Planes still need like half throttle to maintain altitude, that’s why airplane engines are rebuilt every few thousand hours vs lasting hundreds of thousands of miles (tens of thousands of hours) for a car engine that only uses a small fraction of its power to keep a car moving.
> Planes still need like half throttle to maintain altitude,
Yes, bit less than half, but anyway that is exactly why I said takeoff would be the peak power output.
> that’s why airplane engines are rebuilt every few thousand hours vs lasting hundreds of thousands of miles (tens of thousands of hours) for a car engine that only uses a small fraction of its power to keep a car moving.
Ratio of max power to average power is very low on the list of reasons why a gas turbine engined plane needs maintenance more frequently than a piston engined car.
> Ratio of max power to average power is very low on the list of reasons why a gas turbine engined plane needs maintenance more frequently than a piston engined car.
I meant for the comparison to be between an internal combustion engine in a car and an air-cooled piston engine in a plane, I should’ve clarified in my post.
I’m amazed we even figured out how to make reliable gas turbines (single crystal blades still astound me) so any required maintenance makes sense, they operate at the edge of engineering in a way that most machines don’t.
I would note this line from the press release:
> its all-electric propulsion system delivered more than one megawatt of power.
I assume this was peak during takeoff.