Alice, the world's first all-electric passenger airplane, took its first flight yesterday. Read about the plane, which is one of the boldest solutions to one of the most difficult obstacles to a zero-emission future:
all-electric passenger airplane looks like it could be at home in the sea. Instead of a traditional metal tube, its fuselage resembles an orca — with a sharp nose and a wide body that tapers dramatically to a T-shaped fin at the rear. Its wings are long, knifelike. The plane’s twin propellers, driven by quiet, piston-free motors, thrum like the future..
Bar-Yohay is a scientist by training, and his breakthrough came when he calculated that building an electric airplane from scratch — with lightweight composite materials, super-efficient electric motors, fly-by-wire systems — could shave off enough weight to extend the range to 400 miles or more. “If you built a very, very slick aircraft,” he says, “there was a mission profile that worked.”
The limitations of electric flight might seem to outweigh the opportunities. But aviation’s contribution to global warming is more significant than commonly understood. “Flying is by far the worst thing we do for the environment,” says Jeff Engler, CEO of the aviation startup Wright Electric. He points to research that the emissions linked to a single seat aboard a round-trip trans-Atlantic flight can wipe out the carbon benefits of eating vegetarian for a decade.
This means there are practical limits to what pure, battery-powered aviation can accomplish — even with hoped-for advances in technology. Other innovators hope tofuels like hydrogen. Wright Electric is an Albany, New York-based startup with backing from the U.S. military and NASA. It has developed an ultra-light, ultrapowerful, two-megawatt motor capable of operating at 40,000 feet.
Getting Alice to this moment has been a trial by fire, all too literally. Eviation’s first prototype debuted to rave reviews at the Paris Air Show in 2019, but in early 2020, a fire in the lithium-ion battery pack destroyed that aircraft. The lesson was as valuable as it was painful. The Eviation team redesigned the power system to ensure that a single failed battery cell can’t spark a packwide failure, and the plane can complete a safe, powered landing.
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