I’ve briefly mentioned electric planes before, but now there’s the tragic news of a crash of an experimental electric plane. This IEEE‘s EnergyWise blog post suggests the batteries might have caught fire:
A local news site report, translated by Google, reports that “The aircraft ignited during the crash, the flames were extinguished by professional firefighters in Pécs and Siklós within a few minutes….” However, AVWeb cites witnesses who saw the aircraft “maneuvering at low altitude before catching fire and crashing in a near vertical dive.”
If indeed the fire began in the air, and if the airplane was indeed a pure electric version of the eFusion, then one might speculate the problem could have started in the lithium-ion battery pack. Such batteries can undergo thermal runaway, in which one cell suddenly releases a lot of heat, causing neighboring cells to do the same in a chain reaction. Thermal runaway has plagued cellphones, laptops, and e-cigarettes.
But it’s too early to tell.
I suppose there are two approaches to this problem. The more desirable is to construct batteries that just don’t catch fire, while the less desirable, but analogous to the fossil fuel world, is to have a fire suppression system that hardly ever fails. It’ll be interesting if they go one way, the other, or both. I suspect the latter.
