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by leoedin 1475 days ago
That's all very well, as long as there's no common modes of failure. Redundancy can be a means to achieve reliability, but not always. Imagine the cause of failure is a bug which kicks in at a specific time of day, or an integer overflow which happens after a certain amount of uptime, or all the motor drivers are susceptible to a specific RF frequency. It doesn't matter how many motors you have if they're all susceptible to the same failure mode.
2 comments

> integer overflow which happens after a certain amount of uptime

It’s not just electric powered planes that have to worry about such things… this was an issue for the Boeing 777 Dreamliner too. If it was powered on for longer than 248 days, it could lose all electrical power due to an overflow in the generator.

https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-01-boeing-787-dreamliner-so...

I’m not saying it isn’t a concern, but rather it is a concern for all planes (and vehicles for that matter). Many commercial passenger planes are now fly by wire. If you lose electrical power, you’ll also lose control. So, while we’re talking about purely electric planes, the problems are universal.

But many planes can glide to a certain degree.

This thing would just fall or glide with zero pilot control. No control surfaces.

That's what certification is there for, isn't it?