Solar Impulse 2, the plane powered only by the sun, has dominated the electric aircraft news cycle recently, starting its 5-month, 20,000-mile journey around the world this month. But they're not the only folks trying to build alternative, environmentally friendly ways to fly.
NASA's in the game, too, and is working on an experimental wing that could finally eliminate the massive advantage exploding jet fuel has over batteries when it comes to keeping planes in the sky. The key to this new design? It has 18 propellers, powered by lithium iron phosphate batteries, mounted on a 31-foot wide carbon composite wing.
It's called the Leading Edge Asynchronous Propeller Technology project (LEAPTech), and while it's not ready for flight yet, the team is going to test the experimental wing by mounting it to a truck and driving it across a dried up lakebed at Edwards Air Force base in California at 70 mph later this year. Revealed this week by NASA, it's been in development since last year.
It's part of the agency's X-Plane program, which has developed advanced prototype airplanes for more than half a century. Planes developed in the program include the first rocket-powered airplane to break the sound barrier in 1947, and prototypes that were instrumental in the development of the Space Shuttle.
So what's up with the huge number of propellers? According to IEEE Spectrum, they'll blow wind directly over the wings to generate lift, so you want a whole bunch of them. Conventional planes rely solely on forward motion (often produced by a jet engine) to create lift. The LEAPTech way of doing things provides three big advantages: It should able to take off on shorter runways. The wing can be optimized for cruising efficiency rather than takeoff and landing. And each motor can run at a different speed (that's the asynchronous bit in the name) to optimize performance, ride quality, and noise reduction.
If the LEAPTech is indeed the basis for the new X-Plane, likely to be dubbed X-57, it should be able to fly at 200 mph with a 12,000 foot ceiling, with a range of 450 miles. But like with every X-Plane, the aircraft is just a vehicle for new technology: NASA's real goal is helping the aviation industry eventually go electric.
