It promptly crashed into a lake.
With that said, Air Canada has announced that it will purchase a full 30 battery-powered planes for both hauling cargo and the ferrying of passengers.
Heart Aerospace, a Swedish startup, are the makers of something called the ES-30 aircraft.
As Heart noted in a recent press release of their aircraft;
It is driven by electric motors powered by batteries, which allows the airplane to operate with zero emissions and low noise.
I get that sinking feeling that the good folks at Heart failed to realize that batteries only store energy, not create it.
Nonetheless, the everything nerdliger website Electrek.com tries their best to church things up, but no matter how hard they may have tried, I can’t help but get the impression that no sane person would ever willfully board one of these flying turds.
As reported (emphasis and brackets, mine);
Air Canada announced that it invested in Heart Aerospace, an electric airplane startup, and it is ordering 30 units of a new version of its first electric aircraft.
Battery technology has improved enough that short-range commercial planes are starting to make sense.
Several startups are working on viable electric aircraft, and some are starting to get the attention of major airlines.
Heart Aerospace is one of those startups.
The company is attached to battery technology. When it came out of stealth mode last year, it believed that battery technology would enable them to have a commercially viable all-electric aircraft for 19 passengers with 250 miles (400 km) of range by 2026.
OK, but this isn’t 2026. What does Heart Aerospace offer us in the here and now?
Perhaps with the image of glorified golfcarts relying of gasoline-powered generators recharging their batteries burned into their retinas, at least I give them points for forward thinking;
Now the larger 30-passenger aircraft will have a much shorter all-electric range of 125 miles (200 km), but it will have a reserve-hybrid configuration, consisting of two turbo generators, to get the original 250 miles (400 km) range and the reserve energy requirements [AKA: “Aviation fuel“].
Reserve-Hybrid Turbogenerators are a new technology developed by companies including Honeywell and Rolls Royce that enable aircraft to have electric propulsion powered by jet fuel [In other words, Heart Aerospace is just doing the aircraft version to the video below].
Hey guys, wouldn’t it be just simply easier to just hook up those Honeywell and Rolls Royce Turbogenerators directly to the props?
What you guys have going on is just heavier than air flight with extra steps.
Fighting climate change, one gallon at a time.