Electric Aircraft

AeroTEC and magniX successfully conducted the first flight of their eCaravan all-electric Cessna 208B Grand Caravan on Thursday. The 30-minute flight took place at the AeroTEC Flight Test Center, which is located at Grant County International Airport (MWH) in Moses Lake, Washington. According to magniX, the eCaravan is currently the world’s largest all-electric commercial aircraft. […]

France-based VoltAero announced on Tuesday that it has begun flight testing its hybrid-electric Cassio aircraft family from its headquarters at the Royan-Médis Aérodrome. Testing is currently being conducted with VoltAero’s Cassio 1 testbed aircraft, which is powered by two wing-mounted Safran ENGINeUS 45 electric motors, each driving a forward-facing propeller. The Cassio family includes models […]

Common Sense vs. E-Everything Austin Meyer here from Laminar Research. I wrote the flight simulator X-Plane and I am currently using it to evaluate a number of eVTOL aircraft, including several that I am consulting or otherwise working on. Jason Baker recently wrote a blog here titled “Common Sense vs. E-Everything” In this blog, Jason […]

Finavia, the entity responsible for maintaining public airports in Finland, has joined the Network for Electric Aviation and predicts that electric airliners will be used on domestic routes before the decade is out. This move, along with the funding of electric-aircraft research and development, is part of Finavia’s aggressive climate program aimed at decreasing CO2 […]

Eviation Aircraft’s all-electric Alice commuter prototype caught fire during ground testing at Ernest A. Love Field (PRC) in Prescott, Arizona, on Wednesday evening. No injuries were reported in the incident, which took place at approximately 6:30 p.m. local time. According to a news release from the City of Prescott, the fire department was on standby […]

For all the blather about electric airplanes, you’d think by now there would be at least three or four to pick from and compare. But no, except for electric motorgliders, there’s only one commercially available electric airplane, Pipistrel’s Alpha Electro. Despite the lack of a refined regulatory framework, Pipistrel is finding buyers for the Electro […]

Rolls-Royce has introduced the plane it hopes will set a new record for the world’s fastest all-electric aircraft, announcing plans to try for the top spot in late Spring 2020. According to the company, its target speed for the aircraft is 300 mph (480 kph/260 kts) or greater. The previous record of 210 mph (338 […]

Dating occurrences from memory is always an iffy thing, but I can clearly recall a phone conversation I had with Burt Rutan. I know it was in the summer of 2001 or 2002 because my old home office in Connecticut had a skylight and I was sweating as the afternoon sun streamed through the glass. […]

Canadian seaplane company Harbour Air announced that its modified all-electric DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver has successfully completed its first flight. The six-passenger “ePlane,” which the company is calling the world’s first all-electric commercial aircraft, took off from the Fraser River at the Harbour Air Seaplanes terminal in Richmond, British Columbia, on Tuesday morning. The aircraft […]

NASA has successfully completed testing of a new high-aspect ratio wing for its X-57 Maxwell all-electric research aircraft. The goal of the wing tests, which took place at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, was to “calibrate installed strain gauges for real-time loads monitoring and to verify the wing has met design specifications.” The […]