Building an airplane is easy. Building an electric airplane isn’t much harder. Building one that can cross an ocean is difficult. There are two ways to do this. You can, like Solar Impulse, build an absolutely immense airplane, cover it with photovoltaic cells and cruise at a leisurely 30 mph.
Yates, who used to race motorcycles, has no interest in this.
“Flying electrically, really slow, doesn’t provide humanity anything,” he says.
He isn’t after airliner-like speed. Lindbergh averaged just over 100 mph in Spirit of St. Louis. Yates wants to go at least that fast. If that means inventing some method of aerial recharging, so be it. But without the multi-million dollar budget of a project like Solar Impulse, Yates must get creative. Yates, moving at the speed of a pit-lane mechanic at the Indy 500, grabs a part from the shelf. It’s a hub from a GMC Denali, and it will link the bespoke carbon-fiber propeller to the electric motor at the back of the plane.
“It’s $170 at Kragen,” he notes.
Using the GMC part is not only cheaper, it’s safer. It’s a proven design and less likely to fail than anything he might come up with.
“That’s the key to pushing the limits,” he says. “Don’t push them all by biting off unnecessary technical risk.”
It’s this kind of low-budget DIY ingenuity that allows him to do things like build an electric motorcycle capable of almost 200 mph. That bike provided the motor, which Yates says will produce about 258 horsepower.
“We donated it to a museum,” he says of the record-setting electric motorcycle. “I don’t think they needed a $30,000 motor to sit hidden inside the bike.”
Twenty minutes becomes 40 as installing the hub takes longer than anticipated. After quickly washing up, Yates jumps in his car and speeds to his next appointment, multitasking all the way. “I’ve got to call my patent attorney real quick,” he says. Who doesn’t?
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