Alan Styan

NEWS: BYD today ‌unveiled its second-generation Blade Battery with "Flash Charging 2.0" • LFP • Peak charging speed: 1,500kW • 20% ​to 97% charge in under 12 minutes, even at -20°C (-4°F) • Charges 10% to 70% in 5 mins • 5% higher energy density • BYD has increased the guaranteed capacity retention rate by 2.5% and promised a lifetime warranty on the battery cells • Delivers a driving ​range of up to 1,006 km (621 miles) on the (optimistic) CLTC cycle, an improvement from the ~600 km (373 miles) range in the first-generation Blade Battery. The new battery would likely mean a 450 mile range if tested on the EPA cycle. • Ten BYD models will be the first to feature the battery • The Yangwang U7, equipped with a 150-kWh battery pack, "achieves a pure electric range of 1,006 km, while the fully electric Denza Z9GT have a range of up to 1,036 km" on CLTC cycle. BYD also aims to expand its "Flash Charging" network to ​20,000 stations by the end of 2026, including 2,000 on highways. The company had built more than 4,000 stations as of March 5. However, keep in mind that in the past BYD has been slow to roll out promised ultra fast charging infrastructure expansion.

😓 Air India 🇮🇳 Flight AI171 with fully loaded Boeing 787-7 Dreamliner fatal accident: I‘m an airline pilot with >15‘000h of experience and a physics institute: My brief PRELIMINARY analysis of the visible facts from the video of the takeoff: * The flaps are only slightly extended, presumably to position 1 instead of 5. * The landing gear is still extended, which should have been retracted at this altitude and causes additional drag. * The aircraft is at a high angle of attack, which confirms the insufficient flap setting. * From the video and witness accounts, only low engine noise is audible. * Neither smoke nor fire is visible. * An engine failure is less likely. The most probable cause is presumably a human factor, an incorrectly chosen, insufficient flap setting for takeoff, and consequently an inadequately selected thrust. In this context, the correlated speeds were too low because they were calculated for a larger flap setting or a lighter aircraft. As a result, the aircraft took off with insufficient speed and intentionally but falsely derated thrust, was therefore on the unstable side, and rapidly lost more speed and altitude due to the additional failure to retract the landing gear in a timely manner, leading to a subsequent stall at low altitude and crash. For the experts: the aircraft got onto the wrong side of the speed vs drag curve and maneuvered itself into a corner from where there is no escape. Another possible cause could also have been an incorrect input of a wrong takeoff weight into the Flight Management System, resulting in too low thrust and too low speeds. The pilots got startled after takeoff, couldn’t wrap their head around what went wrong and incorrectly prioritized making an emergency call instead of flying the aircraft first, manually increasing thrust immediately to maximum, and retracting the landing gear. In summary of this very early and preliminary assessment (your confidence level should be as low as mine): The most probable cause is human error 😓 - as most of the time these days. Not because the pilots got worse (although that effect can be observed as well with prioritization of diversity over competence) - but because technology got so much better.