A very heart-felt thank you to everyone who came by our booth at Osh. We were very surprised and gratified by the number of folks we talked to (if you got there later in the week, a couple of our people were getting hoarse from the amount of talking we did). We’re looking forward to seeing you again in 2025. Take care and fly safely.
A few years ago were sitting around one evening, doing what we do, which is talk about airplanes. We were beginning to think about our next project and what it could be/should be. One of our team hauled out a bunch of drawings and said, “Here’s something I drew up one night when I couldn’t sleep—we definitely shouldn’t do this.” So of course we’re doing it.
Program Goals
The plane will gross around 1,900 pounds (861kg), with an empty weight of approximately 1,100 pounds (499kg).
It is powered by a gasoline-fueled genset located aft of the cockpit. We consider the genset and the whole hybrid approach to be a band-aid while we (and the rest of the industry) wait for something better. We have carefully designed the plane to be very modular so that when better power solutions become available we will not require much redesign. With all of that said our genset is pretty nice and delivers excellent power to weight.
We are designing for a range of 500+ nautical miles (926km). We got into aviation to go places, not fly around the pattern. We are quite confident we can hit the 500nm goal, it’s more a question of how far we can go beyond that.
The plane does have an onboard battery capable of providing power for flight. This is a purely backup power source and is not charged or used in normal flight. Other folks in the industry have referred to this approach as an “electric parachute” and it’s a good description. If the genset fails the plane will have enough battery for full power climb for 6 minutes, or to sustain level flight for ≈17 minutes, or extend a glide until touchdown.
The plane has a circular frontal cross section. We did this for several reasons. Firstly it allows us to keep the molds very simple—there are only two large molds, one for the fuselage and one for the nose bowl. Secondly the circular cross section gives us a very large internal volume while still having an extremely efficient shape.
By using distributed electric thrust (which is the engineering term for “lots of smaller props all over the place”) we get to use a blown wing. A blown wing is an approach wherein the air flowing over the wing is powered rather than varying with the forward motion of the plane. This allows the designer to use a wing that is smaller than typically seen and therefore greatly reduce drag. A little more about this here.
SkyLab is located at the Anoka County/Blaine airport in Blaine, Minnesota (Airport ID: KANE)
We are particularly interested in hearing from others in the industry who would like to work with us.
Contact us via email: steve@skylabengineering.com
Q: Developing an electric aircraft of this size, complexity, and performance, is a challenging proposition. Do you, SkyLab, know what you’re doing?
A: Righty tighty, lefty loosey.
