Advanced Aircraft Electric System

The topics, advanced aircraft electric system and all-electric airplane, inspire a broad range of concepts from the evolutionary to the revolutionary. The revolutionary developments are exciting to the research and development community but find little encouragement or acceptance from airframe developers whose objective is to build an advanced technology airplane using only-off-the-shelf, proven equipment. Their anthem rings "We know how bad the ___________ is, but we have learned to live with it. We have only your vision of how good an advanced system will be and fear to chance it. "However, the cost of living with these known systems combined with the escalating cost of fuel and the military need to address advanced mission capability demands more than a patch called improved reliability and maintainability. The time is at hand to demonstrate an evolutionary approach to achieve a revolutionary improvement. This paper describes an advanced electric system, the life cycle cost improvement anticipated, and the evolutionary means to implementation.