First hybred jump plane?

[riggerrob 643]

When I was down a Skydive Oliver - last week - the pilot was raving about how great their hybred Airvan was on gas.
He told me that they bought it a couple of years ago, off an Australian charter operation that flies sight-seers over the Great Barrier Reef.

A few weeks after they started flying jumpers, the pilot started experimenting with the electric "booster" feature. It just looks like an over-grown electric starter driving a beefed-up ring gear.
There is a fancy voltage regulator under the pilot's seat and a couple of bus batteries under one of the bench seats.
Initially, he just used the booster feature to maintain full climb power above 5,000 MSL, and that knocked two or three minutes off the time to climb to 10,000 feet.
A few weeks later, he started using the regeneration feature on the way down. They were never able to reclaim all the energy they burnt on the way up, but were to halve the number of times they had to replace batteries during busy days. During slow days, they just let the wing-mounted PV panels re-charge the batteries to 80 percent and completed the re-charge by plugging the plane in over-night.

The pilot said that their biggest benefit is on the way down. While they never got a full re-charge, by using the re-generation feature, they were able to turn the propeller to to fine pitch, creating massive amounts of drag and they could dive the airplane straight down, with-out fear of exceeding airspeed limitations on the open door. They soon saved four or five minutes descending from every load.
The other nice thing about the re-generation feature is that they could keep power up on the gasoline engine and not worry about cracking cylinders.

He concluded by saying that the biggest hassle of operating a hybred jump plane is that their gasoline purchases have decreased so much (30 percent) that the FBO is threatening to raise gasoline prices to cover his overhead.

[AggieDave 6]

Damn these fools of April...

--"When I die, may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline."

[ZigZagMarquis 9]

Some have that tallent ALL THE TIME, not just one day in April!