Fantastic Skydiving vehicle.. If you can get 9 people (+ gear) 12'000ft on a 30 minutes flight, then you can glide all the way down for the next load. at $6 worth of fuel it would be a game changer.
In theory yes. In practice the amount of regained energy would probably be negligible and not worth the loss of positive flight control it would entail.
The article isn't totally clear on this point, but I wonder if the $6 included the costs for taxiing and taking off, or just the 30 minutes in the air?
“In airline service, operators would need to recharge the batteries between flights, with charging times correlating closely to flight times, says Ganzarski. That means the batteries would need about 30-40min of charging following a 30min flight. The weight of the batteries makes swapping spent cells for fresh cells unfeasible between flights, he says.”
Yeah i wasnt very clear. Drop zones keep those planes moving all day long. It could be done but the substantially increased amount of time spent ’refueling’ means you’d either need more planes or just accept fewer customers.
What I suspect would kill this for sky diving is recharge time. Even if fuel expenses go to zero, it's not going to be viable if it has to recharge for several hours after every hop.
A lot of the expenses in flying arise out of regulatory requirements. Want to carry passengers? Pilot needs a license that take several hundred hours minimum to obtain. Want to use a part in an airplane? Getting it through the FAA certificating process will inflate its cost by several multiples. Want to operate an aircraft? You need to get it inspected every $fixnum number of hours of operation by a mechanic who in turn has to do everything the 'certified' way and is himself certified by the FAA.
It's these costs, not fuel costs, that account for a big percentage of the cost of flying. There's no meaningful way to reduce the cost of flying without reducing them. Perhaps electrics will incur much lower costs in maintenance, reducing costs somehow.
I had the oppurtunity to spend an hour in a T-6 trainer a number of years ago. This was the primary trainer used by Air Force in WW2. Big radial engine. At full throttle (which we were mostly at, as we were doing acrobatics), that eats through fuel at about 40 gallons/hr. That's $200/hr just in gas, for a plane that carriers 2 people and isn't really all that powerful.