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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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Technology
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Is there no simple anymore? Plane A went this far on 5 dollars electricity. Plane B went the same distance on X dollars worth of jet fuel. I want to know the distance travelled and I want to know what "X" is.
$5 for 30 minutes in the air. pick any speed you want. it doesn't matter. avgas and jet fuel don't compete with $5.
I pick 30 minutes at Mach 7, here's your $5 Canadian and please get out of my way, I do intend to board now.
How long do you want to spend at Mach 7 relative to stopping and starting? Because that could be a lot of G-force.
I want people to find my face at the starting runway, and my skull in some field 7 miles away from where the plane landed.
Meh just accelerate with F-force and then switch to G-force when you are up to speed and vice versa when slowing down, problem solved!
Using N-force, which is the little can of Nox under my seat
Yes
i definitely won't be in your way. bring back pictures.
Well, the data we do have is that the flight was just under 30 minutes and very likely under 100 miles.
From the Wikipedia on airline fuel efficiency:
In the example values table, the most efficient plane for a 560km trip burns 0.92 kg of fuel per km, so doing some rough math and assuming the electric plane travelled 100 miles, that would be roughly 148kg of fuel, or 50 gallons (190L).
At current jet fuel prices ( $3.76/gallon ) that's about $188 US in jet fuel as a rough estimate. It's unclear if the test flight went up to full altitude or if the plane was at full weight, so a fair comparison might have used even half as much jet fuel.
Edit: From some of the other comments, it seems like they might have only considered flight time as cruising time, not takeoff and landing, so my numbers will be quite far off if that's the case. My gut feeling is that this is probably the case, because this seems like too big a difference otherwise.
$5 of electricity to lift an airplane 10,000 feet definitely seems low.
If you want to be really smug, you could say a gas powered plane requires $0 of fuel to glide for 30 minutes
That’s good enough to get from Britain to Ireland