Highbrids. (highbirds?).Need a hell of a long flex.
If it goes to the States does it swap voltage halfway across?
That would be good wouldn't it!!?? Fly a £10M plane to the States but can't recharge it and fly it back due to different voltages!!
Highbrids. (highbirds?).Need a hell of a long flex.
Only 19 seats isn't going to help. They need an aircraft big enough to take enough passengers to cover the huge landing fees at the London airports. Plymouth Airport closed because it wasn't economically viable without the routes to Gatwick and London City. Those had stopped because the landing fees had been hiked. The larger capacity planes needed to spread those costs amongst more passengers need a longer runway.
In a word…no! A386 ar one end and a chuffing great factory the other.The ideal aircraft for the airport would be the Airbus A220-100 (100 to 125 passengers). It only requires a runway of 1463m
View attachment 4817
Currently the runway at Plymouth is 1160m in length. Wonder if an extra 303m could be squeezed out of what's there?
The point I was making is that the airport will come into its own in the future when newer electric planes are built and used for small airports, when silent vertical take off planes are used and so on. A place where drones can take off and land.
20-30 years is nothing... think about the next 200-300 years .. or don't you think Plymouth will still be around ...It "may" come into it's own if and when newer electric planes like in that article start flying. Given that the first electric planes (usually conversions of small 2/4 seaters) are a relatively new technology, I suspect that small commercial planes like the one you highlighted won't be commonplace or mainstream for a couple of decades - even if that one does start flying commercially in 2027, how many will they look to produce annually? If a Plymouth-based airline was to place an order for 5 or 10 of them when that company started to take orders, when would they likely to be in service here? If the person in that article is talking about £25 tickets from London to Manchester, if similar charges were applied for flights from Plymouth to London Docklands, how many full planes would need to fly that route alone to make it commercially viable? What about other locations around the country? Then there's still the age-old argument about whether there's enough people locally who'd use that service daily to make it commercially viable, because there was never the interest in the past.
I really like the idea of electric planes, but I think we're a good 20-30 years away from seeing 30-40 seaters (if we take the base Dash-8 as a comparison) regularly in our skies, and I really can't see the point of keeping Plymouth Airport mothballed for that length of time, especially as there's still such uncertainty as to whether, even then, it would be commercially viable.
20-30 years is nothing... think about the next 200-300 years .. or don't you think Plymouth will still be around ...
In a word…no! A386 ar one end and a chuffing great factory the other. View attachment 4823