Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements
I recently had a pie-in-the-sky business idea and I would love for someone who knows more about the industry why it will definitely fail. I assume it's unworkable for a lot of reasons, but it is just plausible enough to be a fun idea for a sci-fi novel.Get a fleet of 2-4 seater unpowered glider planes [1]Get a bunch of rural properties spaced ~100km apart.Put little glider landing and launch strips on each property. Use a powerful electric winch to launch the gliders.Develop software that can fly the planes autonomously from strip to strip (I assume this is the really hard part, but I am under the impression that autonomous flying is a much easier problem than autonomous driving?).You now have the ability to shuttle passengers around your network of airstrips at ~200kph for the cost of electricity used by your winches and maintenance of the glider fleet.My thought is that the electricity of the winches is pretty minimal and could be served with some locally installed solar panels and batteries, and the maintenance is super low since the gliders don't have many moving parts onboard.The main use-case would be city-to-city short hops that are currently poorly served by rail. It's far easier to build a string of small airstrips than a whole rail corridor.This idea came to me when thinking about SpaceX's recent plans to catch their Starship boosters out of the air instead of having landing gear on them. The reasoning is that you can have essentially unlimited mass for ground support equipment, but mass on the booster is precious. So you offload the landing gear from the booster to the ground support equipment, even if it's big and complicated. This idea is like electric aircraft, but you've offloaded the propulsion and batteries to the ground support equipment.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(sailplane)