Slovenia-based Pipistrel is the only company currently selling a certified electric training aircraft. In this week’s news, we learned that Textron Inc., the U.S.conglomerate that includes Cessna and Beechcraft, has added Pipistrel to its stable of companies. In this video, which first appeared in 2019, find out what Textron got in the deal with an undisclosed price tag.
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Woke nonsense. Well there must be enough liberals who want to fly that they figure they’ll want a woke plane. But electric planes are a complete dead end. Idiocy led by idiots.
Ted, you appear to be a bit upset about electric planes.
But, this company is making a profit from idiots?
just sayin
Ted, Sorry, but your arrogance (and ignorance) as demonstrated by your extraordinarily narrow-minded comment is breath-taking.
There were people like you spouting the same sort of nonsense at the dawn of the industrial revolution, at the dawn of the steam age and again at the dawn of ‘motor carriages’ and *again* at the dawn of manned flight.
There will always be people like you ready to shoot dawn any sort of disruptive change in the status quo (perhaps you feel your place in the world is threatend by a new technology you can’t be bothered to understand, let alone appreciate?). Fortunately, there will always be the other sort of person; free-thinking, visionary types, like Elon Musk, for example. And yes, I expect you had the same thing to say 10 years ago at the dawn of the mass-produced electirc car… Perhaps you still do despite the rather obvious fact that you are simply *wrong*!
It’s not just important that we come to the right conclusions about important issues. Its also important that we use good reasoning and rhetoric when doing so. Otherwise, we leave ourselves open to being manipulated and misled. It’s also important we don’t make everything about race and social justice.
So none of this seems to have anything to do with woke. Its not about social awareness or social justice.
Seems to me your divisive rhetoric isn’t helping your case here. That sort of thing is what you resort to when you haven’t got any good arguments, and there are good arguments for why the merger is bad.
When steam engines came out they were practical and useful. The electric planes are not practical for training or x-country flying or anything more than half an hour before refueling. They have a long way to go and I don’t know if they’ll ever get there.
I personally would love to fly an electronic airplane. After the first hour I had in the Cessna 182 without a noise canceling headset, I was done. The noise canceling headset makes it better, but not by much.
I’ve got thousands of hours in 182’s flying skydivers and my hearing is still good. I use either the H10-40 and earplugs or Peltor 7004.
I like the video and seeing the production line and the commentary from the Pipistrel rep – a little more commentary (and perhaps it’s in the accompanying article) would be to talk about market demand, target market etc. For my flying, I could see a little longer battery life (ie something in the 90 minute range) – to bore holes in the sky and then put her back – it wouldn’t be a x-country platform for me, but the last time I spent longer than 3 hours on any given flight was in 2011 – I suppose battery technology will improve in the coming years and/or switchable battery packs for busy flight schools – only time will tell and it’s looking positive.