"Gatt" wrote in message
...
A few years ago when people were discussing the possibility of
electric-powered flight, you'd get hacked on pretty hard for
suggesting such a thing would be practical or possible in our
lifetime. Obviously if you knew anything about physics or electrical
engineering, why, you'd know it was totally impossible.

It's not totally irrelevant to this thread to note that a manned electric
airplane, the Solar Implulse, recently made a 12 hour, 59 minute international
flight. This also would have been said to be totally impossible not so many
years ago.

I make no claims that the Solar Impulse is a practical airplane. After all, its
average speed of advance was only some 27 knots. That said, gliders and hot air
balloons also generally fail the test of practicality, but there are plenty of
them around.

Vaughn