podcast interview with Neil Cloughley, CEO and founder of Faradair, a U.K.-based company developing a hybrid electric aircraft concept for sustainable regional flight. He shares his perspectives on the evolving landscape of air travel.The dynamics of travel are changing.
If we can put a major dent in that while not upsetting all the local people who are living in and around these regional airfields, and we can do it more sustainably — that was a light-bulb moment for me. I decided to form Faradair in 2014 with a specific goal of solving those three problems.
As we improve over time, we try and improve the metric, the economic model. We try and improve the opportunity. And we looked at this from the same perspective, saying, “OK, most regional turboprops are twin-engine aircraft or regional jets.
Consider the same 30,000-hour period with the electric motor. You don’t have to crack the case open, because you have that single moving part. It gets inspected at 30,000 hours, and you have no cost in that period. That’s putting a huge dent into that cost-of-operation model. If you don’t have a ground power connection — for example, you’re parked out on a stand on the apron — then you have a thing in the tail cone called an APU, an auxiliary power unit. It’s a mini jet turbine, and all it does is turn on and create electrical power. It’s a generator. That allows you to fire up your big engines. And once they are running, you can turn the APU off.
The Faradair BEHA is an electric airplane. But today, we use a jet fuel power generator, which could use sustainable aviation fuel to reduce the emissions footprint even further. And then, at a point in the future, we take that box out, put a different box in and the aircraft carries on as a full net-zero asset in the future. That’s our rationale. That’s our logic to how we’re approaching things.
We can take trucks off the road, because what would have been done by a great big articulated lorry can now potentially be distributed locally by a regional electric van from the local distribution hub. As long as you’ve got a 500-meter lot — and we’re saying 300 meters or less, for a short takeoff and landing and runway requirement, which is very short on all surfaces — then we can start using those regional environments for the movement of both people and of goods.
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