[dredmorbius]

I'd like to see what a typical widebody's fuel drain over time is, but suspect a large share is the takeoff-and-climb portion of flight.

A winged battery which could drop away at ~FL20--30 or so and return to either the origin field or some secondary collection point might be all you need, rather than tossing batteries out the cargo bay throughout the flight.

I also suspect that most EV aviation will be shorter haul such that a large set of drops wouldn't be necessary.

[Galxeagle]

You piqued my interest enough to go hunting - this StackExchange[1] question estimates ~19% of fuel is spent on initial climb-out to 30k feet for a 737-800 on a 5-hour LA->JFK flight.

Without doing hard calculations, it intuitively feels pretty marginal potential flight weight savings for the operational complexity it would add

[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/47262/how-much-...

[dredmorbius]

Thanks for that!

Worth noting that EV aircraft flight segments are likely far shorter (100--500 km, maybe at a stretch 1,000 km, not the ~5,000 km of JFK->LAX), and cruise much slower (~100--300 knots, say), so climb-out would be a proportionately larger share of the energy budget.

And ditching 20% of your energy storage mass immediately on attaining altitude would still be a considerable savings for the remainder of the flight as that mass doesn't need to be kept aloft.

EV aviation (and aviation itself) is a battle of thin percentages. EV aviation itself has relied strongly on materials advances (advanced fibre composites), and reducing crew (ultimately: autonomous piloting). The need for cabin crew for safety reasons remains, and would be a significant hurdle. The extent to which non-revenue occupants and payload can be minimised likely plays a huge role in any eventual success. A 19% reduction is nothing to be sneezed at, if it can be achieved without significant other compromise.

[dadadad100]

Thunderbirds are go!