spent on maintenance, and theres all that pricey fossil fuel. You have to fly a lot or your skills atrophy and that's dangerous. But when it works it's like having a magic carpet, not to mention being the most fun you can have out of the bedroom....

Yep, I thought about a LongEZ when I decided to get back into flying. They have amazing numbers, I don't think anything has beaten it even now. Burt Rutan ruled in efficient design.

But my wife vetoed the tandem seating, which is a big part of what gets it that fantastic low CdA. Plus the useful load isn't really adequate for 2 up, full tanks and some gear. The useful load on the RV is 650 so full tanks + 2 ppl + 100 lbs of stuff. I do wish it carried another 10 gallons though. 3 hours plus reserve is a bit short especially for IFR work.

Nope, she wouldn't. She crossed the Atlantic to attend US climate conferences on sailboats both ways. Carbon neutral travel, it was claimed.

But they were high dollar racing yachts which consume lots of resources to build. The crossings each took about 2 weeks. She could have made the crossings in some old beat up cruising sailboat but it would have taken much longer, so in her own way she too chose speed over efficiency. Or she could have just stayed home and attended virtually.

Bottom line is there ain't no free lunch in the world of physics, and all human activities have their upsides and downsides. What we can do is what makes sense personally at any given point.

So, solar and an EV daily driver for me. I'm giving up absolutely nothing and saving money too boot.

But the RV and plane will continue to burn gas, for now.

Not criticizing Greta BTW, she's ok in my book. It's the work of the young to push limits as in every generation. Generally we end up somewhere between doing nothing and throwing out everything, which is as it should be.

Originally posted by hogone that plane sounds pretty environmentally friendly.....kinda like these activist who preach global warming then jetsetting all over the world.  jon

Actually small airplanes can be extremely energy efficient. Far more efficient than cars. I'll explain but it will take a teeny weeny bit of basic physics.

There will be a quiz at the end (not) so pay attention...

As an example, my plane is over 3x more efficient than my Prius is. How is that? Because of much lower air drag. Drag accounts for most of a cars energy use at highway speed and practically all of an airplanes'.

Drag is measured in square feet of equivalent frontal area (aka CdA), meaning the area of a flat plate that would create the same amount of drag if you pushed it through the air.

The CdA of my Prius is 6.2 square feet. It's about the lowest drag car on the road. In comparison an rpod's CdA is around 30 square feet.

My airplane's CdA is 2.3 square feet, 37% of the Prius and less than 10% of an rpod's. Like a 1x2 ft piece of plywood vs a 4x8 sheet for the rpod and a 2x3 piece for the Prius.

How did the plane designer manage that?   Its waaay more cramped in there than in any car. Plus great attention to detail of every little thing on the plane that creates drag.

And the plane has another big advantage over the Prius. I can fly at around 8000 feet where the air density is only about 77% of sea level. So overall drag effects my plane only around 29% of it's effect on my Prius.

So now that we have that tidbit on drag let's move on to how drag and efficiency are affected by speed.

My plane travels at about 195 mph, compared to the Prius travelling 65 mph. So almost exactly 3x faster (not counting the additional benefit of getting to go point to point rather that having to follow roads).

The problem with going fast is that drag goes up with the 3rd power of speed. The plane is going 3x the speed so that would require 27x the power the Prius does if it had the same CdA and flew at sea level. But since it has 29% of the drag at altitude it "only" needs about 8x the power to overcome drag.


8x the power still sounds terrible but it's only about 2.7x the energy. That's bc energy is power x time and I'm getting there in 1/3 the time.

But I still do have to have an engine with enough power to supply 8x the continuous power of my Prius. That turns out to be a 180 HP engine running at 75% (135 HP) burning 10 gallons of gas per hour, compared to the Prius running at about 17 HP burning around 1.3 gallons per hour.

Bottom line is that even though the plane is more than 3x as efficient, it still only gets about 20 mpg vs the Prius getting 50 mpg, because of the 3x speed difference. Try finding a 200 mph supercar that gets 20 mpg.

So next question is, why don't I just take my time and drive the Prius? To which I answer, why don't you just take your time and walk or ride a bike rather than drive?

The whole point of having motor vehicles is to get where youre going before you die of old age. I got the smallest most efficient plane I could afford that got me the speed and convenience I wanted.

Which leads back to the complaint about so called environmentally conscious VIPs burning up fuel in jets blasting around the planet.

In their defense, those folks' work requires them to travel a lot, and not at driving speeds. I'm sure those guys do virtual meetings when they can, but sometimes there's no substitute for being face to face.

My job required a lot of commercial air travel too. I hated it. The rigamarole at the big airport terminals ofen takes longer than the flight. I won't get on a commercial flight now that I'm retired unless its a dire emergency.

If you fly commercial on your necessary travels then youre actually being quite energy conscious. Commercial jets get about 100 mpg per passenger mile, the same as my Prius and 2.5x what my plane gets, assuming I'm carrying a passenger in each. Amazing considering the jets speed is about 8 or 9x a car's (that's 500-600x the drag power requirement). Jamming hundreds of folks in a long streamlined aluminum tube at 40,000 feet with giant high bypass kerosene burning turbofans does wonders for efficiency.

Bizjets get around 15 to 25 passenger miles per gallon if you fill the seats. Not bad considering the speed but nothing close to commercial jets or efficient cars, or my plane. and I doubt those seats are getting filled very often.

OTOH a bizjet can be a whole lot faster and more convenient door to door than a commercial jet. At the end of the day we all choose to consume energy in transportation because of speed and convenience. Otherwise we could just walk, ride a bike, or sail a boat.

So while I agree that environmentalists who fly in bizjets should suck it up and fly commercial instead, I can certainly sympathize with their not so great choices. We all do it to one degree or another.

Look at us RV folks. A couple in an RV are getting around 15-25 passenger miles per gallon, same as a full bizjet. We could backpack but we choose speed and convenience instead.

that plane sounds pretty environmentally friendly.....kinda like these activist who preach global warming then jetsetting all over the world.  jon