Historic test flight brings electric aircraft a step closer

Electric-powered cars are the likely future of motoring. So why not electric-powered aircraft as the future of commercial aviation?

In theory, the answer is an absolute ‘yes’ for the same reasons that governments, regulators and auto companies are embracing electric vehicles: fossil fuels are a finite and expensive resource with many environmental drawbacks.

Challenges still to be solved for electric-powered aviation

But there are challenges for aviation, particularly profit-driven air travel. For one, batteries that can get a heavy aircraft into the air and keep it there are themselves extremely big and heavy. The electric aircraft also need to be as quick as the ones flying now, because fee-paying passengers aren’t willing to take twice as long to get where they’re going.

“So if you want to add more power to a plane, you need to get a bigger battery, and to get that plane airborne despite the weight, you’ll need even bigger battery that’s more powerful, but that means more weight. And then you’ll need an even bigger battery to offset that weight. Oh, you get the point…,” explains an article published in Business Insider.

Then there’s the safety and regulatory aspects. “If something goes wrong, you can’t stop,” highlights Roei Ganzarski, CEO of MagniX, an electric propulsion technology company that aims to disrupt the aerospace and defence industry with advanced electric engines.

“You can’t pull to the side of the road. There’s only one place for that airplane to go. And so the regulatory stringency is much higher. The requirements for reliability, redundancy and safety are much higher for a good reason. You have no alternate.”

First large-aircraft flight lasts 30 minutes

But advances are being made all the time. Just over a week ago, MagniX made the first flight of the largest all-electric commuter aircraft yet, in the skies above Moses Lake in Washington State in the US.

The aircraft, a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, climbed to 2 500 feet and flew for 30 minutes in what was described as a successful test. It performed “flawlessly,” according to Steve Crane, chief test pilot for AeroTEC, an aerospace technology company that works with MagniX.

View a video of the flight here:

Flight used less power than expected

The choice of the Caravan was intentional, Ganzarski told the media. It is a widely-used airframe for both passenger and cargo flights and has logged more than 20-million flight hours worldwide.

When it landed after the test flight, the 560kW (750-horsepower) Magni500 propulsion system still had 10% more energy capacity than MagniX and AeroTEC expected it would, which is a big positive.

Ganzarski says a production version of the electric Caravan, dubbed the eCaravan, would reduce operating costs by 40-80% per flight hour, significantly changing the routes operators are able to fly with it and the cost of flying in general.

The 30-minute test flight, which would normally consume more than US$300-worth of jet fuel, used less than US$6 of electricity.

“Imagine what that does … to the bottom line or profitability of an airline,” Ganzarski said. “Now they can fly from and to airports and on schedules that they couldn’t have imagined before. Now, they don’t have to justify filling 70% of their seats flying into a major airport because that’s the only way to make a few percentage points in earnings.”