World's Largest 106-Foot Electric Plane Takes Maiden Flight In New York (interestingengineering.com) 67
Heart Aerospace's X1, billed as the world's largest battery-electric aircraft, completed a 27-minute maiden flight in New York using more than 1 MW of power and only about $5 worth of electricity. The 106-foot-wingspan demonstrator is a precursor to the company's 30-seat hybrid-electric ES-30 regional airliner, targeted for service in 2031. Interesting Engineering reports: Developed by Heart Aerospace, the X1 demonstrator lifted off from Plattsburgh International Airport in New York on Wednesday, August 12. The piloted aircraft remained in the skies for about 27 minutes and made it to a 1,100-foot altitude above ground level (AGL). According to the Swedish aerospace company, the aircraft has a wingspan of 106 feet (32 meters). It's additionally 76 feet (23 meters) long and has a takeoff weight exceeding 25,000 lbs (11,340 kilograms). "With the first flight of X1, Heart Aerospace has demonstrated electric flight at the scale of a commercial airliner," said Anders Forslund, Heart Aerospace founder and CEO. "Electric commercial aircraft have the potential to fundamentally reshape airline economics and, ultimately, lower the cost ofÂair travelÂfor passengers."
"This is at the heart of our vision for abundant air travel, with electrification enabling more affordable, frequent, and cleaner air service to and from airports closer to home."
You can watch the first flight on YouTube.
"This is at the heart of our vision for abundant air travel, with electrification enabling more affordable, frequent, and cleaner air service to and from airports closer to home."
You can watch the first flight on YouTube.
At least no range anxiety (Score:2)
After all, they always come down.
Units, journalists don't seem to understand Wh (Score:1, Troll)
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"They" in this case likely refers to the reporter/journalist, not necessarily the scientists/engineers behind this project.
Re:Units, journalists don't seem to understand Wh (Score:4, Informative)
They obviously don't speak as precisely as we would like. But I read it completely differently than you did. Maximum power is 1 MW, which is comparable to a twin otter that has with two engines. Same ballpark. Cruising power would be considerably less. Total energy consumed was not stated, other than the equivalent in electricity costs.
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Peak altitude was 1100 feet AGL. Maybe it can be used for crop dusting.
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They claim it can go all they way to 2000 ft AGL, which is an odd spec.
Maybe they're sticking with an adage I first heard years ago relating to hang gliding — "Never go higher than you're willing to fall." Although I would think that, with a conventional aircraft like this is, going higher would give you more options for how far you can go looking to put the bird down after it loses power. Maybe they're just worried about losing their Wi-Fi connection and having the control software turn off or something silly like that.
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That was the peak during the test flight yes. Cruise would be considerably higher, probably comparable to other prop planes.
No it couldn't be used for crop dusting. It's simply not designed for that. This is geared towards short hop passenger service.
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The altitude is limited by the energy contained in the batteries, since most of the energy is undoubtedly expended getting up there. Cruising altitude of prop passenger planes in the past was about 20,000 feet. That would require at least 20x the battery energy that it took to get to 1100 feet, and possibly more due to thinner air and the tradeoff between drag and prop effectiveness.
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I assume by "flow rate" you mean power, which is indeed measured in Watts. The article seems to have its units straight. Perhaps your understanding isn't quite what you think it is?
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The press release just says the batteries provided 1MW. Doesn't say whether it was sustained or peak. Can assume peak.
Uh, what? (Score:1)
using more than 1 MW of power and only about $5 worth of electricity.
1 Megawatt is 1,000 Kilowatts, right?
If 1,000 Kilowatts only costs "about $5", that puts each Kilowatt at about 1/2 cent? Seems kind low...
made it to a 1,100-foot altitude above ground level (AGL)
So this plane flew for 27 minutes 1,100 feet above the ground? Why not higher? (Because it's safer to fall out of the sky at 1,100 feet than at 30,000, LOL?) I wonder how practical it is extrapolate real flight times from such a low-flying example? Do you burn same energy at 30,000 feet as 1,100? How much energy would have been consumed trying to get this plane up to 30,
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Why not higher? Probably because the battery would go dead before they got to 30,000 feet. Gaining altitude requires work!
It does, but is there an advantage in acting as a glider for a portion of the trip after gaining that altitude? I'm guessing airspace clears up significantly above the altitude of paratroopers stepping out to work. Less air resistance too.
Titanium. Carbon fiber. It's hardly weight that's the issue with adding another 20' to that wingspan. It's keeping that aircraft profile fashionably thin for the target audience using ozempic-thin aircraft hangers as a fashion flex.
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It's not ideal to still use fossil fuels, but it could reduce pollution around airports. It could also save money if done right.
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High Efficiency: The ground effect drastically reduces aerodynamic drag, allowing for extended battery range and lower energy use
Zero Emissions: 100% battery-electric propulsion eliminates direct carbon emissions and reduces noise pollution compared to con
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Not only that, you only need a naval captain license (plus the relevant training), but not an airline pilot license.
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Are you just learning about the concept of a prototype in this comments section?
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That's not correct. There are three modes. All-electric, hybrid-30 passenger, and hybrid-25 passenger, with ranges of 200km, 400km, and 800km, respectively. The airframe is to be certified for 20k feet (FL200), with optimal cruise altitudes from 10-15k feet, but this was explicitly described by the company as a "low-altitude test flight".
And to all the people going, "LOL, that's never going to cross the Pacific!" or similar range comments... and? Long haul flights (over 4000km) are only 5% of commercial
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Why not higher? Probably because the battery would go dead before they got to 30,000 feet. Gaining altitude requires work! Longest range would come from flying ground effect the whole way.
Ground effect requires being at lower altitude than the wingspan. Unless that plane is a quarter mile wide, ground effect doesn't play into it. And if it is a quarter mile wide, you'd better hope it doesn't fly into any populated areas. :-)
As others have pointed out, gaining altitude requires some extra energy, but over the duration of the flight, you use less fuel because the air is thinner, resulting in less drag. (This assumes that your propulsion doesn't lose efficiency to match, of course, but I th
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2,000 feet is awfully low for passenger travel but it's plenty high if you're trying to evade radar
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Or its telling us that we are being way overcharged for electricity in our homes.
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It is a perfectly cromulent statement. 1MW = power, $5 = a cost of energy. They are providing both power and (indirectly) energy.
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One kilowatt isn't generally priced as anything. One kilowatt-*hour* is, however, priced.
So they may have actually used this properly, 1MW to take off sounds plausible for an ambitious aircraft in terms of power to take off and climb, but average of 100KW over the flight including the descent to get to a rough area of $5 over a half hour flight (well, still that's a pretty cheap energy rate by modern standards, but it's order of magnitude at least).
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1MW to take off sounds plausible for an ambitious aircraft in terms of power to take off and climb,
The article says 1MW (?) for the entire flight...
And also, the plane weighs 25,000 pounds at take-off and 25,000 pounds at touch-down... That's a lot of mass to push around for 27 minutes and raising up 1,100 feet in the air in the process.
but average of 100KW over the flight including the descent
I have no idea where you came up with that number...
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The article says 1MW (?) for the entire flight...
No, it says:
"It reportedly delivered more than one megawatt (MW) of power during the flight."
At some point during the flight it went over a MW.
I have no idea where you came up with that number...
This one is a bit weirder. They don't cite a rate, so I generously went super cheap, 0.10/kwh which is a smidge lower than even Idaho. Mainly because I wanted to be rough order of magnitude without doing hard calculation, so $5 becomes 50kwh in that scheme. If you use 50kwh in 0.5 hours, then 50/0.5 == 100kw average power in order to use up $5 of super cheap electricity.
I cannot speak to the power required to climb and maintain lift.
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the only thing clear is that the marketing department wrote the article.
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Since they don't seem to say what battery chemistry they use on their website or in their press releases I would tend to assume that this is a realistic concern because they are probably using NCM. (If they were using something less hazardous, they would probably brag about it.)
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EV fires are rarer than ICE fires (and slower spreading [springer.com] as well), so given that the competition is fuel-based....
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So this plane flew for 27 minutes 1,100 feet above the ground? Why not higher? (Because it's safer to fall out of the sky at 1,100 feet than at 30,000, LOL?) I wonder how practical it is extrapolate real flight times from such a low-flying example? Do you burn same energy at 30,000 feet as 1,100? How much energy would have been consumed trying to get this plane up to 30,000 feet compared to 1,100 feet?
Real-world flight times are likely to be miserable for most purposes. Currently, this plane has a maximum altitude of 2,000 feet. Not sure why. But the plane has a maximum airspeed of 140 knots. For context, a 737 has a cruising speed of 450 knots.
In practice, this means that this plane is only suitable for very-short-distance flights where a jet would not achieve normal cruising altitudes or speeds.
A nonstop flight from SJC to DFW takes about 3 hours and 35 minutes, give or take, for 1440 miles. At cr
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It's a replacement for current turboprops, on their shorter routes. This is a picture of this plane:
https://www.heartaerospace.com... [heartaerospace.com]
This is the De Havilland Dash 8:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And the ATR 42:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Note some similarities?
Re:Uh, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
If 1,000 Kilowatts only costs "about $5", that puts each Kilowatt at about 1/2 cent? Seems kind low...
Time to turn in your geek card. A "watt" is a unit of *power*. People pay for *energy*. Energy = power X time.
Electricity is often sold in energy units called kWh (which is 3.6 megajoules). At a retail price of 20 cents/kWh, five dollars of electric ital energy is 25 kWh.
With a power consumption rate of 1000 kW, that amount of energy is used in 90 seconds. Presumably, the 1MW peak power rate was only used briefly, just like a car with a 300hp peak power engine usually cruises around only generating a couple of dozen hp.
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All correct, but you are mixing up consumer prices - 20 cents per kWh - with industrial or large customer prices.
Which are in the 5 cent range, or in Germany 8 EURO cents (mostly including grid costs).
Max power is used during take off, then you cruise.
The plane is a prototype. New batteries are just waiting to be installed.
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So this plane flew for 27 minutes 1,100 feet above the ground? Why not higher?
"...completed a 27-minute maiden flight in New York..."
I'd go with "because your first flight is a proof-of-viability experiment not a test-to-destruction flight".
(Because it's safer to fall out of the sky at 1,100 feet than at 30,000, LOL?)
Literally, yes. You'd want to test things like gear retraction and extension and confirm general flight-worthiness before you're testing cabin pressurization.
I wonder how practical it is extrapolate real flight times from such a low-flying example?
You probably wouldn't. That kind of information comes from airframe modeling, I'm sure. This kind of flight is about confirming you don't have obvious mechanical defects and a little bi
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Electricity is not priced in kilowatts. However if we assume that they are talking about commercial electric rates, the avg for US is about $0.14/kWh. So $5 worth is about 35kWh. Since the flight lasted 27 minutes, if it were consuming 1MW the whole time, that would be a total of (27/60)*1MW = 0.45MWh = 450 kWh, which would cost 450*$0.14 = $63. So, we can infer that the flight was not at 1MW the whole time, and since the energy used was 35kWh, the average over 27 minutes was only a little less than 1kW.
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Apparently you didn't understand that Iron Man was not a documentary.
No one is stupid enough to test a brand new design of a aircraft by going anywhere near the maximum altitude and using anywhere near all the fuel. You can ask the people who've tried, if you are gifted with a Ouija board.
Take off, do a limited number of pre-planned maneuvers, then land is pretty much how every aircraft's first flight goes. Extrapolating anything about the plane's ultimate capability when you don't have a clue what was on t
I'm amazed (Score:2)
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"The ES-30 is envisioned as a conventional fixed-wing and hybrid-electric regional airliner"
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There are to be three variants of the ES-300: an all-electric 200km version, a hybrid 30-seat 400km version, and a hybrid 25-seat 800km version. And the ES-300 airframe very much is not some existing airframe.
So... (Score:5, Funny)
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they weren't as aerodynamically efficient being smaller than the largest.
Headline made me snort (Score:3)
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I was wondering - is there something special about being 106 feet long? Like a category in the Guinness book of record or something?
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Okay, see, I was wondering how many other 106-foot electric planes there are and why it's a thing.
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My first thought was that there must be larger planes that are not 106 feet and that they were excluding all planes that are not 106 feet when they claim to have the largest. Sort of like "the biggest fish in this tiny little pond"
I wonder what the largest is if they don't restrict it to just the 106 foot ones.
Not what we need (Score:2)
"This is at the heart of our vision for abundant air travel, with electrification enabling more affordable, frequent, and cleaner air service to and from airports closer to home."
That quote is an unintentionally ironic illustration of Jevons paradox [wikipedia.org]. Apparently the goal of electrifying airplanes is not to reduce their impact on the planet. Instead his goal is to increase the amount of air travel, which would likely end up increasing the total energy used for it, not decreasing it.
Its a first step, the easy part, ... (Score:2)
Enough baby steps and we might get an aircraft that outperforms liquid fueled aircraft. Personally I am still leaning towards the liquids, think
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Admittedly, this is work-in-progress on building something so I should cut them some slack. It does seem tough to get over that energy density x payload = range issue. True that early electric autos were also range-starved, waiting for the better LiPo's to be developed and scaled to cost.
But if the Wikipedia is correct that "106 foot wingspan plane" maxes at 110nm range currently. Not sure what sort of altitude that includes. 110 miles to ride a plane is a tough sell, even if you are just trying to c
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It all depends on the energy source.
If it's clean energy (or at least significantly cleaner than burning aviation fuel), no problem if more energy will be used, less pollution will happen.
Even if the goal is not less emissions but prettier bottom line, I'm still all for it.
106 foot (Score:3)
If it's the world's largest 106 foot electric plane, how many other 106 foot electric planes did it beat out? And why does a plane need feet?
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Beat me to it!
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The feet are needed to accelerate the plane to takeoff velocities in order to conserve battery mass.
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have they tried steam catapults?
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How do you even fly a plane without meters in the cockpit?
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It's over an order of magnitude heavier than the largest of those (Helios).
There's a difference between an aircraft being built to lift itself and perhaps a tiny payload and be paperlight vs. an aircraft designed for actual commercial service carrying passengers.
How large is the world's smallest 106-foot electri (Score:2)
And for the first passenger-carrying routes (Score:2)
Many years ago - the mid-seventies - there was a seaplane that went from the foot of Wall St. to the foot of Walnut St, Philly. Bet this could do, say, DC, or maybe Boston.
Good Start but Far Short (Score:2)