US News

In 15 years, we could be flying in silent planes that emit zero fumes

The family resemblance — the toothy smile, the grinning eyes — comes through more in some photos than others. But Erik Lindbergh clearly shares one thing with his famous grandfather Charles — a new idea about flying that can make hearts and imaginations soar.

Charles Lindbergh ignited excitement for air travel in 1927 with his historic 33 hour, 30 minute solo flight across the Atlantic in his single-engine monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. And now Erik Lindbergh, 51-year-old aviator, artist, philanthropist and entrepreneur, is devoting himself to the dream of electric aircraft — planes powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels.

“Our mission is to make aviation clean and quiet,” Lindbergh says. “Noise is one of the huge constraints that we have for aircraft, whether it’s jet aircraft or prop aircraft. People don’t want to hear it. It’s bad for you. It causes heart disease, hypertension.”

What if you could hop from Brooklyn to Midtown in a quiet, cheap air taxi?

What if you could live smack next door to La Guardia and never hear planes because they whispered instead of roared? What if the 5 percent contribution to the greenhouse effect some scientists blame on commercial airliners was all but eliminated because they no longer ran on aviation gas? What if you could hop from Brooklyn to Midtown in a quiet, cheap air taxi?

With his historic 1927 flight, Charles Lindbergh won the $25,000 prize offered by New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight between New York City and Paris.

In this millennium, Erik Lindbergh has taken a page from his ancestor’s book, spending a decade helping award Lindbergh Foundation prizes to small companies that advance electric-aircraft development.

One went to e-volo GmbH, a company based in Karlsruhe, Germany, that made history in March with the first manned flight of its innovative Volocopter — a two-seat “multicopter” powered by 18 electric rotors on a circular frame. The craft looks like a drone on steroids.

Charles Lindbergh completed a historic 33 hour solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.Getty Images

Lindbergh also has served on the board of the XPrize Foundation, whose $10 million Ansari X Prize has nurtured private space travel. He hopes to see the XPrize Foundation offer a similar reward for electric-aircraft achievement.

Through his private company, Powering Imagination, Lindbergh is also working with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the National Park Service on the Quiet Flight Initiative.

Graduate students taking part in the initiative are modifying an Austrian motorized glider into an electric, two-seat plane for near-silent tours above US National Parks that they hope will make its maiden flight early next year.

But that’s just one idea.

“The Holy Grail is vertical takeoff and landing quiet enough that it doesn’t piss off your neighbors,” Lindbergh said. “That is going to change the way we move around the planet. We’re not going to be looking at Uber cars, we’re going to be looking at Uber aircraft.”

Vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — or as experts call them, VTOLs (pronounced “VEE-talls”) — are the hardest to design. Airplanes rolling down a runway get lift from their wings, but in order to climb straight up into the air, a machine has to produce a pound of downward thrust for every pound it weighs. That’s one reason helicopters are so loud.

Erik Lindbergh’s (Charles’ grandson) private company, Powering Imagination, is working to design silent planes that emit zero fumes.Daryl LaBello

Electric motors are relatively quiet. But batteries are relatively heavy. And the lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries prevalent today provide only about a tenth the power per pound as aviation fuel.

That’s why Pat Anderson, director of the Flight Research Center at Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, Fla., who is working on electric aircraft ideas with Lindbergh, NASA and a consortium of aviation companies including Airbus, offers a word of caution.

“This is not a slam-dunk easy thing to do,” Anderson said. “Because [aircraft are] so weight-critical and batteries are so heavy.”

Major breakthroughs in battery technology must come, Anderson said, before all-electric aircraft with serious endurance, range and passenger and cargo capacity can be built.

Lithium-battery fires, which can be caused by a chemical chain reaction called “thermal runaway,” also pose a risk, prompting the FAA to impose restrictions on shipping such batteries by air.

“The Holy Grail is vertical takeoff and landing quiet enough it doesn’t piss off your neighbors. That will change how we move around the planet.”

 - Erik Lindbergh

And yet Lindbergh, who still recalls the thrill of flying an electric ultralight aircraft and hearing a dog barking far below, believes that the necessary breakthroughs in electric aviation will come. What’s more, using electric motors rather than combustion engines to generate power, and wires instead of complex mechanical conduits to transmit that power, could ultimately help solve a host of stubborn aeronautical-engineering problems.

“There are a lot of people around the world who are spending millions of dollars right now trying to develop electric-powered VTOL aircraft for personal use,” said Mike Hirschberg, executive director of the American Helicopter Society International. “We are at the cusp of a revolution in electric flight.”

Google co-founder Larry Page, through a secretive company called Zee.Aero, is said to be among those people. So is Joby Aviation founder JoeBen Bevirt, who is working on an all-electric, 200-mph VTOL suitable for use as an air taxi — among other ideas.

Meanwhile, academic and government engineers and researchers, major corporations such as European aviation giant Airbus, and NASA are also charged up about electric aircraft.

Airbus’ all-electric E-Fan marked a big milestone one year ago by flying across the English Channel solely on batteries.

NASA, for its part, is developing an electric technology demonstrator aircraft — the X-57 — and hopes to produce three ever-larger electric aircraft for practical use over the next 15 years: an ultra-quiet urban VTOL air taxi for short trips in cities by 2020; pollution-free electric commuter aircraft for trips shorter than 300 miles by 2025; and electric commercial airliners by 2030.

But given the issues with batteries, hybrid electric aircraft may be more practical than all-electric ones for some time to come. Germany’s e-volo plans to add a combustion engine to its Volocopter to power a generator supplying electricity both to the aircraft’s batteries and its electric motor.

Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va., has a far beefier hybrid concept for a VTOL drone. Its LightningStrike will use a turbine engine to run three 1-megawatt electric generators. With its turbine engine running, the LightningStrike probably won’t be as quiet as a battery-powered electric aircraft, but its generators will give it vastly more power than batteries could provide.

“People are nibbling around the edges of what electric can do,” said Aurora founder and CEO John Langford. “This airplane drives directly to the heart.”

In his own heart, Erik Lindbergh thinks his illustrious grandfather “would be fascinated by” the prospect of electric aircraft. “I think it would be an area that he would be pushing on.”

With that in mind, Lindbergh hopes to see a quiet, clean, four-passenger all-electric plane cross the Atlantic in, say, 11 years, to prove such aircraft can one day be practical. That would be in 2027 — a nice, round century after his grandfather Charles proved air travel practical. And electrified the world.

Richard Whittle is the author of Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (Henry Holt and Co.) and The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey (Simon & Schuster), available now.

All charged up: The latest in E-planes

The hybrid of the skies

Airbus hybrid electric aircraft E-Fan 1.2.

Airbus’ all-electric E-Fan marked a major milestone one year ago by flying across the English Channel solely on batteries. The Airbus E-Fan 1.2 (above and inset) is a hybrid derivative of that craft. It includes a two-cycle gas engine, allowing the plane to use quiet electric power for takeoffs and landings but fly on its combustion engine for better endurance. Airbus plans to use the hybrid E-Fan 1.2, which flew for the first time three weeks ago in France, for research into electric-aircraft technologies.

The future air taxi

All-electric 200 mph VTOL S2

After making a fortune in other businesses, Joby Aviation founder JoeBen Bevirt turned to his childhood dream of creating aircraft like Doc Brown’s flying DeLorean car in the movie “Back to the Future” or the aerocars in the “Jetsons” cartoon show. On its website, his company says, “Joby Aviation was founded to revolutionize how we commute.” For now, Joby is developing an aircraft that has the familiar shape of a conventional plane — except for eight tilting propellers arrayed along the leading edge of its wing and four more tilting propellers mounted on its V-shaped tail. Called the S2, Joby hopes the all-electric, 200 mph VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing aircraft) will be suitable for use as an air taxi.

NASA’s mega-efficient prop plane

Artist rendition of NASA’s X-57

NASA is developing the X-57 — a four-seat experimental light aircraft with a long, skinny wing sporting 14 propellers — a dozen of which will turn only during takeoffs and landings. The X-57 (below) will use two larger propellers, one on each wingtip powered by their own electric motors, to cruise at 175 mph using only a fifth as much energy as the conventionally powered Tecnam P2006T, a light Italian plane whose airframe NASA is using for the X-57.

The hoverplane

The VTOL X-Plane, LightningStrike

Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va., won a $90 million contract last year to build a VTOL X-Plane. Called the LightningStrike, the hybrid electric craft should be able to carry 1,500 pounds of payload, fly nearly as fast as an airliner and hover better than any existing helicopter. LightningStrike will be able to take off and land without a runway, and with computers adjusting the power sent to each individual fan, it promises to be exceptionally agile. First flight is scheduled for September 2018.

The sporty multicopter

German company e-volo GmbH all-electric Volocopter VC200Nikolay Kazakov

In March, the German equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration approved the all-electric Volocopter VC200 prototype to fly in civilian airspace. Made by German company e-volo GmbH, the little multicopter — a two-seater ultralight aircraft designed mainly for sport flying — is powered by 18 electric rotors mounted on a circular frame. Maximum flight duration to date is only 20 minutes, but e-volo predicts “this will become as much as an hour and more in the near future.”