As of 2017, in Which Country Can One Take the Shortest Commercial Flight in the World?
As aviation companies around the globe look to lessen the carbon footprint of air travel, their focus has turned to electric propulsion. But until this past Tuesday, electric commercial planes existed only in theory. On the morn of December eleven, Vancouver-based Harbour Air changed the game with the first successful examination flying of an all-electrical aircraft. Piloted by the airline's founder and CEO, Greg McDougall, a 1956 de Havilland Beaver seaplane dubbed the ePlane, which had been retrofitted with a 750-horsepower magni500 motor by MagniX, took off from Harbour Air's dock on the Fraser River in Richmond, British Columbia, flying for a total of 4 minutes.
"I've been convinced for some time that the future of transportation generally—and certainly aviation—is electric," McDougall tells AD. His airline was the first in Northward America to get carbon neutral, in 2007, then it's no surprise that it's a pioneer for zero-emission aircraft. The challenge facing airlines seeking to go dark-green with propulsion is that current technology leaves electric engines relatively weak for their weight, a major problem for larger planes. The engines also take brusk battery life. But neither issue is a bulwark for Harbour Air—it operates small shipping, primarily de Havilland Beavers and Turbo Otters, that wing short-haul routes across the Pacific Northwest. Some 70 percent of those routes are almost 30 minutes in length, which works well for today'south electric engine technology.
The ePlane during its groundbreaking examination flight on December x, 2019.
Thus Harbour Air is a unique position to pursue an all-electric fleet—the company's ultimate goal—which it volition do by converting the planes it already owns. "It is significantly more cost- and time-constructive to convert one of our existing shipping than to develop a brand-new paradigm," says McDougall. "The aircraft that we're flying have been effectually for many, many years, and for u.s.a. to exist able to retrofit with an electric engine kind of brusk-circuits the whole development of having to build an aircraft around the electric motor, which makes things extremely more simple in terms of certification."
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Tuesday'south test flight of the ePlane is the offset footstep in the certification process, which Harbour Air anticipates volition take ane to two years. Afterward that, the retrofits tin begin for the rest of the armada, and passengers will be able to travel by air without any impact on the surround.
Source: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/worlds-first-all-electric-commercial-airplane-takes-flight
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