World's First Commercial Electric Seaplane Completes Short-Haul Flight (newatlas.com) 75
"An aviation company at the cutting edge of electrified air travel has taken a significant step forward, completing a first-of-a-kind test flight using a retrofitted seaplane," reports New Atlas:
Harbour Air's De Havilland Beaver completed a short hop from the Canadian mainland to Vancouver Island using its all-electric drivetrain, demonstrating the viability of its cleaner approach to short-haul flights.
Harbour Air is the largest seaplane airline in North America and claims to transport around half a million passengers across 30,000 commercial flights each year. In 2019, it pledged to become the world's first all-electric airline, a bold vision that involves retrofitting its fleet of existing six-seater seaplanes with electric propulsion systems. These systems come via a partnership with electric motor company MagniX, which is making important advances with its high-power electric motors and has partnered with other ambitious companies in the aviation space.
In December of 2019, the modified De Havilland Beaver took off to complete the first successful flight of an all-electric commercial aircraft, a brief jaunt above the Fraser River at Harbour Air's terminal in Richmond, British Columbia. The company has since continued this testing program with an eye to certifying and approving the aircraft with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Transport Canada.
"The historic De Havilland Beaver has been completely retrofitted in 2019 to operate using 100% electricity flew 45 miles in 24 minutes," the company said in a statement. They're calling the flight "a major milestone in the advancement of all-electric commercial flights." More data from the ePlane's web site: Our ePlane project will ultimately turn our 40+ fleet of seaplanes from carbon-neutral to carbon-zero!
We know that the electrification of our fleet is the next necessary step to truly make a difference in our environmental and economic goals. It is better for the communities we serve and it also to gives our passengers a better way to travel. It's a bold step in making a big difference for our planet.
Harbour Air is the largest seaplane airline in North America and claims to transport around half a million passengers across 30,000 commercial flights each year. In 2019, it pledged to become the world's first all-electric airline, a bold vision that involves retrofitting its fleet of existing six-seater seaplanes with electric propulsion systems. These systems come via a partnership with electric motor company MagniX, which is making important advances with its high-power electric motors and has partnered with other ambitious companies in the aviation space.
In December of 2019, the modified De Havilland Beaver took off to complete the first successful flight of an all-electric commercial aircraft, a brief jaunt above the Fraser River at Harbour Air's terminal in Richmond, British Columbia. The company has since continued this testing program with an eye to certifying and approving the aircraft with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Transport Canada.
"The historic De Havilland Beaver has been completely retrofitted in 2019 to operate using 100% electricity flew 45 miles in 24 minutes," the company said in a statement. They're calling the flight "a major milestone in the advancement of all-electric commercial flights." More data from the ePlane's web site: Our ePlane project will ultimately turn our 40+ fleet of seaplanes from carbon-neutral to carbon-zero!
We know that the electrification of our fleet is the next necessary step to truly make a difference in our environmental and economic goals. It is better for the communities we serve and it also to gives our passengers a better way to travel. It's a bold step in making a big difference for our planet.
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The De Havilland Beaver normally has a cruising speed of 230 kph, so I'm not sure why you're comparing the electric variant with commercial jets. For short hops like the ones Harbour Air are doing, the small drop in speed isn't so important
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I'd like to see a car race the plane on these routes, nor without catching the attention of the police or US immigration as it flies by 80% over the speed limit.
https://harbourair.com/wp-cont... [harbourair.com]
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I would too. It would look something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Given that the car would have to take the ferry, since these routes are over water, the seaplane will win every single time.
Re: Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:2)
Re:Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Did you even read the article?
This particular test flight took 24 minutes. Driving the same exact trip takes almost 2.5 hours because you need to take a ferry to get to Vancouver Island. Perfect use-case for electric planes: short but crosses difficult terrain or large swaths of water. This is why there's been huge interest in electrifying air travel in Norway, a country of difficult terrain and sparse population.
As for the financial viability, the are already flying these routes successfully and unless the batteries take up a majority of the passenger or cargo space, this might easily prove to be cheaper to fly than using traditional fuels.
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Well you lost the bet. it is over six times faster to take the EV seaplane than driving and taking the ferry.
Re:Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Did you even read the article?
This particular test flight took 24 minutes. Driving the same exact trip takes almost 2.5 hours because you need to take a ferry to get to Vancouver Island.
Yes, the actual flight itself only took 24 minutes. But what is the *TOTAL* time -- travel to the airport, check in, board the plane, fly to destination, get transportation at the destination airport, etc.
If you add everything up, I bet it isn't any faster than driving and taking the ferry.
I've flown Harbour Air from the seaplane base in downtown Vancouver (from which a lot of their flights originate). I bought my ticket online. Check-in was at their terminal in what is basically a large store front in a restaurant/tourist area. About the only security was lining up on the dock in front of a locked gate and making sure I had a ticket for that flight. The overall process for doing all of this was more akin to taking a carnival ride than taking a flight from a larger airport (and by saying that I am not disparaging Harbour Air's professionalism).
On the other hand, the ferry terminal is about 1 1/2 south of Vancouver. I haven't taken it so I can't comment on the process. But from other ferries I have used, the time to get your car on board isn't that different from getting on a plane at Harbour Air.
The two modes serve two different types of customers. If I'm living in downtown Vancouver (and a lot of people do) and need to hop to Victoria, then Harbour Air beats driving to the ferry. But if I am living south of Vancouver then the ferry may be quicker.
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Use cases for the two methods of transportation are fairly different. With any plane, you usually buy your ticket ahead of travel, often several days or weeks, whereas the ferries in BC, while having a reservation system, also function on a first in first on system. For instance, I've reserved a trip from Victoria (properly Sidney) to Tswwassen. With a reservation, providing I arrive at least a half an hour to 45 minutes early, I'll get on, but the trip will take about 1 hour 45 minutes. The trip back I hav
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Right, but Harbour Air, takes you from the Inner Harbour to Downtown Vancouver in about 25 minutes. Figure an extra 30 minutes to show up at the terminal before your flight. So once you factor in the drive on the Pat Bay highway, and the drive from Tsawassen to downtown Vancouver, you've saved a significant amount of time, but you don't have a vehicle.
It all comes down to whether you need a vehicle at the other end, and what your time is worth.
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When I have meetings or conferences in Vancouver, I usually just park my car at the airport and fly out. While costs have gone up, time is money as well, and the fact that I can fly out at 9:00am and land around 9:30am, with a shuttle to the hotel or meeting usually taking about 30 minutes. If I was taking the ferry, I'd still be in the lineup.
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It's a sea plane. You walk out on the dock and climb into the plane.
There are quite a few places on Vancouver Island you can only reach by boat or sea plane. You can't drive there, no matter how much time you have.
Re: Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:2)
Re:Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it's not going to be practical for short haul flights, but these short hop flights generally are only 20-30 minutes in length, and it's plenty practical for this. They don't fly often (the ferry is the more economical option, plus you bring your car), but getting between Vancouver and Victoria in a hurry, they are reasonable options.
Especially during tourist season where tourists of Vancouver can pop over to Victoria to spend a few hours there, or business trips.
I don't get this "Oh it's not good in the general case so it's uesless" mentality comes from. Or "It's not useful in all cases right now, so it's useless". I mean, a plane like this is useless for most flights, but for this niche use case of short hops between places that require crossing a body of water or inhospitable terrain, it's perfect - takes a less costly fuel, is friendlier to the environment, etc. Or EVs - sure you can't do a cross continent roadtrip non-stop, but EVs are great for city runabouts and more leisurely road trips. That's like saying laptops are a useless product because they have limitations (especially in the early days when you had portable computers that still needed to be plugged in)
Re:Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:4, Insightful)
Harbor Air also does tourist tours in their De Havilland Beaver seaplanes - those are just half an hour or so of circling around describing the scenery to the up to 6 tourists before returning to their departure sea plane port.
So even a short-ranged EV conversion of the Beaver, would be more than adequate for those as well And the EV conversion is probably quieter, without that noisy radial engine roaring away a few feet in front of you, and so would make for a nicer tour experience anyway.
And they're not talking about converting all their planes, or even all their Beavers, so they'd still have conventionally powered seaplanes for their longer (or higher capacity) routes. But using EV for the short haul where you don't need range and combustion engines are at their least efficient makes a lot of sense. They're quieter, they're lower maintenance (and old radials need a lot more maintenance than modern turbofans on the big jetliners) and so they're probably cheaper to operate over the plane's total lifetime.
So good for them for looking to use EV planes where they make sense -- on many of the kinds of routes they were already flying.
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Why are you comparing a jet speeds to a short hop EV plane - do jets do short hops?
On the costs front, they'll be saving bucket loads on fuel and maintenance.
Re: Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:2)
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The Beaver, and the Otter (and Twin Otter) are still unmatched as Bush/Sea Planes due to their incredible STOL capabilities. Pound for pound, they have an incredible amount of lift. It's to the point where 50+ years later, the brand, tooling, and certificates have been purchased and both the Beaver and the Twin Otter have been put back in production.
Re: Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:2)
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Harbour Air hasn't had that trouble. They fly out of the two seaplane bases at least once every 30 minutes or so or less during daylight hours.
Turns out, giving pilots a life where flying is just a regular 9-5 job (ok 0630-21:00 in the summer) makes it a lot easier to recruit and keep pilots.
Re:Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:4, Funny)
Can't fly passengers on batteries
That's until you realize... passengers ARE batteries!
Have I been watching too much Matrix?
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A car can’t race this plane because it can’t drive over water. Harbour Air provides service between the mainland and Vancouver Island.
It’s a niche application, not broadly applicable to most commercial air traffic, but it certainly makes sense in this case to go electric.
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Re:Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the first person to reply gives the obvious, most easily refuted response with zero thought or analysis.
Harbor Air already flies this route in the original, non-electrified version of the same plane. There is already customer demand. They are already making money flying around this speed and on this exact route. They know what they are doing with this business and I guarantee they have done the math on this. This is the exact use case for electric planes with all the current limitations on the current commercially available technology. They do not need any increase in battery density, battery capacity, or electric motor efficiency to make these short hop, slow speed routes that they have been servicing for decades with and electric plane. Arguing that slow speed, short distance flights are useless is just plain ignoring the facts as they exist right now for this exact airline.
The De Havilland Beaver DHC-2 they are using for these operational flights have Pratt & Whitney Wasp Jr. radial piston engines, last made in 1953. The maintenance list on these engines is enormous. A couple of the items that need to be done every 100 hours is to replace the 7 gallons of oil and 18 $40 spark plugs. That's close to $1000 on two of the least expensive things to replace on this - there's dozens of checks, tons of labor hours, and if anything is broken, parts on a, at best, 69 year old engine are rare and expensive. Overhauls are required between 1200-1600 hours will cost around $40,000 if nothing is wrong, and a lot more if something is. The engine is not known to be fuel efficient, burning around 25-28 gallons per hour in the Beaver, but they will probably save money on maintenance alone by ditching these engines.
Electric airliners, if they will ever be feasible, are decades off from being reality. But Harbor Air's plan to replace old expensive engines on short hop, slow flights is exactly where electric aviation makes sense right now.
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Yep. It's about the only place it's workable. I'm a bit concerned about reserve time (time to fly if weather at the landing airport is bad or they need to divert for any other reason). It may be that it's only approved on flights short enough they can return to the departing airport.
Technically diversion due to weather or technical issues isn't going to be a real issue. These are point to point flights with nothing but water in between. The closest alternate "airport" is either the origin or destination (depending on how far you are into the trip), or if you really have no option - the water you are flying over.
However legally it is probably a different matter. This [stackexchange.com] suggests an additional 45 minute reserve for piston powered planes. But I am not a pilot, nor a ICAO lawyer, nor a Ha
Re: Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:2)
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The key for any passenger plane is to be light, and batteries are known to be heavy.
I'd have thought the opposite. No, not batteries being light, I mean PASSENGER planes are large filled with air, so their total weight should be lower than that of CARGO planes, which are filled to the brim with something and as little air as possible.
So using passenger planes as the test bed for electric planes seems to be logical.
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Re: Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:2)
Rather than trying to invent a whole new technology if electric flight, why canâ(TM)t we focus on creating synthetic jet fuel? This would make aviation carbon neutral, and would be a good application for small fluctuating renewables. Finally we would have a practical application for those wind farms.
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Re: Can't fly passengers on batteries (Score:2)
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I'm talking about fuel for existing jets. Or, avgas for existing Beavers.
Never mind electric ones (Score:2)
Never mind electric ones, they are a nice bonus for the future, but why aren't seaplanes in general used more for travel between islands? Air travel has become quite difficult, you need to be 2 hours earlier or more at the airport, delays are common, in cases of islands airports are far away. Example is Greece, of the over 100 islands you can visit via ferry, you have less than 30 with airports. It's a choice between a (usually) slow ferry ride, or a 30 minute (turboprop) airplane flight that takes you 3-4
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Plus I'm guessing seaplane pilots need a special/extra license as they'd need to understand the nautical enviroment.
Re: Never mind electric ones (Score:2)
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Plus I'm guessing seaplane pilots need a special/extra license as they'd need to understand the nautical enviroment.
Your guess is correct, but it's not especially difficult/costly--to the point where there are outfits that do a "get your ASES rating on vacation" package (go down to Florida, spend a few days on the beach, a few hours in the air, a few hours of ground school, take a checkride, and done).
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That is correct.
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Rough waters are common in the open sea. However seaplanes landing on protected coves, harbours etc would rarely find rough waters - especially in the summer tourist season, which is when they would be needed in the first place...
Re: Never mind electric ones (Score:2)
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There are also constant canceled sailings on BC Ferries due to staffing issues as there is a shortage of qualified seamen too. This leads to upwards of 8 hour waits at the ferry terminals and even with a reservation, if the ferry is canceled, you're out of luck.
Meanwhile Harbour Air doesn't seem to have any canceled flights, is not that much more expensive then the Ferry and is basically downtown to downtown rather then needing to travel to the ferry terminals at both ends.
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Which trek? Ferry terminals maybe 15 km each end and maybe 40 km ferry travel, it has been at least 40 years since I took that route.
What do you mean by air taxi?
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Are any of them likely to be certified for operating over the ocean, or rather a turbulent straight? And perhaps more important, as a STOL on a moderately rough ocean.
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I was thinking more of unplanned water landings. I also see it will need a heliport so basically launching and landing from the same spot as Harbour Air.
Anyways, I'd assume that once in production and certified, Harbour Air will purchase some but for now a modified Beaver is going to be certified sooner.
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Downtown Nanaimo to downtown Vancouver is about 3 hours by ferry including check-in and road travel at each end.
Harbour air takes a little less than an hour, including check-in. The flight is from downtown to downtown.
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It's hella expensive. The Harbour Air charges like $300 for Vancouver->Seattle. That's one way. I've flown Berlin-NYC and back for that much. I can't see this flying especially in Greece.
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I'd pay double that to fly without hesitation.
I'm so fucking past done by the time I make it to Mt. Vernon that I'd probably give a kidney to avoid making the rest of the trip. And that doesn't even include the damn border.
Re: Never mind electric ones (Score:2)
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Mostly because they're stupidly expensive to maintain, hard to fly, can only land and/or fly in certain weather, etc.
That makes them at most a niche option for where there * really* isn't any alternative.
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Mdern sea planes can land on land just like any other plane.
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Amphibious floatplanes do exist, but generally only in lighter aircraft than a Beaver/Otter/Twin Otter.
The wheel mechanism integrated into the floats is too delicate for these heavier craft. Instead, when they need them out of the water, they ahve bolt on wheels that they can use and tow them out at a boat ramp.
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They also can't land (on water) at night, which makes them daylight only aircraft.
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That's the way it is here on the southwest coast of Canada, where Harbour Air is based (the owners of the aircraft in question). In Vancouver harbour, you have seaplanes taking off every 15 minutes or so, flying to Victoria, Nanaimo, the Gulf Islands, Seattle, Whistler, and the Sunshine Coast.
It's great if you don't mind shelling out $250 or so for a seat. But if you have the time, driving and taking the ferry is generally cheaper. I could get to Victoria in about 90 minutes door-to-door on the seaplane or
The real question is (Score:2)
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They will continue to cost all the traffic will bear, like other prices. There isn't enough business to support multiple competitors for your flying dollar, so it's at best an oligopoly, a near-monopoly. If this reduction in fuel and maintenance costs raises profits enough, they may get frisky and go for enlarging the business at the expense of the ferries, yes; but the ferries are their only competition.
Tasteless MTV Joke Time (Score:2)
Butthead speaking
"Hey Beavis! He said BEAVER!
Beavis speaking
Yeah Butthead. [snort snort] Maybe we can get some BEAVER. Yeah! Yeah!
A battery-powered 75-year old design? (Score:2)
Wikipedia tells me these planes first flew in 1947. It's faintly possible something more modern, or something purpose-designed, might make better use of battery power.
Cheaper, too? (Score:1)
I wonder how long it'll be before ROI catches up, and ticket prices can drop.