What Could a Future with Electric Planes Look Like?

Electric planes have been around since the 1970s, but they haven’t taken off. What’s keeping them grounded?

Many companies have been betting on battery-powered planes for a cleaner future. But even though electric planes have been around since the 1970s, they haven’t taken off. What’s keeping them grounded?

In the late 1800s, two French army officers experimented with electricity to propel an airship, but they ran into problems when the battery just couldn’t hold enough energy.

This would become a recurring problem for the next 100 years. When nickel-cadmium batteries were invented, the first flight with an electric motor took off but lasted less than 15 minutes. Then, in the 1980s, lithium-ion batteries were invented.

They could store more power than ever before, leading to planes like the Solar Impulse 2. Starting in 2015, the solar-powered aircraft spent 16 months flying around the world, except it flew at an average speed of 28 to 34 mph.

Solar Impulse 2 is part of a movement in recent years to develop alternative energy and technologies, especially when people and governments started realizing just how bad flying was for the environment. The aviation industry emitted about 1 billion tons of CO2 in 2019. That’s about 2.5% of global emissions. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s almost as much as the entire continent of South America emits in a year.

Electric planes have been on people’s minds for a while, but two big problems have been keeping them grounded. First, the technology’s not quite ready. When you’re trying to get an electric plane off the ground, you want a battery that packs a lot of punch in a little package, but… A battery’s efficiency, or ability to hold power, is measured in specific energy. Right now, even the best batteries have a specific energy of only 250 watt-hours per kilogram, but we have to get closer to 800 to really start flying, and that is still nothing compared to jet fuel’s specific energy, which is nearly 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. Think about it like those computers from the ’80s. They were huge but much less powerful than the sleek ones we have today. Right now, batteries are like those ’80s computers. They’re not as powerful as they need to be, and they’re not just big, they’re also heavy. 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.

But even if engineers design a plane around the shortfalls in battery tech, they have to take on the industry’s second hurdle, certification. In the US, that means getting permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to test and fly an electric plane. Companies have to prove every inch of their aircraft is safe, passing a series of tests, one of which is to make sure the battery cells won’t catch fire.

The FAA amended its rules in 2016 to allow electric propulsion systems in airplanes built for up to 19 passengers. The real problem, though, is that certification, even with these amendments, takes years, so companies have gotten creative. They’ve started to retrofit old planes to get certified quicker. Retrofitting has happened in phases.

The first phase was from the Slovenian company Pipistrel. It created the world’s first all-electric two-seater plane back in 2007 by putting an electric engine in a glider.

Today, those planes are used for pilot training. The second phase: a hybrid. Los Angeles company Ampaire replaced one of the two engines in a 1973 Cessna with an electric one.

Ampaire hopes to get its new plane, the Electric Eel, certified for commercial flights by 2021. And, finally, over in Vancouver, electric-motor manufacturer MagniX and Vancouver-based airline Harbour Air flew a retrofitted 62-year-old plane.

A 15-minute test flight in December 2019 made it the world’s first all-electric commercial plane to fly. It proved that electricity could take off. The two companies’ goal is now to electrify the rest of Harbour Air’s fleet of more than 40 seaplanes and have it certified by the end of 2021. So, retrofitting seems perfect. The problem, though, is that it limits you to what the plane structure is already built for. If the original motor and fuel weigh, say, 1,000 pounds and you remove them then you have a limit of 1,000 pounds to work within. Electric motors are smaller and lighter than gas ones, but remember, those batteries are heavy. So you lose range because batteries, for the same amount of power, are so much heavier than fuel. While Harbour Air and MagniX figured out the balance of weight in their plane, the range took a hit.

Their electric plane can go over 100 miles, a little less than the distance from Seattle to Vancouver, but for electric planes to be successful long-term, they’ll have to go farther. Israeli company Eviation might have a solution. Instead of retrofitting an old plane, its engineers built a plane from scratch.

The nine-seater plane, Alice, was designed around the battery to reduce weight. That battery’s all over the place. It’s under the floor, it’s in the wings, it’s the fuselage in different locations. Alice, in theory, could fly up to 650 miles, roughly a flight from Las Vegas to Denver, but because it was built from the ground up, getting her certified is taking longer.

Each electric plane in development is different, but they all have one thing in common: they’re going after flights under 500 miles. And while it may not seem like an impressive distance, these short-range electric planes could solve a major problem in travel. In 2018, a little less than half of all air tickets sold globally were for flights under 500 miles, but instead of using small, efficient planes designed for these shorter routes, we often use expensive airliners built to fly thousands of miles. These planes are most efficient if they’re able to cruise for a long period, but on a flight that’s 50 minutes, these planes go up, and they come right back down. Currently, a 109-mile flight from Los Angeles to San Diego emits about 110 pounds of CO2. In the last four decades, flying regionally with commercial jets got so expensive for airlines in the US, Europe, and Australia that they began stopping service to regional airports.

Of the 20,000 FAA-approved runways in the US, only 2.5% are currently active. The regional airports left are running at a loss or even going bankrupt, but electric planes could be a fix, and there’s already an infrastructure for them. Omer says 11,000 of those 20,000 US runways could support an electric plane, which is a lot cheaper to operate. Alice could save about $800 per flight hour compared to a normal turboprop plane. Noertker: It’s a tenfold increase in the number of potential destinations, all the while not having the significant burdens on the communities of noise and pollutions.

As for the distant future, electric aviation could come in all kinds of forms.

Uber is already working on an electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, or eVTOL, that could pick you up right at your house and fly you to an airport. Even big players like Airbus, Boeing, and Rolls-Royce are betting on this future.

Everyone we talked to said that’s still about 15 years off, but now that an electric plane has proven successful, those in the industry are hopeful that investment into battery development will start rolling in. Because to break out of that infinite power and weight loop we were talking about, we’re gonna need more efficient batteries for electric planes to take off. The question is, when does it make economic sense and who has the many billions it will take to bring a product like this to market in 15 years? So, is it the future? Absolutely.

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