TE||The electric-flight plan
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Zunum Aero电动飞机
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The electric-flight plan
电动飞行计划
本文英文部分选自经济学人science-and-technology版块
Small hybrid-electric airliners ready for take off
ELECTRIC cars are clean, quiet and, it seems, the way of the future. Tesla, an American firm that has done much to help electric cars shed their museli-munching image, is struggling to meet demand for its mid-market Model 3 (though that has not stopped it announcing plans to build electric lorries as well). Volvo, a Swedish carmaker, has said that, from 2019, all its cars will be at least part-electric. Volkswagen has plans to offer battery options across all of its brands; General Motors has made similar noises. Some countries, including China, Britain and France, are mooting bans on internal-combustion vehicles, to take effect within a couple of decades.
电动汽车清洁、安静，似乎是未来的发展趋向。美国公司特斯拉(Tesla)，在解决电动汽车性能羸弱的问题方面发挥了巨大作用，现在公司正在竭尽全力满足其定位中端市场的车型Model 3的需求(然而这并没有阻止它宣布制造电动卡车的计划)。瑞典汽车制造商沃尔沃(Volvo)曾表示，从2019年起，其生产的所有汽车至少能够实现部分电力驱动。大众汽车计划为其所有品牌汽车提供电池选项;通用汽车也有类似的计划。中国、英国和法国正考虑对内燃机汽车实施禁令，并将在几十年内实施。
Not all forms of transport are so easy to electrify. One of the hardest is aviation, where battery power runs up against a serious problem: weight. Kilo-for-kilo, fossil fuels contain roughly 100 times as much energy as a lithium-ion battery. On the road, that is a problem which can be designed around. For a machine that must lift itself into the sky, it is much harder to solve.
然而并非所有的交通工具都很容易电气化。其中最困难的是航空业，电池电量与一个严重的问题相冲突:重量。化石燃料的能量大约是锂离子电池的100倍。在地面上，这是一个可以解决的问题。但对于一个必须把自己提升到空中的机器来说，要解决这个问题就难得多了。
But it is not impossible. Dozens of firms are working on electrically powered planes of all shapes and sizes. Some resemble flying cars, such as those which Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, is backing. Others are hovering, drone-like machines that could operate as autonomous aerial taxis (Uber is keen on these). Pipistrel, a Slovenian company, already makes a two-seater electric training plane. Another two-seater, the E-fan, has been flown by Airbus, a European aviation giant, although it recently abandoned the project.
但这并非不可能。数十家公司正在研制各种形状和尺寸的电动飞机。有些类似于飞行汽车，例如谷歌的创始人之一拉里·佩奇(Larry Page)正投资的项目之一。另一些则是悬停式的，类似无人机，可以作为自动空中出租车运行(Uber热衷于这些)。斯洛文尼亚一家公司Pipistrel已经制造了一款双座电动训练飞机。另外，欧洲航空巨头空中客车公司还试飞过一款双座飞机E - fan，但最近却放弃了这个项目。
The reason for that became clear on November 28th, when Airbus announced something more ambitious. It has teamed up with Rolls-Royce, a British jet-engine producer, and Siemens, a German electricals group, to convert a small airliner into a “flying test bed” to prove the feasibility of hybrid-electric propulsion. “We are entering a new world of aviation,” said Frank Anton, head of Siemens eAircraft. Electric power, he predicted, would prove to be as significant to commercial aviation as the invention of the jet engine.
11月28日空中客车公司宣布了更具野心的项目, 使放弃E - fan的原因明朗化. 它与英国喷气发动机制造商罗尔斯·罗伊斯（Rolls-Royce）和德国电气集团西门子（Siemens）合作，将一架小型客机改装成“飞行试验台”，以验证混合动力推进的可行性。 西门子 eAircraft 的负责人弗兰克. 安东(Frank Anton)说：“我们正进入一个新的航空世界”。他预测, 就像和喷气发动机的问世一样,电力也将会被证明对商用航空有重大意义.
Insufficient, currently
目前动力不足
The general view in the industry is that battery technology is not yet up to building fully-electric airliners. But just as hybrid arrangements help to extend the range of some electric cars, so hybrid systems will bring electric aircraft closer to take-off.
行业内的普遍看法是电池技术不足以建立全电动型客机。 但是如同混合动力有助于延长电动汽车行驶里程，混合动力系统也将使电动飞机离起飞更进一步。
The Airbus team plans to modify a BAE 146, which is a 100-seat regional airliner powered by four conventional jet engines (see illustration above). The first step will be to replace one of those engines with a 2MW electric unit, consisting of a fan contained in a shroud. As with a hybrid car, the fan will be powered by a combination of a battery and a range-extender, in the form of a small jet engine mounted in the rear of the fuselage and hooked up to a generator. This range extender can be switched on during parts of the flight to power the fans or to top up the battery. Because it can be run at its most efficient speed all the time, unlike a jet directly propelling a plane, it would be highly fuel-efficient.
空中客车团队计划改造一架BAE146，它是由4台传统喷气发动机驱动的100座支线客机（看上幅插图）。第一步用2MW电动机组替代其中一个发动机。2MW电动机组由一个装在罩子里的风扇构成。跟混合动力汽车一样，风扇由电池和增程器组合供电。增程器的结构是装在机身后部的小型喷气发动机与发电机连接。在飞行中要为风扇提供动力或供电池充电时，可以启动增程器。它能一直保持最有效的速度飞行，并且不像喷气机直接推动飞机，因而燃油效率高。
Flight tests are due to begin in 2020. If they are successful, a second engine on the aircraft will be replaced. The results, the team hope, will provide enough data to design a full-on hybrid-electric airliner with 50-100 seats from scratch. Such a plane might enter service in 2030 or so.
飞行测试将开始于2020年。如果测试成功，飞机将再换掉一个引擎。该团队希望，测试结果能提供足够的数据，来设计一架具有50-100座全新的混合动力电动客机。这种客机可能在2030年投入使用。
Other planes could be in the air before then. Zunum Aero, a startup based near Seattle, hopes to have its 12-seat hybrid-electric airliner ready to fly its first passengers by 2022, helped along by investment from Boeing, an American aerospace giant, and JetBlue, a successful airline.
到那时，其它一些飞机将已投入使用。位于西雅图附近的创业公司Zunum Aero，由美国航空巨头波音和卓有成就的航空公司捷蓝航空共同投资，希望在2022年拥有12座混合动力电动客机，来迎接它的第一批乘客。
Such aircraft will, their designers hope, serve as bridges to fully electric planes in the future. Overcoming the weight problem will be tricky. For big planes flying long-haul routes, full electrification may never happen, although hybrid systems would reduce their fuel consumption. But design changes can help. Airbus, for instance, thinks it can blend its electric motors into the aircraft’s fuselage to reduce drag. And electric power offers some advantages that offset its big drawback. One is that combustion engines are not very efficient at turning the energy in their fuel into motion. Instead, a great deal of it ends up wasted as heat. A jet engine might manage around 55% efficiency during a steady cruise at the ideal altitude. But that number could fall by half or more when taking off, climbing, landing and taxiing on the ground, which is what aircraft that fly short routes spend much of their time doing.
未来，设计者希望这种混合电动客机能过渡到全电动飞机。如何减轻电池重量将会是一个棘手的问题。尽管混合动力系统减少了燃油消耗，但对于大飞机而言，完全电气化或许根本不可能。但是改变设计能帮助解决这个问题。例如，空客认为飞机机身内置电动机可以减少空气阻力。电力提供了一些优势，来弥补它的巨大缺点。其一，内燃机不能很好地将燃料中的能量转化为动能，很大一部分能量转化为热能浪费了。喷气式飞机在理想高度，稳定巡航时的燃油效率可以保持在55%。但当飞机在起飞、攀升、着陆、以及滑行过程中，燃油效率会减半或更多，这正是短途飞行的飞机所花费的大部分时间。
An electric motor can do much better. The latest models are more than 95% efficient, so the batteries that power them would not need to match the energy density of jet fuel. Electric motors are also lighter than jet engines, which helps offset some of the weight disadvantage. And they contain far fewer parts, which means they require less maintenance, which is a big cost in aviation.
电动机的表现则更加出色。最新的电动机机型燃油效率达到95%以上，因此，为它们供电的电池将不需要与喷气燃料的能量密度相匹配。而且电动机的重量比喷气式发动机轻，这能够弥补喷气式发动机在重量上的劣势。再者，电动机的零部件少得多，所需保养维护较少，保养费用大大降低（航空行业的保养费用十分高昂）。
Those are all reasons why Zunum plans to focus, at least at first, on relatively short routes, where the efficiency gains from electric motors are most significant. The idea, says Ashish Kumar, the firm’s chief executive, is to serve the hundreds of small American airports that have been left behind as flights have shifted to bigger hubs. The firm’s aircraft will cruise at around 550kph (340mph) and have a range of about 1,130km (700 miles). Like the Airbus machine, it would use a single small jet engine in the rear fuselage to run a generator that could power the plane’s two 500kW fans and top up the batteries, which will be mounted in the wings and designed to be swapped in for fresh ones after landing. This way, at some airports, the turnaround time could be as low as ten minutes.
因此，Zunum计划至少在一开始的时候先把重点放在短途航行上，因为短途航行过程中，电动机能够最大程度地提高能源的利用率。该企业的首席执行官阿希什·库马尔（Ashish Kumar）称，这个设计理念是打算为美国几百个小型机场服务的，因为很多航班都已经迁到较大的机场，这些小型机场早已无人问津。该公司的飞机时速550公里／小时（340英里／小时），一次飞行行程为1130公里（700英里）。跟空中客车（airbus）的飞机类似，机身的尾部安装有一台小型的喷气式发动机，该发动机能够发动两台500千瓦的风扇以及为飞机的电池充电。电池将安装于机翼中，并且在飞机着陆后，能够进行替换。在某些机场进行该项操作，所需时间可低至10分钟。
The aircraft’s range, says Dr Kumar, should increase over time. For batteries have another advantage over fossil fuels: as a relatively underdeveloped technology, they still have plenty of room left for improvement. As production ramps up, led by the car and electronics industries, battery capacities are increasing and prices are falling.
库玛博士（Dr. Kuma）称，飞机的航行里程将会逐渐加长。相对于石油燃料而言，电池目前的开发程度还相对较低，还有非常大的进步空间，这是它的另一个优势。随着汽车及电子行业不断发展，电池产能不断增加，容量不断增加，价格也在下降。
This week, for instance, Samsung Electronics, a big South Korean firm, said that by incorporating graphene—an ultra-thin form of carbon—into a lithium-ion battery, it had managed to boost its energy capacity by 45% and greatly decrease the time needed for a recharge. Many other new battery chemistries are being developed. One promising idea is a solid-state lithium battery, which replaces the liquid electrolyte of current cells with a solid substitute. Besides offering much higher energy densities, such batteries should also be cheap to mass produce. Those trends, thinks Dr Kumar, would allow his aircraft to increase its range to around 2,400km by 2035, and perhaps even ditch the on-board generator.
例如，本周，韩国的一家大型电子公司三星电器声称，通过将一种超薄型的碳离子石墨烯混合到锂离子电池中，它成功地将其储电容量增加了45%，并大大减少了充电所需的时间。许多新的电池化学品正在研发中。其中固态锂电池就大有前景，它用固体替代物代替当前电池的液体电解质。不仅提供更高的能量密度，而且其批量生产的成本也低。库马尔（ Kumar）博士认为，照此势态，到2035年，他的飞机飞行航程将增至到2400km左右，甚至可能连机载发电机也用不到了。
Combining all these benefits and drawbacks into a single figure is tricky. Paul Eremenko, Airbus’s chief technology officer, says a single-aisle hybrid electric airliner would be “safe, efficient and cost-effective”. Zunum’s Dr Kumar is prepared to go further and talk numbers. For airlines, the important figure is the CASM—cost per available seat mile. This is obtained by dividing operating costs by capacity, measured as the number of seats in an aircraft multiplied by miles flown. Zunum claims that its plane will have a CASM of 8 cents. Oliver Wyman, a firm of aviation analysts, reckons that the average for American airlines in 2016 was 11 cents.
单用一个数值来整合这些优缺点是不现实的。空客公司的技术总监Paul Eremenko说道，单侧混合电动客机将是“安全，高效和划算的”。Zunum公司的 库马尔（Kumar）博士准备更进一步谈论数据指标。对于客机来说，CASM(每里程中每个位置的成本)就很重要，它由运营成本和运营能力的比值计算而得。运营能力值是机内座位数与飞机所飞航程的乘积值。 Zunum公司宣称他们的飞机CASM值将会是8美分。而一家航空业分析师Oliver Wyman认为，在2016年美国航空公司的平均值是11美分。
And like electric cars, electric aircraft would offer other benefits that are worth having, but harder to quantify. They would be quieter than jet-powered planes, which may be attractive for airports near big cities. They would be cleaner too, and become more so as more electricity is produced from low-carbon sources. Sceptics doubt the weight problem can ever be properly overcome; cynics suspect that these projects are motivated by PR. But few people predicted the pace of electrification in other areas. If electric aircraft can offer faster door-to-door journeys avoiding crowded hub airports and provide cheaper fares at the same time, then air travellers will be happy for the sparks to fly.
正如电动汽车一样，电动飞机还具有其它的一些优势，但难以量化。与喷气式飞机相比，电动飞机更安静，这对大城市附近的机场可能是有吸引力的；而且他们也会变得更加清洁（排放），尤其当更多的电力来自低碳资源中的时候。这其中也存在一些质疑：重量问题是否妥善解决；一些激进者怀疑这些项目都是公关捧起来的。但是少有人预测别的领域的电气化进程。如果电动飞机可以提供更快的上门旅程服务，避免去拥挤的机场，同时提供更便宜的机票，那么旅客们有谁不乐于乘坐呢？
翻译组：
Joel，男，产品运营，科技类外刊爱好者
Cyrus，男， 口译民工，经济学人爱好者
Coco，男，物流民工，经济学人铁粉
Helga，女，笔译民工，经济学人爱好者
Xingyi，男，小硕，经济学人爱好者
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Damon，男，建筑民工 ，经济学人铁粉
Lucia ，女，英语专业学生，经济学人粉丝
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观点 |评论|思考
文章把电动飞机和电动车汽车做了类比，说到电动汽车，行业标杆非Elon Musk的Tesla莫属，想想前段时间发布的电动卡车，查了相关很多资料以后才发现“外行看热闹，内行看门道”这句话说的太对了。电动卡车从概念到量产过程中有太多的问题需要解决，比如卡车的supercharger，卡车司机的接受程度，工况等等。具体可以看看这篇文章：
https://www.zhihu.com/question/68073289
关于运输工具，Elon Musk还提出过两个概念。
第一个是超级高铁hyperloop，在真空管道内运行时速可以达到1000多公里/小时的高速列车，这其实和国内的磁悬浮原理可谓是异曲同工，参照国内磁悬浮，技术已经成熟很多年，但是应用于商用的的几条线路都是亏损的，所以小编认为Elon Musk的技术绝对没有任何问题，但是真的投入到实际应用中，首先要考虑的是投资回报周期，如果10年，100年都回不了本的事情，我相信应该是没有投资人会感兴趣的。顺带查询了大量资料：关于美国为什么不建高速铁路
https://www.zhihu.com/question/29232954/answer/229603919
稍微总结下其实是由三个方面决定的
1. 地理：美国地广人稀
2. 成本：美国劳动力成本高
3. 政治：共和党反对
第二个是马斯克提出的Big Fucking Rocket,简称BFR,中文叫做大他妈的火箭，是为了移民火箭设计的，宣传片提到整个地球任何两个城市的旅程可以缩短至1小时以内。概念很吸引人，但是实际操作就不得而知了。
以上提到的三个概念都挺fashion的， 但是技术最终是要落地，所以成本必须是要考虑的，而目前来看这三个概念的成本都是硬伤。
扯远了，再回到电动飞机，文中提到和电动汽车一样，主要受制于电池技术，确切的说是电池能量密度https://www.zhihu.com/question/23527698，那么电动飞机在未来能成为主流吗？
小编认为这是必然的事情，就和电动汽车必然在未来成为主流一样。只是以何种形式呈现，这个暂不得而知，经济学人在5月份的一篇文章Small flying “cars” come a bit closer to reality说到小型电动飞行汽车可能更加接近现实，最合理的解释应该是落地最快，可以参看
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21721339-german-firm-completes-test-and-uber-promises-prototype-2020-small-flying-cars-come
文中就提到了Uber将推出电动“飞行出租车”，主要是解决市区上下班拥挤问题，但是需要解决的有几个问题：噪音，起降落场地以及安全问题，万一飞行汽车出故障掉落，那么将会是重大的安全事故。
说了这么多，担心了这么多，其实我们很多时候只是杞人忧天，看了这么多期经济学人，每次遇到同一个话题，去查大量的衍生资料，每次都会发现一些新的idea，除了知识迭代以外，就是一次次的纠正自己原先的错误的惯性思维，这就像前几天晚上小编要搜林俊杰的《伟大的渺小》时候发现，最爱的网易云音乐因为版权问题竟然没有，于是在qq音乐中付费购买，无意中发现曾经那么不屑的qq音乐做了很多改变，现在也有了精彩评论，还有弹幕，偶的神，而且它推荐的歌单也很不错，扯了这么多，小编的point只有一个：不要让惯性思维代替了我们的思考，读的越多看的越多，才会越来发现自己的渺小。不管是Tesla 还是Uber他们都是在创造或者提出一些新的理念，所以如果我们用常规逻辑去思考也许就是错的，但是不得不说正是他们的大胆思维，才给我们社会带来这么大的进步，因此在质疑的同时，我们应该给予他们一个大大的掌声。俗话说：梦想总是要有的，万一实现了呢。
以上观点仅是小编个人观点，欢迎拍砖
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