Renewable Revolution

Very well put AG.

Don't get me wrong, sign me up for one of these 4th Reichstag's windup plastic run-abouts, there cool as ****.

I'm seasoned, AG's seasoned. We both possess a ticket to ride. I'm not current at this point in time. 30 days of
review in reg's, weather, sim time, left seat with an instructor & whaa-la I'm a Legal Eagle again. Oh, yeah & the medical.  :icon_mrgreen:

SOOOOOO, it's complicated & for "1st timers" that's a BIG hurdle.
The point is, the ego is being tickled & the brain is in the caboose. Eye candy with big consequences.
If you'll notice in the vid, no one was aboard. That was a big boy toy drone test flight. These cats haven't even
received GOOBERmint approval to have a test pilot flight yet.

I'll take a Cherokee 6, an attractive female hostage, leave Lauderdale airspace & head to little Guana Cay for lunch.  

  

So, you've flown a six? I put quite a few hours into those birds way back when. Here's a short war story from my air taxi rat days:

It was the San Juan to Vieques flight in a 260 hp Cherokee six sometime in 1969. The folks that lived in Vieques would fly to San Juan and buy stuff to take back to their island (half of it - the other half was routinely being blown to smithereens as a bomb fun and games place for the Navy and Marines - it looked like the moon  ).

Vieques islanders were  sort of country bumpkins to the average cosmopolitan San Juan dweller. Country folks are very practical and aren't real particular about appearances.  On this particular flight I had some people carrying sacks of potatoes (I eyed these carefully when I did my weight and balance  ) and a lady that had some live and healthy (and noisy) chickens. I can't imagine why, but country folks also smell a bit ripe on a hot day in the tropics... Perhaps it's fear of flying that makes them perspire a bit more than normal, but I was always glad for my tiny flip down pilot seat window... 

Well we, took off and encountered a lot of wind noise. I called the tower at the international airport 5 miles east of my air taxi base (Isla Grande airport) and asked for a touch and go, which they approved. It seems the latch over the door had not sealed the door properly.  I had a friend riding in the right seat (he wasn't a pilot) and I asked him to see if he could force the door open a bit and then try to pull it closed again (we are in flight approaching the international airport at this time). He did that (sound of torrent of air going by at 150 mph) and the lady with the chickens screamed. The chickens weren't too happy about that either. 

It didn't work. So, we landed, slowed down and did that again until we got that silly latch to catch right. Without ever coming to a stop, we just took off again and flew east over the north coast of Puerto Rico and then southeast to the island of Vieques.

The landing was "routine" but I should explain to you what that entailed at Vieques. They have a weird runway there.  The runway, when you are landing going east (which is almost always) is much higher than the other end. To further complicate matters, the runway elevation goes UP after the threshold before it starts to go DOWN.

All that is a great advantage when you are taking off but a bit tricky when you are landing. AZ, you obviously know about ground effect and low wing aircraft fun and games. A runway sloping down hill is a ground effect nightmare that can lead you to overrun the runway if you don't watch it!

I don't know if you have ever flown a FULLY LOADED TO THE GILLS Cherokee six. They are very squirrelly on landing. You know that the normal drill is to round out and then flare out, right? Well that would result in way to much FLOAT at Vieques.

So, I came up with a trick to deal with that.    I would establish approach speed at a fixed pitch attitude. That's right, I would NOT flare. I would bring her over the threshold watching for the slight runway rise just before the downhill part started WITH MY HAND ON THE FLAP HANDLE (I had full flaps at this time, of course  ). As I reached the bump I would lower the flaps to touch the main wheels without any pitch change and remove all flaps and hit the toe brakes. It worked like a charm. The people, potatoes and chickens all arrived safely. 

I taught a few other pilots to do that and they said, HEY, it works! Flaps are just supposed to be there to steepen the glide path on approach when you apply them, not when you remove them, so we all agreed the FAA would not understand our cool trick and that we would never tell the feds about it.

Getting back to the Electric Airplane subject, most people are not aware that aircraft internal combustion engines mostly fail when you are at full power, which happens to be when you are taking off and need that engine the most. Electric motors, can fail at any time. But when they do, it's almost always temperature related. Which means they will rarely fail on take off because they are fresh! For large EV flying machines, having a bunch of motors will make them far more reliable than internal combustion or even jet engines (less moving parts to fail).

I can imagine the FAA coming up with some BULLSHIT about having to learn engine motor out procedure for 30 different configurations on an Electric bird with 30 motors just to keep anybody from ever being able to check out in it. That's what they do.