Optimal Cruise Airspeed for Hybrid-Electric and Electric Aircraft: Applications to Air Mobility

Abstract: Electric and hybrid-electric aircraft can help our society transition towards more sustainable aviation and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper provides solutions to minimize the direct operating cost (DOC) for hybrid-electric aircraft. The solution is the positive real root of a quintic polynomial which is derived using Pontryagin's minimum principle. By properly selecting a hybridization factor, one can also find the cruise airspeed corresponding to the minimum DOC of an electric aircraft. The optimal airspeed is integrated into the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees Star (RRT*) path planning algorithm. The minimum DOC solutions are investigated in a hybrid-electric international travel scenario and the path planning approach is applied to an electric aircraft city scenario.