posted in Technology
First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/first-test-flight-of-largest-all-electric-aircraft-used-just-5-of-electricity/
This article is idiotic.
$5 cost. 25,000 pounds. BUT OVER WHAT FUCKING DISTANCE?
$5 gets me 23 miles in my Delica. It gets me 100 miles on my motorcycle. It gets me 30 miles in my Porsche 914. But the article says nothing about distance.
Literally the first sentence:
The first flight of the largest battery-electric aircraft to take to the skies lasted nearly half an hour while costing just $5 of electricity.
Can your Porsche 914 fly for half an hour on $5 of fuel ?
Off a cliff yeah
It would have to be a very high cliff.
If humans can hang glide I don’t see why we couldn’t use those aerodynamic principles to try to glide a car hooked up to glider wings. It’s a real engineering challenge, but I feel like it would be possible to get some distance in a scenario where a car uses its wheels to go fast, drives off a cliff, deploys some kind of glider wings (or drive with the glider wings timed out to where the car gets to the cliff edge right at the point where the wings plus updraft provide enough lift) to get the vehicle to glide a substantial distance.
Seems horribly dangerous but not impossible.