> It uses electric motors for zero-emission short hops up to 124 miles and backup reserve generators for an extended hybrid range up to 300–500 miles.
I was wondering how they're gonna deal with alternate airports and "fuel" reserves, but it seems they also have generators on board (supposedly used in case of emergency / unplanned detours).
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.
Yeah, could be. The article linked here had very few details on the generators, besides calling it "hybrid electric" which led me to google a bit and found those ranges, but not additional info on how it'll be used. I guess we'll find out mroe when they start flying routes.
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Lots of places have water or mountains preventing car or train travel or making it go the long way around. Ferries are slow. Those would be natural applications for this. Tallinn-Helsinki city pair for example.
I wonder, if this can get approved or certified somehow now, if then modifications and improvements are relatively easy, as long as many aspects like the pilot interface stays the same. Battery technology improves constantly after all.
As an example, going from the current 200 km range to 400 could make it very useful in numerous regions certainly.
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 :)
I've flown from Helsinki to Tampere, under 200 km, long long time ago. The cabin personnel had to push the refreshments trolley uphill and downhill the aisle as there was not much level flight portion. I don't really know why it even existed as a route. National carrier and I assume there was a subsidy involved. Back then there was not much security so there was a lot less overhead. Still, a direct train route and road exists and all, so it was very redundant.
27 mins endurance (?) for $5 of power. Not bad. I rent a 172 and have been paying a $5/h fuel surcharge for the past few months due war in Iran - but at UK avgas prices 27 mins in my plane would be $55ish. Haven’t looked into the details but kind of crazy impact on economics of aviation if this size plane (10x 172 MTOW) can actually do useful short haul
I’m thinking they got this wrong by an order of magnitude.
The region they did this flight in charges ~$.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.
Yeah, fully charging my EV (0-100%) at home on night-time discounted electricity of $0.07/kWh would cost me $6, so even allowing for really cheap electricity this doesn't feel right.
A Dornier 328 (roughly similar in size) has two 1625 kW engines. Heart stated they "delivered more than one megawatt of power" during the flight, so maybe comparable to one of the Dornier's engines at 60% power? Even the DC-3 could take off with one engine but 60% seems iffy.
At 1000 kW and $0.10/kWh (being very generous I think), the plane would be using $100/h (at 1000 kW level) or $1.67/minute. You'd blow past $5 in 3 minutes.
I don't like that they don't share the basic numbers. It's as if they don't want folks doing the math.
I assume being electric that the maintenance costs will also be much lower. How much do you spend annually on engine maintenance?
Well I just rent so no idea. Not sure they will end up lower as presumably it will all need to be conducted by a FAA double-starred technician who is not just vibe coding it
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?
It has a diesel generator onboard, which provides the reserve.
You never get to hear what these planes sound like in these promo videos
Electric aircraft that use normal propellers are significantly quieter than their combustion counterparts. Here's a short video of some takeoffs and landings from both.[1]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXm4TnaXDWc
Truth, they could have totally taken the opportunity in that video to demonstrate how much quieter it is, but unfortunately it has a soundtrack on it.
All FedEx express packages in my area come and go via a dedicated twin-prop plane that flies 35 miles to the hub. I'm sending a package today, and $14 of the 54$ total is a fuel surcharge. I wonder if I will be seeing electricity surcharges in the future.
Do you happen to live in Alaska? Or is this common in the US?
Most of the Fedex feeder aircraft are single-turboprop Cessna 208B Super Cargomasters (stretched Caravans). There are also larger feeder routes served by ATR twin turboprops, but most of the small out-stations are served by 208Bs for air freight.
Does anyone know if there is a theoretical limit for how energy dense a battery could be?
I wonder if there is a possible future where some sort of commercial long haul flights could be done by a fully electric plane. I've never gotten a great answer on this, and maybe we don't have an answer for certain since battery chemistry is some sense is still early days
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.
Where does 12kw/kg come from? A specific type of battery? That sounds like the energy density for lithium alone. There may be architectures like flow batteries which could get close for some chemistries, but a standard battery (intercalation of ions) cannot get remotely close, even in theory.
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".
> Powered entirely by batteries, X1 used approximately $5 worth of electricity during its first flight
It's fun to look at the arithmetic behind this to pull out the assumptions. To lift a 25000 lb mass 1100 ft in the air requires just over 10kWh, but that's assuming no air resistance or friction, so let's triple the energy needed to 30 KWh.
Let's add another 10 kWh for forward distance covered (assuming it was mostly gliding). Then let's pad it up to 50kWh for anything else. If they say that was $5 in electricity that implies an electricity price of $0.10/kWh, which is possible with utility scale solar.
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.
300kW seems very low compared to equivalent jet powered planes, which output an order of magnitude more power for a 30 seater plane. Even if the electric drivetrain is far more efficient than a jet engine it stretches credulity.
Which of my numbers is off?
Ooo, sneaky. Not being familiar with flight verbiage, I didn't catch the "27 minute mission" being different than a 27 minute long flight!
> 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.
Planes still need like half throttle to maintain altitude, that’s why airplane engines are rebuilt every few thousand hours vs lasting hundreds of thousands of miles (tens of thousands of hours) for a car engine that only uses a small fraction of its power to keep a car moving.
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.
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I don't believe the $5 cost either.
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. I wonder why they don't push the idea of it being a hybrid more, as it seems to me a lot of useful routes are going to rely on the generators.
I'd love to see something that can do around 250mi. It would be nice to electrify transit in the Texas Triangle if we end up never being able to actually build useful HSR.
I wish them luck on continuing to try!
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.
There's regular DEN to COS flights by United, every hour on the hour. Sometimes can be faster than driving, would be a great one to replace. Also ORD to MKE. A lot of small routes that are about 100 miles that are equally inconvenient to drive.
>Also places like Denver -> Ski resorts (Vail/Aspen/Crested Butte) are 2 - 3hr drives
See also: Boston and NYC to Cape Cod and the Hamptons.
The electric/green angle helps with these kinds of routes too.
>"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.
> Millions of people in the US live in places a 2+hr drive to the nearest major airport
If its >2 hour drive to the airport this plane probably isn't going to take you there on pure-electric power, that's my point. If you drive 65MPH for two hours, you've gone further than this thing can fly (on pure battery).
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.
What happens when a large amount of these batteries get submerged in fresh or salt water?
Island hopping is the usual sales pitch for these planes.
Maybe from mainland to islands if there's enough range for the round-trip. Otherwise many islands are not going to have the electrical infrastructure to handle the charging demands.
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.
Appx 5% of us domestic flights, 1200 per day.
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.
My guess is most of those are passengers from Milwaukee connecting in Chicago. You could take the train, but then you'd be in downtown Chicago, and have to take Uber or the El to O'Hare. That's a big hassle and takes a while.
San Francisco - Napa Valley
Booze Cruise aka "Winetasting" for the tech crowd
Fly sustainable, guzzle some fermented bio grapes, ...
They want to push the 'all electric range' angle, but the people who buy it know what it can do.
Yeah, reading a bit more it does seem like this experimental version is to really test the battery electric components but the actual plane they're looking to put on sale seems to be sold as like a plug-in hybrid.
Remember the days when people laughed at the range and charge times of first-gen electric vehicles?
I agree these numbers are likely to improve. I'm purely thinking about this particular model at this particular time.
I'm mostly just wondering why they're making such a big point talking about this being a battery electric plane when the actual commercial variant they hope to sell will likely be mostly used like a plug-in hybrid (I'd imagine).
> The ES-30 is a conventional fixed-wing, 30-seat hybrid-electric regional airliner
It’s funny they tell you the weight at takeoff. That’s uh not changing.
Presumably the generators have fuel that can be depleted
$5 of energy at even $0.10/kWh is 50 kWh. One horsepower is roughly ~754 watts. 50 kWh for 27 min at 100% efficiency means 111 kW sustained output which is 147 HP. The math is wrong, there’s no way this plane flies with only 147 HP. That’s roughly what a Cessna 172 has for engine power.
Conclusion: AI wrote this article and it has at least one and probably several more errors.
GOOD POINT by my wife. Is there a super high density battery they could use just to have available to count for reserves even if it’s one time use. Just plan never to use it in normal flight.
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.
Electric regional air travel is something I’m really excited about.
I'd prefer a train but since I live in Iceland this would be perfect.
Your user handle complements the message perfectly
Electric aircraft makes no economic sense, but I'd want to see them flying one day nonetheless.
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.
> 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.
could we relax the security around electric planes, because they don't carry as much highly explosive material?
that could make it much more convenient and appealing as a travel method
You don't see megawatt-hours of energy in batteries as potentially dangerous?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Jet fuel, like diesel are not flammable, let alone explosive. They are combustible.
Gasoline on the other hand …
They cary the same amount of energy
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.
looks like an interesting and sensible approach, will have to see if I can pull together details of the battery system
beta also seems to do their flight testing in plattsburgh, ny, anyone know why?
New York State is funding Plattsburgh as an electric aviation R&D hub, and actually gave BETA $20M in a grant.
could someone explain to me how that $5 spend is lying to me. i know elec is cheap, but that cheap?
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.
$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) = $30
(Add residual kinetic energy upon landing too)
Side note: Heart also has a weight issue here they'll need to overcome if they want to certify under FAR Part 23 (as their 19-pax spec implies); TOGW limit for that is 19,000 lbm.
I tried to run a napkin calculation, and that 5$ figure must be quoted per seat (30 seats). And a 'first flight' might be very very short, like 15 minutes of flying or less.
During certain hours of the day in California, electricity is essentially free due to solar overproduction, which sometimes causes negative wholesale prices.
VTOL aircraft have the same distance capabilities and make more sense in a lot more scenarios than this, with way more flexibility. It’s obviously larger but I’m just not sure of potential advantages over other modes of transport currently available and in the near future
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
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.
Air transport in general, not just this airplane, could benefit from a catapult or winch takeoff at airports. It could be electric, it would reduce the most energy-demanding part of flight and make takeoff safer.
They could also use electric tugs to and from the runway, not just at the terminal.
>"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.
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