It would be like Toyota marketing the Prius as an electric vehicle, then buried in their presentation sneaking in the gas propulsion. Same with Chrysler Pacifica (32 mile electric range).
And in larger aircraft, multiple independent engines. See for instance ETOPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
From the pictures, I see that this new aircraft has 4 engines. So it should be adequately resilient to single engine failure.
We pay about $120 for the privilege, which takes 20 minutes of flying.
So I think even in this case the reserve capacity is "needed" (for the reserve requierement), but I can see them realistically being able to fly between the islands purely on electric power.
Unless we ignore the additional maintenance cost of having to completely different proportion systems to maintain (and it is worse than a twin engine plane, because the propulsion systems are different, so you have to stock up on more different kinds of parts and possibly have different kinds of mechanics on staff to understand them)
Having the turbine, electric motor, gearbox, and potentially clutches to isolate the turbine or electric motor from the transmission seems pretty viable though. This would waste a little bit of power keeping the turbine spinning (unless there are clutches) but would also ensure that the turbine’s been spun recently, the oil pumps are primed and the bearings are lubed and ready to go.
Not that I’m saying a turboprop turbine like a PT6A is a simple device, but compared to a high-bypass turbofan like you’d see on a 737 or A320, they are considerably simpler.
Edit: looking quick, the time-before-overhaul (TBO) on modern PT6As can be up to 6000 hours, with a ~2000hr Hot Section Inspection. I’m not sure how “spinning but not burning fuel” counts on TBO, but it should at least mean the HSI is simple.
But... given that turbine APUs already exist for ground power and are already engineered to be as light as practical, my naive guess would be that it's easier, simpler and faster to just use a COTS APU as a series hybrid rather than trying directly couple a turbine to the propeller.
On inspections and overhauls: I'd expect that not needing to start the turbine at all on a given flight massively helps the economics of the airplane. Turbines often have parts that must be replaced after a given number of (startup) cycles, and that's going to be especially important for a turbine that is only expected to run for a short time (if at all) at the end of a flight.
If you only start the turbine on, say, 5% of flights, that means you get 20x as many flights before overhaul/inspection. I could see that being incredibly attractive to airlines.
For private, yes. For airlines, the requirement boils down to basically enough fuel to "fly to the intended destination as scheduled, then loiter for XX minutes, then fly at normal speeds to a pre-designated alternate, land".
For short flights, that means the fuel loaded at departure can be more than twice what is actually needed to get from A to B...
Which is why the hybrid approach is fairly clever: You can use it for ~125 mile flights, and remain 100% electric on ~95% of flights. Whereas, without the reserve turbine the practical limit would be ~60 miles. On the ~5% of flights requiring more range, you're still mostly operating on electricity.
> You can use it for ~125 mile flights, and remain 100% electric on ~95% of flights.
It's why I believe hybrid cars that use a gas motor only to charge the batteries are more reliable and more efficient.
I don’t know where you live or what you drive, but I just punched in a destination 200 km away as the crow flies, the Alps are in the way and I’m looking at five hours of driving.
Also, water.
Now, of course, most of the hassle of getting to NYC from Boston is transit to and from the airport. And of course, transit from JFK, Laguardia, etc into the city.
There are at least 5 capable airports/airstrips closer to me than Logan or T.F. Green. Only one of them, Worcester, offers NYC flights. Worcester is almost an hour from me on average, and a bit more expensive. It’s an hour from takeoff to landing (I’ve arrived 10 minutes before takeoff, at the PARKING LOT many times without it being an issue).
If they can get this in and out of even smaller airports, like in Stow, MA, which is beyond capable, it will be a gamechanger.
Even then there are lots of flights in Europe that are between cities less than 1 hour apart.
This idea generally makes more sense in Europe than the US, I think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-haul_flight_ban?#Overvie...
Of course those -should- be easy on trains too…
Report recently from my area.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/transporta...
To your question… Feasible: no; Possible: yes.
But I doubt we have the capital to buy them new.
Assuming you have a straight road in that direction with a speed limit that allows an average speed of more than 100km/h.
There's a ton of small routes that just aren't getting much service now because of operating costs - the founder speaks to that in the video - that this could serve.
A slightly larger aircraft able to do ~300 miles on battery and then say 1,000 in hybrid mode, might resurrect the economically unviable but relatively fast LHR/LGW flights down to NQY. The six hour drive is pretty, but... yeah...
There are a lot of "island hopper" and bushpilot mini airlines in the world. The current world record is a route in Scotland that, on good days, takes less than a minute of flight time [1].
It is much much easier to supply such islands with electricity (there almost always is a power grid tied to whatever the nearest mainland is) than to continuously haul fuel around.
And in Croatia... that is easy enough distance to cover Rijeka-Zadar for example, which is about three hours worth of car or bus drive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westray_to_Papa_Westray_flight
That aircraft would need a very large battery to do that, and it's way more efficient to have some burnable fuel there that you'll never actually use.
You make it sound like it is acceptable for a badly planned flight to have a fuel emergency. It is not.
If there is a fuel emergency (or the plane lands with less than 30min of fuel) there will be an incident investigation that treats the situation as serious as if the plane had crashed. If the investigation discovers it was nothing more than bad planning, (at minimum) the planning procedures will be changed to ensure it never happens again.
The pilots took exactly enough fuel to reach their destination. They didn't have enough fuel to divert to an alternative airport. They didn't even have the mandatory 30min of reserve fuel. They did not account for a minor holding pattern just before landing (ironically, because another plane had a fuel leak).
The crew failed to declare a fuel emergency, and crashed 18km from the airport. They had only been in the hold for 10 min when their engines ran out.. they were very short of fuel, the pilots knew they were short. They should have diverted (or declared a fuel emergency) almost an hour earlier, but they didn't want anyone to know how close they were cutting it.
No the investigation isn’t as serious as if the plane had crashed. In July 2026 nine planes simultaneously had a fuel emergency in London. You bet it’s different from nine planes simultaneously crashing in London.
It helps to understand different kinds of fuel emergency. Declaring a fuel emergency to get to a diversion airport is very very different from having 30 minutes of fuel left.
But still very serious. 9 simultaneous fuel emergencies could have easily overwhelmed ATC and snowballed to worse issues.
Something lead 10 different aircraft to make the exact same mistake and find themselves without enough fuel for a safe diversion. There will be recommendations to try and prevent it from happening again.
I somewhat doubt that. Part of the advantage of the design is that the generators don't need to be sized as big enough to power take off, climb and a potential go-around on landing. They only need to be sized as big enough for cruising.
So powering them up during critical phases wouldn't help with safety. If anything, normal operating procedures might actually require shutting them down during critical phases.
What this does mean is that the batteries need to be reasonably full when it comes into land, possibly as high as 50%. And most go arounds will require immediately powering up the generators, so it probably needs to be fuelled for all but the shortest flights.
I would guess the opposite. Many parts in a turbine engine are "lifetime limited" by number of engine starts. That is, you are required to tear down the engine and replace certain parts after a certain number of engine cycles.
That makes the economics of the turbine hybrid radically different if you need to start it every time you land vs. only the rare cases where you need to dip into fuel reserves.
For example, the PT6A (a common 500-1000hp turboprop) requires the turbine and compressor disks to be replaced every 16,000 cycles. That's about 5 years of commercial service at 4x round trips per day. But if you only start the engine once in every 10 flights, now those components (theoretically) last for 50 years of flying.
There aren't that many existing flight routes that will fit into the 125 mile range (though the existence of this plane might change that), so I suspect we will see most of these planes go into service on slightly longer routes. So they will probably still need one cycle per flight.
Though... The video isn't quite clear if the 125 miles is what they can fly without starting the turbines or if it's what they can fly without needing the turbines ready to act as an emergency reserve. I actually suspect it's the later and this aircraft can make it to 200+ miles without starting the turbines.
Where I live, there aren't that many 125 mile flights, but there are a lot of 200 mile fights.
I also suspect the turbines are sized so that only need to start one of the two turbines on most flights, which would extend lifetime a lot. Ideally the turbines would be sized so that one is enough for cruising, and with two you can actually charge the batteries after a go-around (enough to enable a second and third go-around)
Because the required buffer is HUGE and we’re at a point where electric planes barely have enough energy for the actual route. So they’re doing the sensible thing here, flying the actual route electrically and falling back to combustion if the plane needs to divert.
Yup. And to bring this point home:
"Only" doubling the battery capacity likely eats well over half of the payload capacity, in terms of mass. So your 38 seat plane is now a 19 seat (or fewer) plane.