Electric aviation took a big step forward in June when a Massachusetts-based airline announced it had placed the world’s first order for a commercial all-electric passenger airplane. The Alice, a three-engine, battery-powered airplane that can fly up to 1,000 kilometers on a single charge, will be delivered to Cape Air in 2022.
The Alice, manufactured by the Israel-based startup Eviation Aircraft, has not yet been certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. However, the company’s e-airplane “could be certified right now to fly,” insists Lior Zivan, Eviation’s chief technology officer. The company is “anticipating full certification by 2022.”
The Alice will be powered by a 900-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery manufactured by the South Korean company Kokam Battery. (For comparison, the Tesla Model 3 electric car uses a 50- to 75-kWh battery pack.)
Cape Air flies to popular vacation destinations, including Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, and serves a total of 35 cities with routes in the Caribbean and in the U.S. Northeast, Midwest, and Montana. According to Trish Lorino, Cape Air vice president of marketing and public relations, the company’s historic order of Eviation’s Alice aircraft “makes sense for us because we are a short-haul carrier.” Lorino notes that “for 30 years, we have specialized in serving short-haul routes, particularly to niche and island destinations.”
The carrier currently operates 88 Cessna 402s and four Islander planes (all of which seat nine passengers) made by the British company Britten-Norman. The nine-seater Alice e-aircraft thus fits within the Cape Air fleet’s general size and passenger capacity.
Although the carrier has not yet decided which routes will feature the Alice, company officials anticipate keeping the plane close to the company’s Massachusetts headquarters. “Short-haul routes in our ‘backyard’ such as Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Provincetown would be the likely routes,” Lorino says.
Eviation CEO Omar Bar-Ohay showcased the Alice at the Paris Air Show in June and spoke about the differences inherent in designing an all-electric airplane and a conventional, petroleumfueled plane. For example, no fuel is burned during flight, so the plane’s takeoff weight (6,350 kilograms or 14,000 pounds) is more or less its landing weight (and the battery accounts for 3,700 kg).
Each of the Alice’s three motors has only one moving part, compared with about 10 in a standard (petroleum-fueled) reciprocating engine. “Obviously, electric propulsion has a major advantage in both reliability and maintenance,” Zivan says.
The e-aircraft’s three engines include two “pusher” motors mounted at the rear ends of the wingtips and another pusher motor mounted at the rear of the plane. All three are designed to have double or triple redundancy in their components. As for the electrical system, “the battery is designed in such a way that any malfunction or failure will result in a minimal reduction in the capacity, if any,” Zivan says.
Because the Alice relies only on electric charge, the cost of operating the plane is expected to be lower than for its petroleum-fueled counterparts. And the noise emitted by a plane with no internal combustion engines is also lower. This is especially true for the Alice, given its ability (unique to e-aircraft) to vary its propeller speeds to compensate for crosswinds and to lower cabin noise.
As an early standard-bearer in electric passenger flight, Cape Air says its decision to purchase the Alice was also partly motivated by the company’s “deep sense of social responsibility,” Lorino says. The company’s headquarters is 100 percent solar powered, she says, and the company hopes to use sustainable energy sources to charge its fleet of e-airplanes. The number of new electric aircraft that will join Cape Air’s fleet has not been finalized.
“Our hope is that electric-powered flight is a reality in the next decade and that there is adoption from the public to view this as a viable, natural form of transportation,” she says. —Mark Anderson
A version of this article appears in our Energywise blog.
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