Electric Airplanes Are Having Their Kitty Hawk Moment

A small, 21-foot long airplane took off in Bordeaux, France on April 25 while a French economic minister and a handful of local politicians watched. It was an attractive little plane, with a sleek, composite fuselage, an appropriately futuristic-looking cockpit, and big wide wings, but you have to listen to hear what's truly remarkable about it: the quiet whirr of its engines, as the electric E-Fan experimental aircraft took off on its first public flight.

"Everybody wants a solution to oil," Jigar Shah, CEO of the Carbon War Room, which was founded by Richard Branson and others to combat climate change, told Scientific American. "Aviation is where it's going to come first."

It's a field that ripe for disruption. Abstractly, it seems like airplanes are the greener choice than driving. An Airbus A380 can seat from 407 to 644 people, but, according to The Economist, “uses as much energy as 3,500 family cars, equivalent to six cars for each passenger.” Long haul flights produce, on average, twice as much emissions per mile traveled per passenger than cars; short haul flights produce three times as much.

MIT researchers estimated that fine particulates from airplane engines are harmful enough to have a measurable body count. The team estimated that airplane emissions kill around 10,000 people every year.

That's why Boeing and the US military are working on making bio-jet fuel from camelina, jatropha shrubs or algae. It's why people get so excited at the prospect of a really slow, solar-powered plane. It's also why, even though, it only seats one, only flew for eight minutes, and only went 45 miles per hour, the E-Fan is an achievement.

The E-Fan is made by the mostly-French Airbus Group, and while it appears to have jet engines, those are actually “shrouded” propellors, powered by 120 lithium ion polymer batteries arranged in the aircraft's wings. It can fly for about an hour, which might not seem like much, but considering that the Wright brothers' first flight was only three seconds, it's pretty good. The cost per flight hour on the would-be trainer aircraft is just 12 euros, compared to 40 euros for a comparable petrol-powered plane.

So its eight minute demonstration was a wisp of a flight by a wisp of an airplane, but the pace of innovation in aviation is quick. The Wright brothers were getting off the ground for just seconds at a time in 1903. Within 15 years, the first airliners were being built.

The E-Fan, then, can be thought of as a “first step" in the production of "successive generations of electric planes of increasing sizes, with the goal of building electric-powered jumbo jets within the next 20 years," France’s Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg told France 24.

Sounds good. Frankly I'm still holding out for solar-powered blimps though.