While I agree with the drawbacks of wireless charging, it could prevent cables obstructing pedestrians and prevent vandalism. Maybe it’s a good idea for street parking
Ah yes, just fuck up streets and waste a fuckton of energy due to wireless charging
I am assuming you’re assuming inefficiencies in wireless charging over wired charging. One provider looking at this technology finds wired and wireless VERY close to one another in efficiency, with wireless possibly being even MORE efficient.
"Wireless charging for EVs is considered as efficient and fast as charging with a plug. For example, most EV plugs have 80-95 percent efficiency ratings. According to WiTricity, a leading provider, their wireless EV chargers achieve 90-93 percent efficiency. " source
I would be interested in that if done by anyone else than elon. I wouldn’t put it past them to have made that proposal to kill public transit or something else. Like they already did with the dumb tunnel that was canceled now.
Yeah, and most wired charging for a modern EV and charger is on the upper end of that scale.
The wireless charging being that efficient is reliant on the ground never being dirty or wet, the charging coils on the car being very low, and the car being perfectly aligned.
If shopping carts are any indication Europeans will simply plug cables back into the chargers while Americans will be dropping them on the sidewalk and hiring people to organize them.
A big advantage of repurposing existing lampposts is that cities don’t have to dig in order to lay new cables, says Artis Markots, the chief executive of the Latvian start-up SimpleCharge, which is focusing on Central and Eastern Europe.
Trojan Energy is a Scottish company whose chargers sit flush with the pavement, resembling miniature manhole covers from the outside.
The UK company Nyobolt recently created Bolt-ee, a compact, ultra-rapid charger that can provide up to 300kW of DC power to charge a car within minutes.
Fully mobile charging could be useful for people with disabilities, says Liana Cipcigan, a professor of transport electrification and smart grids at Cardiff University’s School of Engineering.
In terms of fire risks, Mr Shivareddy says that Nyobolt has carefully designed Bolt-ee to be ultra-efficient, and thus to generate very little waste heat.
As Prof Cipcigan says, there is much space for innovation in the EV charging market, and younger and smaller companies “could make an interesting impact on this very complex landscape”.
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On a hot day sitting in a parking lot, my Model 3 loses about 10% of its charge just cooling the battery. I am lucky to have the ability to charge at home so I don’t have to worry about it, but if I was living in an apartment, I’d have constant anxiety about it discharging and not being ready when I need it. It’s doable, but having to plan out an extra 20-30 minutes plus travel time to hit a charger, that’s a fairly significant change to routine.
That said, yes, more EV charging at gas stations please. It’s critical for road trips.
So are they just going to tighten them up real well and call it a day? Also are these the same planes they were urging the FAA to let them flight without further inspection?
After looking at that diagram I have to ask - why in the everliving fuck would a pressure bearing panel like that be hung by bolts and not inserted into the cabin and held in place by the ribs of the fuselage? I mean seriously?
I don’t get why they don’t just make it a bit bigger on the inside so that when pressurized, the pressure itself seals it. Seems like a fail safe solution instead of this shadiness.
It’s a well documented that when Boeing merged with McDonald Douglas, they turned from an engineering led company to an executive led one & have been shit since
It is, kind of. The plug is secured by 6 stops (or tabs) along each side. The positive pressure differential pushes the plug outwards into those stops.
To remove the plug you uninstall 4 bolts which allow the plug to go up and over the stops, after which it can hinge outwards on a hinge found at the bottom of the plug.
Just seems like a better design would be if no bolts existed (like from them loosening over time and falling off), it would still be sealed perfectly fine. The obvious failure point is the bolts and seems they could do better.
That’s how the normal doors work because they aren’t permanently secured in place. The reason is weight as it pretty much always is in aviation design.
It’s a door plug, which means it’s meant to be replaced with an actual door if required, so a lot of the hardware for an actual door are in place. Doors are designed to slide in, then raise up so the stop pins engage the stop fittings from the inside, so the door is in effect bigger than the hole it’s in. this video provides a detailed explanation of how it works.
The big issue here is that the airplane is only 2 months old, it was delivered from Boeing in late October. Which means it’s either a design flaw or a process flaw in the original manufacturing. This smacks of corporate cost cutting again. Boeing are totally on the hook for this and it’s only lucky there were no lives lost. You watch, they’ll blame it on the airline initially but the fault will come back round to them again.
I am glad to read all these reports, investigations and of course the emotional laden criticisms of actors associated with this. Because each time I check aviation incidents in Russia, they determine in the first 24 hours it must have been the pilots fault.
Probably more than you think. This strikes me as an understaffing issue in the factory. Loose bolts happen when the person who is supposed to verify the work has been done correctly, is busy doing work elsewhere on the plane. Understaffing causes people to pitch-in to make deadlines, or to ease the burden on their co-workers. Seems trivial at first, but with airplanes, this behavior gets people killed.
Not clear if this is the cause of the Alaska accident. Those bolts hold on the hinges at the bottom, and the photos appear to show those hinges still attached on the incident aircraft.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is leading an investigation into the incident, said pilots had reported pressurisation warning lights on three previous flights made by the specific Alaska Airlines Max 9 involved in the incident.
As bad as it is if a manufacturing issue caused a piece to fall off an airplane, there's a huge amount of negligence in an airline continuing to fly an airplane that has triggered pressure warnings multiple times without investigating and resolving the issue.
Agreed. This is a multi-layered fuckup. The manufacturer probably didn’t tighten things down all the way, their QA didn’t catch the critical defect, the plane inspectors didn’t catch it during inspection, the airline didn’t ground it after a pressurization warning, the pilot flew a plane with a known issue. There are several cultures of complacency at play. Hopefully the FAA can scare everyone into flying right.
The reason I added the "if" is because I didn't see any information about age and don't know the specifics of the engineering/specs. Bolts needing the be checked annually and tightened every 5 on average could be perfectly reasonable with how much stress is on airplanes. There's a reason frequent inspection is enforced more heavily on airplanes, and it's not just because failures mean potentially falling out of the sky.
But yeah, it's entirely possible they fucked up, but it's for sure United Alaska did.
The jet had been prevented from making long-haul flights over water so that the plane “could return very quickly to an airport” in the event the warnings happened again, NTSB chief Jennifer Homendy said.
Which makes it sound like they couldn’t find the source of that warning but weren’t willing to completely write it off.
I’ll wait to pass judgement because, not being an expert, I have no idea what the standard procedure is for that warning appearing in 3 out of however many (hundreds of?) flights this plane engaged in over that period of time. With hindsight of course we can say “duh don’t fly the plane with the door about to blow off if it says it has pressurization issues” but maybe this is not actually a particularly serious warning in different circumstances.
If I’m not mistaken, the Alaska Airlines accident aircraft completed 99 flights, as it went into service only a couple months ago.
Not an expert myself but I binge air crash investigation shows like nobody’s business, and this seems to speak to QC and maintenance workload/culture issues.
Apparently it started immediately after Alaska installed their wifi equipment, which some sources have indicated requires opening that door plug. They apparently assumed it was due to the wifi install. Should have grounded it until the figured it out.
Ex-aircraft mechanic here. Nothing will have been done in this situation without paperwork backing the decision. There are often small niggles that could ground an aircraft, but there are manuals that can be consulted to see how many more flights can be taken before it must be grounded for rectification - the MEL (minimum equipment list) and CDL (configuration deviation list). So the airline will not have made the ultimate decision to keep flying, Boeing will.
The fact that this has now been found in two different airlines means that it’s a design flaw again, either the locking mechanism on the bolts is insufficient, or the reinstallation instructions in the maintenance manual is incorrect (the Alaska airlines aircraft door plug was recently removed to carry out maintenance on another part)
As an airline customer, I would much rather have the airline tell me the plane was grounded due to parts being ready to fall off than the 3 hours I had to wait one time because of a busted tray table.
Bolts in need of “additional tightening” have been found during inspections of Boeing 737 Max 9s, United Airlines has said.
Inspections began after a section of the fuselage fell from an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 on Friday.
United Airlines said “installation issues” relating to door plugs would be “remedied” before the aircraft type would return to service.
In its statement, United said: “Since we began preliminary inspections on Saturday, we have found instances that appear to relate to installation issues in the door plug - for example, bolts that needed additional tightening.”
The door plug is a piece of fuselage with a window that can be used as an emergency exit in certain configurations.
It was this part of the Alaska Airlines plane which dramatically fell off mid-flight over the US state of Oregon, eventually landing in a teacher’s back garden.
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Sounds like Mustafa Thuria was the driver, Hamza Wael Dahdouh was in the passenger seat, and Hazem Rajab, Amer Abu Amr, and Ahmed al-Bursh were in the back seat (all three of those survived).
AFP says they were filming a house that was damaged by combat, so my guess is they were using a drone to gather footage that is close enough to the drones used by Hamas that the IDF considered it a threat to troops operating nearby.
there is one truth: NOBODY that can take decisions cares about civilians (in general) killed. Except if it justify a “democratic intervention” of course
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