Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft

I assume being electric that the maintenance costs will also be much lower. How much do you spend annually on engine maintenance?

I want this to work but this isn't enough to get anywhere. Aren't you supposed to have 30 minutes extra fuel minimum just as a safety margin?

I’m thinking they got this wrong by an order of magnitude.

The region they did this flight in charges ~$.25/kw. So they would have had to do the entire flight with 20kw/h or an average of 40kw of output. That’s 60hp, or about a third what your Cesnna uses on climbout. Even if you give them a very low price of $.10/kw then they are flying with less than the Cessna on climbout. Hell, a Cessna in level flight uses ~80 kw.

In other words, they are claiming that they can fly this thing on a VW beetle engine, or the PR guy got the number wrong.

I think the generators are meant for intentional longer range trips as well. You get the cost savings for a big share of the trip even if you have to use the generators for part of it.

There are really weird short hop routes like Adana/Mersin Turkey to Northern Cyprus and Bahrain to Dammam (Saudi). The latter trip is 1 hr by CAR. Gulf Air flies wide body aircraft on that route and the plane doesn't even have time to properly take off before it needs to start landing. They hand you your juice box while you enter the plane and you never get to recline the seat or open the tray. Surreal stuff :)

You never get to hear what these planes sound like in these promo videos

Do you happen to live in Alaska? Or is this common in the US?

From what I remember on the topic, batteries are not yet remotely close to dense enough to enable long haul flights. Even hydrogen electric doesn't cut it, and hydrogen fuel is much denser energy wise than conventional batteries.

Perhaps if solid state batteries become cost effective to produce at scale that would change the feasibility, but someone else would have to chime in there.

The answer to this question depends heavily on your definition of "battery".

Lithium air batteries theoretically can reach 10000-12000w/kg though they have only reached 1200w in labs so far. Gasoline is 13000w/kg. We don't need to match gasoline as it is inefficient. CATL just got it's 500w/kg batteries for commercial aviation approved I am betting China is going to do the same with electric planes that it did with cars. They can't build a efficient enough jet engine to be competitive yet but they already can build the narrow body planes replace the jet engine with electric take over the market for short haul aviation once the battery densities cross 1000w/hr.

I don't believe the $5 cost either.

Ooo, sneaky. Not being familiar with flight verbiage, I didn't catch the "27 minute mission" being different than a 27 minute long flight!

The jet planes are flying much higher and are loaded; I'm assuming this one was empty. That would account for the power discrepancy.

Finally, I think you might be still high on the power cost. $.10/kwh is retail cost in the PNW, they might be, um, bullshitting a little and have purchased power at a very good rate at a particular time just so they could say $5. They didn't say every flight would be $5. So energy could have been 3x more than you estimated.

> I'd guess the actual flight time was only 10 of the 27 minutes, 30 kWh used over 10 minutes is 300kW of peak power

I would note this line from the press release:

> its all-electric propulsion system delivered more than one megawatt of power.

I assume this was peak during takeoff.

Island hopping is the usual sales pitch for these planes.

As someone who lives in the Great Lakes region - there are a ton of 100 mile flights that would take 4 hours to drive - often as the first leg in a two-flight trip. Also places like Denver -> Ski resorts (Vail/Aspen/Crested Butte) are 2 - 3hr drives, heavily dependent on road conditions all within the pure-electric range.

The best use case might be short flights over water or other geographic obstacles where driving routes might be much longer or impossible. Like Kahului Airport to Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport for example.

>"At 120 miles of useful pure electric range, I can't imagine there are many US corridors where that pure electric range makes sense. That's still a range where the door to door time of a car can still win."

It's about feeding the existing network. Millions of people in the US live in places a 2+hr drive to the nearest major airport, but have plenty of smaller municipal fields nearby. Electric aviation could finally make it profitable and cheap enough to run those routes. It also opens the door to true commuter aviation becoming a thing, when you can offer short flights for the cost comparable to a train ticket, and operate out of small fields with small planes multiple times a day and no need for the whole TSA experience.

They want to push the 'all electric range' angle, but the people who buy it know what it can do.

Appx 5% of us domestic flights, 1200 per day.

Remember the days when people laughed at the range and charge times of first-gen electric vehicles?

GE along with BETA, NASA, and Boeing showcased a hybrid aircraft at the Farnborough airshow last month that's worth checking out!

https://investors.beta.team/news-events/press-releases/detai...

There are like 10,000 flights between Milwaukee and Chicago every year. Personally I would take the train, but a lot of people do not.

Portland to Seattle is about 140 miles and has constant flights. Even if a small part of the flight uses fuel, that’s major cost savings.

San Francisco - Napa Valley

Booze Cruise aka "Winetasting" for the tech crowd

Fly sustainable, guzzle some fermented bio grapes, ...

Presumably the generators have fuel that can be depleted

No. The closest I can think is to have a solid rocket booster and that has obvious risks as well.

A suitable one-time-use super high energy density battery would be jet fuel.

Your user handle complements the message perfectly

I'd prefer a train but since I live in Iceland this would be perfect.

> Electric aircraft makes no economic sense

You better start working on them now if you want them to be ready when they'll make economical sense, which might be in a not so distant future

For short haul they make sense at high fuel prices.

And for medium haul they make sense if you can get beamed power working.

Around 15-20% of the cost of the lifetime of a jet aircraft is fuel. Electricity is much cheaper than fuel, so that would mean significantly lower ticket prices. Of course, such aircraft can only fly on routes shorter than their maximum range, so they will only compete with jets/turboprops on regional flights.

Even if the initial cost of an electric plane is higher than a combustion equivalent, the cost of the aircraft itself is only 5% of its lifetime cost. So an electric aircraft's purchase price could be twice as much and still represent a cost savings for an airline. And that's not even counting other advantages such as reduced maintenance needs for EVs.

Nope, because we all know about the race to the bottom of all companies and the littlest crack or wiggle room will be used to save a penny and kill people.

You don't see megawatt-hours of energy in batteries as potentially dangerous?

Interesting thought, but I'm not sure the (admittedly flammable & explosive) fuel load is the main threat posed by a hijacked aircraft — the large mass at velocity can still to major damage and casualties wherever it is crashed.

Plus, depending on the battery chemistry, that material could also create a serious fire; it is a lot of stored energy either way.

So, I would not wait for it

Total energy is going to be comparable for aircraft with similar ranges, I don't think a lithium fire is any less unpleasant than a Jet-A fire for for anyone nearby.

Even if the batteries could be made entirely inert, the ability to deliver a plane sized slug of kinetic energy to a building of your choice retains most of the danger.

Even if that could be avoided, a plane must remain operational enough throughout all flights to avoid falling out of the sky.

It would take a large bomb to take out a whole bus load of passengers, a very small one to put safety critical systems of a plane out of action.

As much as I would appreciate this happening, I don't think electric planes are going to make it happen.

They cary the same amount of energy

Jet fuel, like diesel are not flammable, let alone explosive. They are combustible.

Gasoline on the other hand …

Not due to them being electric. It's possible that being this small they could use FBO rules more like private jet/charter operators, but even then I doubt that would be the normal case. These seem to make the most sense as a last mile connector to regional airports, in which you'd want them inside the security boundary when making your connection.

It would really suck to have to go through security after your first flight whenever you are connecting.

Whether 25,000 pounds of mass hitting something at 500mph also explodes or not is irrelevant.

Also, I'm not so sure the passengers involved would be thrilled at your suggestion.

The problem of the jets on September 11 is the use of the jets themselves as weapons.

Even without the jet fuel on board, the destruction would still have been substantial. Whether the Twin Towers would have fallen without the fuel is not really relevant.

Most of the security is security theater. The primary improvements to security have not been people taking their shoes off or emptying water bottles. It was locking the cockpit doors and passengers knowing that they cannot rely on the hijacker wanting to survive. Other than that, making sure passengers are on board if their luggage is has meant no more Lockerbies.

All the other stuff is pretty much a waste of time.

During certain hours of the day in California, electricity is essentially free due to solar overproduction, which sometimes causes negative wholesale prices.

They’re using wholesale prices. The entire flight was 27 minutes, peaked at a megawatt of power, and a wholesale megawatt-hour is $40-50 these days.

I tried to run a napkin calculation, and that 5$ figure must be quoted per seat (30 seats). And a 'first flight' might be very very short, like 15 minutes of flying or less.

$5 does not make sense, and there must be some qualifer on that we're missing.

Napkin math:

(27 minute flight) * (25000 lbm TOGW) * (Earth gravity) / (~10 average L/D) * (160 KTAS average) / (70% propulsive efficiency) / (97% coulombic efficiency) * ($50/MWh) = $30

(Add residual kinetic energy upon landing too)

Side note: Heart also has a weight issue here they'll need to overcome if they want to certify under FAR Part 23 (as their 19-pax spec implies); TOGW limit for that is 19,000 lbm.

New York State is funding Plattsburgh as an electric aviation R&D hub, and actually gave BETA $20M in a grant.

Aren't VTOL aircraft significantly more complex and riskier to operate than fixed-wing prop aircraft? There's certainly many fewer moving parts and tricky transitions from hover to airfoil flight regime.

I'm not so sure. I haven't seen a true regional airline class VTOL yet, mostly just demonstrators that carry a few people, at that. The fact that it's larger is actually very important, the economics of a regional jet replacement make far more sense than that of an air taxi. I also doubt the similar range claim, lifting an airframe directly into the air without wings is far, far less efficient than just taking off with the benefit of lift. They're also way more complex and would require additional training for pilots.

Further, noise restrictions will probably limit VTOL's to airports, never underestimate the NIMBY's. Note that demo videos of eVTOL's almost always have background music rather than ambient sound.

VTOL will not have the same distance capability because the 'vertical' flgiht is the most energy intesive. It's why there's designs like the Beta which transition from VTOL to fixed wing forward flight as soon as they can.

VTOL have other advantages of course in terms of operational flexibility, but where there's existing airfields, fixed electric would be more efficient

Also, at the size/scale of this aircraft (thirty passengers) any type of VTOL wouldd be even less practical

I really like the STOL "blown lift" Electra design. It never has to do the dangerous transition to an inefficient VTOL mode, and can still land in very small places. Although, this is a much small aircraft, and it's a hybrid.

https://electra.aero/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4INw9bclxeI

Why do you believe that?

>"Largest" is just straight-up a false claim.

Largest in terms of takeoff weight. Wingspan is a pretty meaningless metric for "largest aircraft". By that logic the planes you linked are larger than a 737.

I guess it's the largest by its useful load.