Electric Aircraft

Bangalore: A NASA engineer has followed his long obsession and has come up with a one man electrically powered helicopter/plane/glider podcraft. Mark Moore, the designer of this amazing technology is employed at NASA's Langley research centre in Virginia. He has named this technology as "Puffin" aircraft, and has been working with various organizations like MIT, Georgia tech, the US National Institute of Aerospace and private firm M-DOT, reports The Register.

Rather than the rotors tilting and fuselage maintaining attitude, the whole lot will tip over into forward flight after making a vertical takeoff; and tip back again for landing to set down on its tail. Moore reckons just 45 kilowatts of power will suffice to lift the Puffin and its pilot off the ground. Unfortunately, while electric motors are great they generally mean the use of batteries - which aren't great at all, even today. The Puffin has just 45kg of them, which with present-day lithium phosphate technology means only 4500 watt-hours of juice: in other words the machine can hover for about six minutes before its batteries run flat.

Moore has told the press that the Puffin could fly in tipped-over plane mode for 20 minutes, achieving a range of 80 km. Previous remarks of his have suggested energy consumption of around 7.5 kW in the cruise for such aircraft, indicating that there would also be juice for around 90 seconds' hovering at each end of such a journey.

Moore believes that battery energy densities could triple in coming years, which would make Puffin-style craft much more useful.

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