World’s first all-electric passenger aircraft takes flight.
The world’s first all-electric passenger aircraft has successfully taken to the sky, CNN reported.
The Alice was successfully launched on Tuesday morning by the Israeli-founded company Eviation Aircraft from Washington’s Grant County International Airport, according to the report. It further stated that the zero-emission aircraft flew for eight minutes at a height of 3,500 feet.
“This is history,” Gregory Davis, Eviation’s president and CEO, told CNN Business.”We have not seen the propulsion technology change in the aircraft since we went from the piston engine to the turbine engine. It was the 1950s that was the last time you saw an entirely new technology like this come together.”
With battery technology similar to that of an electric car or a cell phone and 30 minutes of charging, the nine-passenger Alice will be able to fly for one hour to two hours.
Based on today’s battery technology, Eviation is targeting a range of 250 nautical miles. As recently as April, Eviation had said the Alice would be able to fly about 440 nautical miles. The plane has a max cruise speed of 250 knots or 287 miles per hour. For reference, a Boeing 737 has a max cruise speed of 588 miles per hour.
Since its formation in 2015, Eviation has been advancing Alice. The company hopes to use the information gathered during Tuesday’s flight to review the next steps and deliver aircraft to customers by 2027 — though Eviation warns that plan is subject to change.
“We’ve actually generated, frankly, terabytes of data with the data acquisition systems that we had on the aircraft, so we’re going to take a couple of weeks actually and review it to see how the aircraft performs versus our models and our analysis,” Davis said. “From there, we’ll understand what we need to do next.”
According to the company, it will take until 2025 to construct an FAA-certified aircraft. After that, there will be a short period of flight testing before Alices can be delivered to clients. Currently, Eviation wants to have Alice operational by 2027.
