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Whisper Aero Ultraquiet Electric Aviation
Whisper Aero's amazing 55-lb. ISR drone has a single top-mounted 10-lb.-thrust electric ducted fan.
But Whisper’s ambitions go far beyond powering small drones, to encompass air taxis and transonic aircraft and even consumer and industrial applications from leaf blowers to compressors. “This is going to touch everything that wants to move air quietly and efficiently,” says co-founder and CEO Mark Moore.“We’ve flown a drone that weighed 55 lb. but for another customer we’re looking at vehicles in the tens of thousands of pounds, with propulsion systems in the thousands of pounds and able to exceed the current capability of other solutions like propellers and even turbofans,” says Chief Engineer Devon Jedamski. “We’ve already been paid by the government to see how this scales up and show that this can achieve up to transonic speeds for newer applications.”
Electric aviation is getting started with propellers and rotors because the speeds are modest and noise, efficiency and time-to-market are priorities. “Electric aircraft developers are in a race to get things flying and certified as quickly as possible. That’s great, but they are in the Model T era of electric flight,” says Moore, a former NASA engineer and co-founder of the Uber Elevate aerial ride-sharing initiative.
(Via aviationweek)
The earliest reference in science fiction to the idea of an electric airplane is the electric plane from Synthetic, a short story by Charles Cloukey published by Amazing Stories in 1930:
(Electric plane from 'Synthetic' by Charles Cloukey)A white electric plane approached at great speed, high above the course. It flipped over on one wing, turned, dove, and passed over the cabin-plane where the other members of our party had been watching the race through the binocular telescopes...
(Read more about the electric plane)
And I can't resist this earlier reference to a whisper quiet method of flight than "whisper mode" from Blue Thunder (1983):
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/23/2023)
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I might also be thinking of K-9 from Doctor Who.
