The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Indeed. One reason that aircraft used to use (and may still do) rotary
converters so that huge electrical drains like lowering undercarriages
or flaps do not result in instrument blackout. A big heavy rotor
spinning at many thousand RPM stores a lot more energy than the same
sized capacitor.

This is completely wrong. Although aircraft certainly did (and some
still do) use rotary converters, they didn't use them to supply the
high power loads. The high power system was fed by engine generators
(DC, then later AC) at 100V and above and the rotary inverters were
used to supply the older 28V standards for existing instrumentation
systems. Nor do these rotaries have particularly massive rotors with
appreciable stored energy in them.

I posted a summary of aircraft electrical power to this ng a while ago.
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt...a7213ccfd91f85