The Future of Aviation Is Steam Power

With viable electric aircraft for flight training still years away, what’s the real alternative fuel?

Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 09:44 AM ET

Verified

The fatal flaw standing in the way of effective use of electric-powered aircraft is very well understood and easily summed up in two words: energy density. [Photo: Air]

Key Takeaways:

The article characterizes electric aircraft development as an "investor-targeted fraud," similar to Theranos, claiming vast sums are squandered on concepts unlikely to deliver a usable product or investor returns due to a lack of critical scrutiny.
The primary obstacle for electric aircraft is the significantly lower energy density of current batteries compared to aviation fuel, severely limiting practical flight range, payload capacity, and endurance.
Practical deployment faces further challenges including battery performance degradation in extreme temperatures, excessively long recharge times, and the inability to efficiently power essential auxiliary systems like cabin heating.
Future technologies like solid-state batteries and hydrogen fuel cells offer insufficient improvements or are more than a decade away from being practical and cost-effective solutions for aviation.

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Attention, investors: I’ve decided to design and build an airplane powered entirely by steam engine. The target market for such an aircraft is, of course, flight schools and any pilots looking to avoid the high cost of avgas by chopping their own firewood. Exciting, huh? I’m just a few years from building my conforming prototype and looking for investors with an insatiable appetite for socially responsible nonsense and too polite to wonder out loud how long it takes the boiler to build up a head of steam.

Yeah, sticks of wood are a kind of fossil fuel, but they are unleaded, so my engine is definitely greener than yours, sort of. And yes, a steam engine can spin a propeller. Now, enough of your pesky questions.