Media reports look forward to battery-powered “personal air vehicles”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8128
In a four-minute video clip foreseeing personal air vehicles, engineer Missy Cummings , a former Navy fighter pilot and director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab, never mentions battery power. But BBC produced that clip in its World-Changing Ideas series well before two airplanes this month duplicated Louis Bleriot’s 1909 first flight across the English Channel—and did so powered by batteries.
An Airbus plane crossed the channel that way on 10 July, hours after an independent French pilot did the same. AP reported that “the battle to perform world ‘firsts’ in electric planes is heating up as the technology becomes more durable.”
For future personal air vehicles, Cummings’s BBC clip emphasizes what her lab’s website calls “the multifaceted interactions of human and computer decision-making in complex sociotechnical systems with embedded autonomy.” The site declares, “Given the explosion of autonomous technology in aviation, medicine, and even in everyday mundane environments like driving, the need for humans as supervisors of and collaborators in complex autonomous control systems has replaced the need for humans in direct manual control.” Since late in the last century, NASA research engineers have linked the growing likelihood of personal air mobility to the growing power of information technology, not just for control of an aircraft but for control of air traffic.
As it happens, a NASA engineer was speaking to colleagues and to the public in presentations at about the same time as the symbolic, battery-powered reenactments of Bleriot’s flight. A headline in a Virginia daily newspaper near the country’s oldest civilian aeronautics lab declared, “NASA Langley pursuing electric ‘personal air vehicles.’”
The Newport News Daily Press article quoted advanced concepts engineer Mark D. Moore: “What we’re looking at is how these new technologies can fundamentally change on-demand mobility.” He foresees a “human/machine interface that is essentially more like driving a car than flying a small aircraft.”
The article reported that NASA and commercial partners are developing distributed electric propulsion “to help drive the future toward ... personal air vehicles, as well as vastly improve general-aviation aircraft and commercial delivery services.” It said that Moore called it “the biggest shift in aerospace technology since the invention of the turbine engine.” An excerpt clarifies:
“Distributed electric propulsion lets us do things that we’ve wanted to do for 50 years, because it fundamentally changes the degrees of freedom that we have in the design of aircraft,” Moore said.
By using battery-powered motors to turn compact propellers distributed along an aircraft’s wing, he said, a plane becomes easier to handle, lighter, less noisy and more environmentally friendly. It can also perform better in a tricky vertical take-off or landing.
Moore also cited tests “showing as much as a 500 percent reduction in the energy needed to perform a high-speed cruise” and emphasized, “we’re really talking about transformational capabilities with this technology.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.