World's Largest Battery-Powered Plane Completes First Flight

It weighs as much as an empty school bus. It seats 30 people. It just flew for 27 minutes without burning a drop of jet fuel. Meet the X1, a demonstrator aircraft built by Los Angeles-based Heart Aerospace. It took off from an airport in upstate New York this month on battery power alone. It is the largest electric plane ever to fly.

The X1 was flown by a single pilot. It didn’t carry any passengers. It reached an altitude of 1,100 feet before landing. Drawing more than one megawatt of power from its batteries, it proved that electricity can power something close to a real airliner, the company said. The company added that the flight bodes well for Heart's next aircraft, the ES-30. It is a 30-seat hybrid-electric plane. The company hopes to bring it into commercial service by 2031. United Airlines, Air Canada, and JSX have already committed to buying it.

The pitch to airlines is partly financial. Heart says the flight consumed roughly $5 worth of electricity. It projects the ES-30 could cost 40% less to operate than other planes, thanks to cheaper energy and fewer moving parts to maintain. Jet fuel prices, meanwhile, have more than doubled over the past year. Environmentally, electric flight also offers a cleaner alternative. The airline industry is responsible for roughly 2.5% of global carbon emissions.

Those gains come with real limits, though. On batteries alone, the X1's design offers a range of about 125 miles. That's far short of most regional routes. Unlike jet fuel, batteries don't get lighter as they're used. That forced the engineers to trade range for weight. Heart's answer is a backup combustion engine for the ES-30, extending range to roughly 500 miles. Fully electric commercial flight, in other words, remains a future goal rather than a present reality.

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Photo of Heart Aerospace’s X1 demonstrator courtesy of Heart Aerospace press release.