It appears the era of the electric plane is off and running:
From Harbour Air
This morning a small Canadian regional airline made history on a quiet stretch of the Fraser River in Richmond, B.C., just south of Vancouver, when its top executive took the controls of a classic Burrard Beaver floatplane retrofitted with a new electric motor, and lifted off to the cheers of an assembled crowd of media and well-wishers.
Harbour Air founder and CEO Greg McDougall completed the five minute test flight without burning a drop of fossil fuel. In doing so, he moved a big step closer towards realizing his long-time vision of creating the world’s first all-electric airline.
“That was just like flying a Beaver but a Beaver on electric steroids.” McDougall told a crowd of reporters immediately following the flight. “It was such a great performance we had no way of knowing how it would perform until we flew it, and it was amazing.”[Canada’s National Observer]
I think it’s great they retrofitted an old pillar of the flight community, rather than going through the entire rigamarole of designing and manufacturing a brand new – and expensive – airplane. I was complaining to a friend just the other day that, if the United States really considered that we face an emergency when it comes to climate change, we wouldn’t have gone the Tesla route – instead, we’d have researched, designed, and built electric-motor drop-ins for the most popular makes and models of cars, and then trained the car mechanics to perform those drop-ins.
Instead, I suppose we still supply the fossil fuel industry with subsidies. Oh, yes, we do, to the tune of billions of dollars.
Back to the plane, I also found this tidbit from CEO Roei Ganzarsk of the supplier of the batteries, Magnix, even more exciting than this first flight:
For the airlines operating those planes, like Harbour Air, the technology has advantages beyond the carbon footprint. “The operating cost per flight hour will be anywhere between 50% to 80% lower,” says Ganzarski. Flying a traditional nine-passenger plane for an hour costs around $1,200, he says, but a plane retrofitted with an electric system costs around $400 an hour; a plane designed from scratch to be electric costs around $200. The savings come both from the cost of fuel and the fact that electric motors are simpler and therefore require less maintenance. [Fast Company]
That’s the sort of numbers that makes airline executives positively wet their pants. The airlines may begin to peel away from the fossil fuel industry by financing further battery research as they think about the profit enhancements that could come with technology like this. Even if it shortens flight routes, it could be a game changer.
