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> 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.
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 :)
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.

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?
Also a short video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEudbAjschs
You never get to hear what these planes sound like in these promo videos
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?
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.
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.

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 don't believe the $5 cost either.
Link to the first flight on YouTube if you click through from the article:

https://youtu.be/fEudbAjschs?is=707pjOJKf4chS4O2

$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.

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.
>"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.

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.
Island hopping is the usual sales pitch for these planes.
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.
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.
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...

It’s funny they tell you the weight at takeoff. That’s uh not changing.
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.
Electric regional air travel is something I’m really excited about.
Electric aircraft makes no economic sense, but I'd want to see them flying one day nonetheless.
looks like an interesting and sensible approach, will have to see if I can pull together details of the battery system
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

beta also seems to do their flight testing in plattsburgh, ny, anyone know why?
could someone explain to me how that $5 spend is lying to me. i know elec is cheap, but that cheap?
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
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 Electric Aircraft

"Largest" is just straight-up a false claim. [Solar Impulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse) and [Helios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype...) were electric and had over double the wingspan, just to name a few of the ~dozen examples.

Heart's engineers should be proud of this genuinely impressive accomplishment, but they need to rein in whoever is writing their PR pieces.