Cape Air Flight 1965 from Boston to Provincetown is a quintessential puddle jumper. Several times a day, the seven-passenger Cessna 402 takes off from Boston Logan International and climbs to its maximum altitude of 800 feet. Twin propellers thrumming, it heads toward the sandy spiral tip of Cape Cod. Fourteen minutes later, the 402’s wheels screech onto the runway at Provincetown. Total distance traveled: 45 miles, versus the 120-mile road-and-bridge route, a slog that can stretch to six hours on Friday afternoons in August.
This isn’t cutting-edge aviation. Cape Air Corp.’s Cessnas are up to 40 years old and lack most comforts—including bathrooms—that even folks in steerage class demand. But Cape Air, focused entirely on short-range flights, aims to open a doorway to the future. As civil aviation works to become carbon-neutral worldwide by 2050, the first electric planes to replace fossil-fuel models will almost certainly ply short hops such as Boston-Provincetown.
Cape Air, which has about 100 aircraft flying 40 routes, all under 250 miles, is ready for the change. “If an electric airplane were built today, we would start implementing that,” says Senior Vice President Jim Goddard. The company is the first customer for the Alice, a nine-passenger, twin-engine plane being developed by Eviation Aircraft Ltd., a startup based just north of Seattle. Cape Air has signaled it’s ready to buy as many as 75 of the planes, which will have a range of 280 miles at a cruising speed of 185 mph. Eviation hopes to have the Alice in service by 2027.
Carbon-free aviation is starting with such modest goals because it’s far more difficult to electrify a plane than a car. Pound for pound, today’s best batteries store about one-sixth as much energy as jet fuel. Since flying machines must expend energy keeping every pound of their own weight aloft, an electric aircraft can’t go as far, as fast or as high.
In 2021 the US Department of Transportation outlined a multipronged plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions for the aviation sector by 2050, with measures ranging from developing battery-powered planes to improving the efficiency of aircraft routing. Norway is moving even faster, calling for electrification of all its shorter domestic flights by 2040, and France has simply banned short-haul flights where train travel is an alternative.
Airbus and Embraer SA have started developing electric jetliners, while Boeing Co. has invested in a smaller air taxi. Sweden’s Heart Aerospace is building a 30-seat commuter plane, and New York startup Wright Electric is working on a 100-passenger model. But the Alice is the only custom-designed electric aircraft to have flown, with a prototype completing an eight-minute flight last September.
The challenge isn’t just building planes that will fly far enough; they’ll also need to meet the operational demands of a real-world airline. To that end, Eviation has dispatched its engineers to study Cape Air’s operations. A key lesson: Given that saving passengers’ time is a core selling point for short-haul carriers, it’s crucial that the Alice recharge quickly between hops. “Battery life cycle and battery charging are design criteria,” says Gregory Davis, Eviation’s chief executive officer. “You pick what you want, and then you design the batteries to do those things.”
The Alice is sleeker than the Cessnas it might someday replace. It’s crafted from carbon fiber, with fluid lines and spacecraft-like circular portholes rather than the rectangular windows of Cape Air’s ’70s-era aluminum Cessnas. And its two propellers are attached to pylons near the tail, rather than built into the wings. But the biggest difference is the 8,200-pound lithium-ion battery sitting under the cabin floor, which makes the Alice more than twice as heavy as a Cessna 402.
The next hurdle for electric aviation will be getting permission to fly. It’s hard enough to achieve certification for a conventional aircraft; when a plane is packed with new, unproven technology, the task is even tougher. Aiming to ease the transition to zero-carbon aviation, though, the US Federal Aviation Administration is working with manufacturers to develop certification protocols. And it’s investing directly in research, last year upgrading a facility near Atlantic City to help develop electric propulsion technology. “Industry is going to continue to innovate,” says FAA Assistant Administrator Matt Lehner. “Our job is to run at the same pace, so we have a full understanding and ensure it’s done safely.”
As battery technology improves, electric planes have a reasonable chance of achieving a single-charge range of 800 miles, which would allow them to take on routes that smaller jets such as the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 perform today. “With 800 miles, you probably can tap 90% of the regional flights in Europe and North America,” says Nuno Taborda, CEO of MagniX USA Inc., which builds the Alice’s motors. But, he cautions, “you will not get electrical propulsion systems across the Atlantic.”
For that, there’s no replacing the energy density of hydrocarbons. So medium- and long-distance air travel with a zero-carbon footprint will likely rely on fuel that’s chemically similar to what today’s jets burn, but which is derived from biological sources like cooking oil or agricultural waste that don’t add carbon to the atmosphere. Those concoctions, though, cost two to four times as much as conventional jet fuel.
The technical and economic difficulty of decarbonizing aviation is so daunting that no one can say with confidence that the goal will be achieved by 2050. But if the challenge is formidable, there’s an ever-stronger will to tackle it. “For the first time, I see the technology, the geopolitical environment and the environmental pressure are all there,” Taborda says. “Look, we cannot wait any longer.”
This article originally ran in Businessweek on January 18, 2023.
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