FES underpowered for 18m ship?

On 9/15/20 6:38 AM, Dave Nadler wrote:
On Monday, September 14, 2020 at 9:32:04 PM UTC-4, kinsell wrote:
From the mini-Lak brochure on lak.it:
"The FES propulsion system has no known reports of in-flight failures,
allowing you to stay confident in areas of no-lift."

That's just Nonsense. I know of an instance where the controller failed while
FES was under power and the engine quit. I hardly hear about all problems,
surely there have been others...


Of course it's nonsense, but if you tell people exactly what they want
to hear, they gobble it up. Red meat for the base.

The Silent 2 that went through the roof in Connecticut made quite a
splash, I'd call that an inflight failure. Apparently if a battery
explodes on landing roll, that doesn't count as "in flight".

People say motors have been around forever, that's true. But inverters
that take high-voltage DC, convert it to three-phase power at over 25KW
using transistors, and doing it with limited space and cooling, well
that's not something you run down to Grainger to pick up.

I'm not familiar with the FES accident referenced by the OP, would like
more data on that.

-Dave