"Jose" wrote in message
t...
[...]
What I wonder is which weighs more - the fuel that would have been used,
or the motor that the airplane has to carry around for the whole flight.

Doesn't really matter. The weights are probably comparable (and the fuel
may well weigh more), but more important is that the airline has to keep
buying the substance that makes up the weight of the fuel (that is, the fuel
itself), while they can buy the electric motor once (or some very small
number of times over the lifetime of the airframe).

Unless the electric motor were vastly heavier than the fuel (and that seems
unlikely), this seems like a pretty good idea to me. It wasn't clear at all
from the press release what the nature of the motor would be. Is it a
permanent installation, or is it attached to the airplane only while at the
airport? Does it have an internal battery, or does it run off of some kind
of external power source (like the airplane's APU).

I don't think the answers are all that critical to the success of the
device, but they are things I wonder about. Ironically, the link Larry
labeled as "More" simply repeats the exact text he posted. Duh. I guess
"More" just means "more formatted and other extraneous crap".

Pete