
First all-electric seaplane takes flight in B.C. - arman0
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/electric-seaplane-float-plane-test-flight-harbour-air-1.5390816
======
semi-extrinsic
You can do small aircraft like this, no problem. The trouble is you can't
scale it up, due to how quickly the power and energy demands go up. This thing
is 560 kW and gets a range of 86 nmi; an A320 is around 40 000 kW and has a
range of 3 500 nmi, while an A380 is around 80 000 kW and has a range of 8 500
nmi.

Going from this DHC-2 to the A380 requires an increase in energy storage by a
factor of around 14 000x, while the max takeoff weight ratio between the two
planes is only 250.

Airbus is developing a hybrid electric jet, the E-Fan X. They've done the
math. When their CTO was asked about the possibility of an all-electric A320,
the response was

"""

Assuming for a moment that we’d be able to rely on batteries 30 times as
energy dense as that of today, an A320 would be able to fly with half of its
payload for one-fifth of its current range, 500nm max. So, assuming a battery
which today does not exist... It doesn’t work, purely electrical will not
work.

"""

~~~
eloff
We can accomplish the same by producing the jet fuel using electricity.
Realistically this will likely involve methane (natural gas) extracted from
the ground and water, but it could one day be carbon neutral using captured
carbon. The trick is to use clean energy like nuclear of renewables. There was
an article on HN just recently about doing that with portable nuclear
generators like those used on ships, this could be done right in the airport.

We already have a fantastic dense energy battery called kerosene. All we need
to do is make it carbon neutral and our existing aviation tech won't even need
to change.

~~~
jjoonathan
Or biofuel. Plants are good at capturing atmospheric CO2 and the resulting
biomass can be turned into fuel using well established technology.

If it's nearly suitable for cars I suspect it's even more nearly suitable for
aviation on account of the lower volumes and higher margins.

~~~
WalterBright
> Plants are good at capturing atmospheric CO2 and the resulting biomass can
> be turned into fuel using well established technology.

I.e. burning coal.

~~~
_Microft
Nope, that's _outright wrong_ (and from other replies you should have learned
that by now, so why keep reiterating something false?). Anyways...

The total amount of carbon in circulation is what matters because that part
can end up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide where it shows its heat
capturing effects. Trees fix carbon while growing and emit it while
decomposing but do not change the total amount of carbon in circulation in the
long term.

Digging up carbon that has been locked away for aeons is what is so damaging.
There would be nothing bad about burning oil _IF that oil were produced by
capturing carbon dioxide_. We do not do that. We dig up loads of fossil
resources and _add_ them to the cycle.

If that explanation was too complicted, here is an easier one: fill a bucket
to the brim with water, take a cup and start scooping and pouring back to the
bucket. Everything is fine. Now get a second bucket full of water and start
pouring into the first (material so far not in circulation is added to it).
You see the problem?

If you _still_ insist on your view with burning coal and trees being
equivalent, then _I challenge you to conduct the water-bucket experiment_ in
the middle of your living room. I mean it wouldn't do no harm, right?

~~~
WalterBright
Which releases more CO2 into the atmosphere:

1\. chopping down a tree and burning it

2\. digging up a tree and burning it

Both are the same. Calling (1) "green energy" is outright wrong. Want to be
green? Burn less carbon. The source of the carbon you're burning is
irrelevant.

------
Patrick_Devine
I've seen a lot of skeptics and nay-sayers talking about this project, but I
feel like there is a fundamental mis-understanding of why this is significant.

No, it's not going to compete with jet airliners even in the remotely near
future. High-bypass turbofan engines have enormous cost advantages over
traditional piston engines. It's almost always more economical to use a
turbofan engine to power aircraft in anything more than a short hop.

I see this being a classic case of something like Mainframes vs. PCs however.
Most people don't equate flying with General Aviation because GA has
traditionally been so cost prohibitive, much the same way that mainframes were
so cost prohibitive in the 60's and 70's. There are a few airlines, like
Harbour Air, and Mokulele, that currently offer a short haul flights (usually
over water) where people are willing to pay a lot more money. There are
benefits like frequency of flights, but the big ones for me are not having to
queue up for security, and being able to bring liquids on board. My wife once
brought a can of soup on board Mokulele. Try doing that on Hawaiian.

If this can bring down the cost of short haul flights, particularly those
around 200-250 miles, it could be extremely appealing, especially when coupled
with ride hailing. I would much rather take a 45 minute flight and get Lyft on
the other side, than spend 3 hours sitting in a car stuck in traffic. GA can
fly out of smaller terminals and smaller airports. San Carlos (SQL) to South
Lake Tahoe is a 40ish minute flight in a GA aircraft, but can be 5+ hours in
traffic on I-80.

~~~
MagnumPIG
I know nothing about planes, but an interesting detail is that everyone owns a
PC now. If tiny airplanes got cheap, who knows...

------
ska
Some perhaps useful context: Harbour air operates the worlds largest sea plane
service, the majority of it between Vancouver (city) and Vancouver Island
(mostly Victoria). They are a perfect test bed for this, as the in air time is
about 15-20 min for most routes. (less 100km/60m ).

So while electric is a long way from long haul domestic routes, let alone
international, I could see it taking over specific services like this fairly
quickly, at least relatively speaking. I can see why they are experimenting
with it.

Apparently they plan to have certification for this aircraft in the next 2
years, but early days yet.

~~~
pedalpete
I wouldn't count out international so quickly. Once they've got Victoria
sorted, it would be great to see them extend down to Everett, Washington to
link up Seattle. It's 68 miles from Vancouver to Victoria, 98 Miles Vancouver
to Everett. Theoretically, they could fly out of White Rock to reduce that
distance as well.

~~~
ska
Yes I didn’t mean to exclude short haul international.

------
jonawesomegreen
I found this article by the CBC more informative then the one linked:
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/electric-
sea...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/electric-seaplane-
float-plane-test-flight-harbour-air-1.5390816)

> "It's a prototype for sure," said McDougall, "but in every way it's a high-
> tech piece of equipment, which is kind of ironic considering the airframe
> that it's attached to is actually one year younger than me — 62 years old."

> McDougall's flight is the first exercise in what is expected to be a two-
> year process to get the e-plane certified for commercial use.

For some context Harbour Air is a scheduled floatplane airline operating
primarily between Vancouver and Victoria in BC. Since there is no bridge
connecting the capital Victoria to the largest city Vancouver, they offer
short flights on seaplanes that connect downtown to downtown as an alternative
to ferries or larger airplanes that arrive at the airports further outside of
the downtown core of either city.

In this constrained context it seems like an electric airplane could work
really well and provide fuel savings and a quieter ride. They also seem to
have some ambition with these electric aircraft to provide other short range
flights.

> MagniX CEO Roei Ganzarski said Dec. 10, 2019, will go down in history as the
> start of the electric aviation age, and believes the e-plane will eventually
> revolutionize how people travel by making short- to mid-range flights more
> economical than driving. "It means you can stop driving for three, five,
> seven hours to get to a destination because there's no other way to get
> there," he said. "It means you can fly in a small aircraft from a small
> airport to a small airport.... It's faster, cheaper and more convenient than
> any other method of travel, including going with a standard airline."

~~~
dang
Ok, we'll change to that from
[https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50738983](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50738983).
Thanks!

~~~
goodcanadian
I feel ever so slightly ripped off :-)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760768)

~~~
dang
It happens! Sorry. We do plan to do something eventually to share karma with
earlier submitters. In the meantime it's a bit of a lottery, but it does even
out in the long run if you keep submitting good stories.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20lottery&sort=byDate&type=comment)

~~~
goodcanadian
No worries. The smiley was meant to convey the fact that I was simply being
cheeky. :-)

Edit: just happy to see it get traction.

------
lemmox
Adding a little context: Harbour Air is a short-hop seaplane operator working
out of downtown Vancouver. Most of their flights are ~ 100km across the
Georgia Straight to Victoria and Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Trips are ~ 30
minutes IIRC. There is no bridge to this island and the alternative is a
fairly large commute involving a ferry. It's quite convenient to have a direct
connection between downtown Vancouver and downtown Victoria.

Fuel is quite pricey here, they might end up saving a couple hundred dollars
per hour in fuel and engine upkeep costs.

~~~
novok
The island cluster around victoria, vancouver and seattle is pretty much a
perfect use case for electric airplanes today too.

Making a bridge would be incredibly expensive and be a lot of firsts in bridge
making, so it's not worth it:
[https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/transporta...](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/transportation-
reports-and-reference/reports-studies/vancouver-island/fixed-link)

------
rconti
Tangential; I took a Kenmore Air seaplane flight from Seattle (South Lake
Union) to Victoria this summer, and it was absolutely amazing. I loved every
second of it, and can't recommend it highly enough. 45 minutes flying time, so
quick and convenient. We walked to and from hotels on both end.

When I lived in the northwest, it was trivial to drive+ferry to Victoria, even
though it was very slow. I always thought the Clipper hydrofoil, let alone
flying, were unfathomably expensive luxuries.

But as a tourist without a car and on a limited schedule, suddenly the Clipper
(hydrofoil passenger-only ferry from downtown) and flying seem like reasonable
options versus having to rent a car, pay for fuel, take a car ferry, drive a
bunch on both ends, pay for parking, etc.

In the end, I think Kenmore cost less than 2x what the Clipper would have cost
us. Not cheap, but absolutely worth it for a novel one-time experience. One
passenger even remarked that the seaplane flight was cheaper than flying from
Sea-Tac to Victoria airport, before even factoring in the fact that neither
airport is near the major city you're coming from or going to.

------
AtlasBarfed
Carbon neutral biofuel or fuel made via excess solar/wind should probably be
the goal.

Fuel cells might be viable too and the regulated commercial nature of planes
probably means that hydrogen's storage and pumping headaches wouldn't suffer
the consumer problems.

But biofuels are probably the way to go for now.

There are probably hybrid airship designs with solar panels that could do
lower cost shipping. All that extra surface area from the blimp can be covered
in solar panels or those fancy solar paints.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
[https://www.varialift.com/page/specification-
arh-50](https://www.varialift.com/page/specification-arh-50)

200mph at altitude... well, with the jetstream it seems.

Also, could electromag catapults help with takeoff?

------
seabrookmx
I look at the Harbour Air planes out my office window!

Super neat project, although I agree with other commenters that "fully-
electric commercial flight" is misleading.

If I walk down there and book a flight, I'm not going to be in an e-plane.
It's still very much experimental.

~~~
ghostpepper
If you can see the seaplane terminal in downtown Vancouver from your office
then, IMHO, you have one of the best views in the city. Enjoy :-)

~~~
james_pm
I would get no work done in that office. When in Vancouver, I spend a good
amount of my down time sitting at the Convention Centre watching the comings
and goings in the harbour.

------
nuccy
I'm a big fan of renewable energy (solar, wind), electric cars and likely
electric planes (not yet available, so hard to say). But my biggest concern is
that all this will eventually lead to people decisions being affected by
rather this hipe, than common sense (like with nuclear power, which is the
greenest currently available peak/off-peak source of energy). Something
similar can also happen, as with Saturn 5/Apollo, after some time we will lose
the technology, because people retire, workshops are disassembled. We can
loose technology of efficient piston and jet engines, nuclear reactors,
ultrasonic flight, et al. This by itself is fine, batteries work fine
obviously, though one can imagine conditions where it is not the case:
Antarctica, Mars, Moon, space, etc. Just look at Juno space probe, which
instead of small RTG uses huge solar arrays, which produce just few hundreds
of watts on Jupiter orbit, while being capable or producing kilowatts on Earth
one.

------
bzudo
Off topic and stupid, but could an electric plane be outfitted with lightning
rods and/or lightning rockets to attract lightning strikes in order to charge
the batteries?

~~~
bananabreakfast
This is essentially impossible.

Yes a single lightning strike contains roughly a similar order of magnitude of
energy as an entire charged flight battery would but it is delivered in
microseconds. That comes out to hundreds of terawatts of power while in
comparison the new Tesla supercharger charges at an incredibly high rate of
hundreds of kW. That's 1 Million times lower than lightning! There is no
substance on earth that can absorb and store energy at that power rating.

On top of all of that, even if you could get it to work it would be such an
unreliable source of energy that it would never make any economical sense to
deploy on plane if you could just capture it on the ground and charge the
plane from there.

~~~
GrantZvolsky
Is it really impossible?

About a decade ago an astrophysicist friend of mine told me that you can store
lightning energy into some kind of a supraconductor, the problem being that we
don't know how to take the energy out.

I believe he described something similar to [Superconducting magnetic energy
storage]([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage))

------
pi-rat
I'm pretty sure we beat you guys to the the first electric plane able to water
land here in Norway[1], or google translate[2]. :P

[1]: [https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/elfly-med-avinor-sjefen-som-
pil...](https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/elfly-med-avinor-sjefen-som-pilot-matte-
nodlande-i-arendal-1.14660687) [2]:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrk.no%2Fsorlandet%2Felfly-
med-avinor-sjefen-som-pilot-matte-nodlande-i-arendal-1.14660687)

------
dazlari
While the title may have it right, later in the article they state that this
is the first electric aircraft... well they've been flying in WA for some time
now

[https://particle.scitech.org.au/tech/aussie-first-
electric-p...](https://particle.scitech.org.au/tech/aussie-first-electric-
plane-takes-to-wa-skies/)

------
giarc
I suspect this would be much, much quieter than a regular gasoline engine
correct? These smaller planes are loud.

~~~
bittercynic
Much of the noise from small planes is from the propeller(s), so it might not
help much.

~~~
darksaints
For retrofits like this, the noise will go down a bit because the engines are
inside the fuselage.

------
scottmsul
Still seems a bit far from replacing jet engines? This article was going on
about fuel emissions in the entire aviation industry, this is just an electric
propeller. Anyone know how far we are from electric jets? Is such a thing even
possible?

~~~
aphextron
>"Anyone know how far we are from electric jets? Is such a thing even
possible?"

Electric will never replace long haul jets barring a revolutionary
breakthrough in battery technology. But that's not the point. Much of
commercial aviation takes place on distances of around 100 to 500 miles. That
is, too far to drive but not quite far enough to take advantage of the
efficiency of jet engines at high speed, high altitude cruise. For those
applications electric propellor and ducted fan aircraft will be absolutely
game changing. It will make these flights cheaper and safer by a factor of 10
at least. The vast majority of cost in a flight is maintenance of the engine.
That all goes away with electric power. It will make commuter flights an
affordable daily reality for normal people.

~~~
boatswain
Would a hybrid model be more effective? Using diesel generators to power
electric motors?

~~~
Gibbon1
Hybrids are interesting because you can reach higher bypass ratio's because
you can power n number of ducted fans off m engines.

Currently increasing fan sizes are getting problematic. That is the problem
with the 737 MAX. The fan diameter of the new engines is too large to fit
between the bottom of the wing and the ground. So it had to be mounted forward
and up which fucked up the aerodynamics.

Two other advantages are, potentially maintaining thrust in an engine out
situation. When you lose an engine not only do you lose half your power but
the thrust is unbalanced. And faster throttle response. Turbine lag is a big
issue with jetliners.

Note: The reasoning behind high bypass turbofans is thrust is proportional to
delta v times the mass flow rate. Where power input is proportional to delta v
squared. Bigger the fan the more efficient you are and the less fuel you use.

Diesel is kinda interesting. Manufactures are developing diesel engines for
light aviation. I suppose you could have a hybrid diesel/electric aircraft.

------
awkward
I wonder if the limitations of electric flight will impact the infrastructure
- big, dense networks of airports to support short range flights across the
world.

------
floki999
Apparently not quite the first to get there
[https://www.h55.ch/](https://www.h55.ch/)

~~~
chinathrow
"first seaplane"

------
rbanffy
I know using an already certified airframe saves money, but I'd love if it
looked more modern.

------
exabrial
For three minutes. Hydrogen fuel cells are likely the right answer using
current technology

~~~
davedx
TU Delft is looking at this.

[https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2019/lr/delft-student-team-
takes-t...](https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2019/lr/delft-student-team-takes-to-the-
air-on-liquid-hydrogen/)

------
draklor40
sounds kinda weird. IC engine planes get more efficient with lower fuel (lower
weight)whereas with Electric ones, you still have to carry the weight around
with lower power.

------
jascii
The title is a little misleading:

This is not a commercial flight, currently the plane in question is licensed
by the FAA as "experimental" specifically excluding commercial flights.

Still cool! I think electric might have a great future in short-hop flights.

~~~
CalChris
Licensed by the FAA in Canada?

~~~
nbrempel
I believe the FAA and TCCA have a bilateral agreement so it very well could be
the FAA.

[https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/international/bilatera...](https://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/international/bilateral_agreements/baa_basa_listing/)

