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That's assuming an overnight switch from what we have to all electric, for one of the busiest airports in the world.

Thinking in terms of disruption (from the innovator sense), their top 3 destinations [0] are Dublin, Barcelona and Malaga. Skipping barcelona becauese it's as busy, I don't think it's out of reach to consider that a 737 could do a return trip to dublin or Malaga without charging.

Another perspective is that taking off is significantly more energy intensive than cruising. According to [1], takeoff is equivalent to an hour of cruising. One way of looking at this is it only makes sense for mid haul travel instead. If we replaced transatlantic flights, or similar (us to Europe maybe) the savings would be immense and significantly more achievable

[0] https://www.gatwickairport.com/business-community/about-gatw...

[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/47262/how-much-....



Yep. The thing is, even if you divide the power needed by two (by being smart about which planes you charge, or by how much) and then by two again (for a smaller airport) you still need a full new power plant to supply it. It's well out of SMR territory.

The way you'd have to do it is something like the Tesla approach: put small charging stations for luxury planes in as many airports as possible (because nobody, but nobody, will fly a plane into an airport they can't fly out of), and build out from there. That way you can do something financially interesting at SMR scale, and build momentum for the next step on something marketed as aspirational. Because the hardest SMR to build will be the first. Once you've got one, installing a second should be an easy sell. And two leads to four, and so on and so forth.

This is, of course, making the further assumption that something can be done about charging times. Getting 90GJ into a 737 currently takes about 23 minutes. That's 65MW, which is a nontrivial problem to solve all on its own; anything that slows down the recharge means longer queues to turn around, which, one way or another, means more land area or fewer flights for the airport, and worse economics for the operator.




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