Alice, The First All-Electric Passenger Airplane, Takes Flight
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Israeli company Eviation Aircraft successfully launched the Alice on Tuesday morning from Washington's Grant County International Airport. The zero-emission plane traveled at an altitude of 3,500 feet for its eight-minute inaugural flight.
"This is history," Gregory Davis, Eviation's president and CEO, told CNN Business."We have not seen the propulsion technology change on the aircraft since we went from the piston engine to the turbine engine. It was the 1950s that was the last time you saw an entirely new technology like this come together."
With battery technology similar to that of an electric car or a cell phone and 30 minutes of charging, the nine-passenger Alice will be able to fly for one hour, and about 440 nautical miles. The plane has a max cruise speed of 250 knots, or 287 miles per hour. For reference, a Boeing 737 has a max cruise speed of 588 miles per hour.
[...] "We've actually generated, frankly, terabytes of data with the data acquisition systems that we had on the aircraft, so we're going to take a couple of weeks actually and review it to see how the aircraft performs versus our models and our analysis," Davis said. "From there, we'll understand what we need to do next."
The company says it expects to be working on developing an FAA-certified aircraft through 2025, followed by a year or two of flight testing before it can deliver Alices to customers.
Three different versions of the Alice are in protoype stages: a "commuter" variant, an executive version, and one specialized for cargo. The commuter configuration holds nine passengers and two pilots, as well as 850 pounds of cargo. The executive design has six passenger seats for a more spacious flight, and the cargo plane holds 450 cubic feet of volume.
See also: Electric Planes Are Coming: Short-Hop Regional Flights Could be Running on Batteries in a Few Years
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