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- Hacker News
- The interesting part to me is that a lot of current electric aircraft development seems to be waiting for battery technology to catch up. They're far ahead in terms of the motors, propeller, electric propulsion control system. The limitation is the battery capacity.
Companies like Joby, Archer and others also seem to be taking the huge gamble that battery density in Watt-hours per kilogram will SIGNIFICANTLY increase in the next 5-10 years (before they run out of money/investors) making the range of their aircraft much greater, and more viable for commercial operation.
by walrus01 - As noted elsewhere in this thread: probably ain't gonna happen. Battery energy density increases are tapering off. We may already be close to the maximum possible (where close means within a factor of 2 or so).by IAmBroom
- Anyone knows the details why Heart left Sweden? I applied for a job with them a few years ago but never heard back so I am quite curious.
They seemed to have a lot of former Embraer engineers from Brazil, I wonder if they brought them over to the US.
by DanielHB - > In comments to Sweden's government regarding the EU Net Zero Industry Act, Heart wrote that: “The regulatory framework and access to financing is very attractive in the US.”
> Heart warned that Europe needed to respond to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act if it wanted: “to retain technology companies like Heart within the EU”
2 years later:
> "We are deeply grateful to our team in Sweden for being part of this chapter of Heart’s journey, and for all the support we have received in Sweden," said Anders Forslund. "However, as our customers, partners, and investors are increasingly based in the U.S, we see greater opportunity in focusing our resources here. By consolidating our operations in Los Angeles, we can accelerate development, strengthen collaboration, and better position Heart Aerospace for the future."
Looks like a combination of regulatory and business/operations made USA more attractive.
[1] https://www.regeringen.se/contentassets/0a5c91ad1a1c4fdaaefb... (PDF)
[2] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
by petcat - Practical challenges aside, I'll gladly file this under "things my physicist dad said would never happen" and call it a win.by kronodeus
- Mech eng dad here. He guessed something like this would probably happen, but wasn't betting on it happening so soon.by bitwize
- Realistically, how long would it take this company to comply with all the relevant regulations (even just the local ones) before it can fly with human passengers? I imagine new safety guidelines would need to be written for wherever this aircraft is permitted to fly.by cpt_sobel
- As he's explaining the battery-electric propulsion isn't the hard part, he's even selling their software at 10:40. I guess the point here is to be bought by an existing aerospace corporation to kick start a new electric division? Nothing they do here Airbus can't do with better engineering rigour, but it'd be instantly sabotaged by their corporate rats.by simgt
- 'The first clean sheet airliner to be flown in any category. electric or not, in the US in the last 18 years'
This is the statement that matters and why I think electric is a huge deal. We can't get new designs into the air. It costs too much and takes too long. Electric has the potential to bring the design cycle back to something reasonable. Electric engines, and the supporting systems around them, are just so much simpler so there is so much less to certify. Once we really start designing for electric, and iterating on those designs, I think we will start seeing massive gains very rapidly.
by jmward01 - The 737-Max is only not a clean-sheet only because the selling point is pilots don't need to retrain, which is a competitive advantage when selling to airlines.by aidenn0
- First time I saw an electric plane with the cowling off was something like this:
https://www.wired.com/story/magnix-electric-plane-motor/
So much simpler.
by jcims - Interesting decision to build the whole aircraft instead of the propulsion system only. I wonder what the decision process was between retrofit of existing turboprop frame vs. build from the ground up? I would expect the level of effort and certification to be much higher building from scratch even though you get complete control.
- These guys did that / are trying to do:
https://www.weflywright.com/products/motor
But then again, they also ship now stuff for datacenters (facepalm):
by chinathrow - Judging by the seats, perhaps making it as light as possible. Existing airframes are relatively light but let's be honest, they aren't trying to save 500g here and there when they have massive jet engines to get everything airborne.by lbriner
- There are probably multiple reasons for doing so. I imagine some reasons are business risk, freedom to innovate, freedom to take a holistic perspective and improving the possibilites for raising capital.
If you build only the propulsion system you would be 100% dependent of existing aircraft companies, which are heavily invested in jet engines. It would probably be much harder to innovate and make good design choices in such a setting.
by cpach - Probably because they intend to sell aircraft, not electric motors.by huurtehoog
- I think an interesting aspect is that on normal aircraft fuel tanks have to be near the center of lift to maintain weight and balance as fuel is burned off. When using batteries, this is not really a concern, and I would think might lead to some more interesting designs. To be sure, if there is space in the wing, awesome - the batteries can now also be used as ballast though too if required.by woods42
- It may be too hard to do a good retrofit. If you basically have to tear the entire plane apart and rebuild and recertify it to put batteries in the right places, maybe the costs aren’t worth it for potential customers.
I know many planes use their wings as fuel tanks but given the weight of batteries maybe that doesn’t work.
I agree it’s interesting. Not a small undertaking.
by MBCook - Aircraft design is very intricate. Change the CG, break the whole system.
Fuel is often placed in wings because adding/burning fuel from your center of lift means your CG doesn't significantly change through a flight and you spend less on pumping fuel within the aircraft. With batteries, you are looking at a constant mass from the beginning of the flight to the end... so you can place it anywhere. Electric motors are orders of magnitude lighter than jet engines. Also, you don't need to pump electrons against gravity so placing all of that weight lower has handling/performance advantages.
By using an airframe shape that is well known, they are reducing risk and appealing to existing pilots. By building it from the ground-up, they are taking advantage of differences between the tech.
eg: all of that weight in the fuselage instead of the wings means that rolling is going to be much more nimble. Yaw might be affected as well, depending on the placement/moment of the batteries.
- Maybe I missed it but they didn't delve much into the TAM.
"Half of all flights in the world are under 2 hours." Then they give examples of Fjord-town hopping in Norway, or Island hopping in Hawaii, which seem very niche.
Will they be able to compete in any of the busiest routes? Could it take me Melbourne-Sydney in 1 - 2 hours for < $100? I'd sacrifice some time and $ for an eco-friendly option, but obviously there's a limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_flig...
by merek - Electric planes can in theory get longer flights, provided they change the flight profile - you spend a lot of energy going up to higher altitude, and the essentially glide down.by ActorNightly
- Batteries are rapidly improving (on many metrics, but the relevant one here is increasing in energy density).
The range is apparently 125 miles electric, and 500 miles as a hybrid. That's not enough for Melbourne Sydney. Give it a couple doubling-times though (5 years total?) and it will be.
Meanwhile aircraft take forever to develop and there should be enough of a market in shorter hall flights to occupy a scaling company in the meantime anyways.
by gpm - I didn't get that far in the video but from where I live (NYC) two hours gets you to a lot of very common travel destinations:
Boston, Massachusetts (1h) Washington, D.C. (1h) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (45m) Baltimore, Maryland (1h) Toronto, Ontario (1h 45m) Montreal, Quebec (1h 30m) Cleveland, Ohio (1h 45m) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1h 15m) Buffalo, New York (1h 10m) Providence, Rhode Island (45m) Portland, Maine (1h 10m) Bermuda (1h 50m) Nantucket, Massachusetts (1h 15m) Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (1h 25m) Ottawa, Ontario (1h 30m) Quebec City, Quebec (1h 45m) Rochester, New York (1h 5m) Syracuse, New York (1h) Manchester, New Hampshire (1h) Bangor, Maine (1h 25m) Burlington, Vermont (1h 10m) Richmond, Virginia (1h 10m) Norfolk, Virginia (1h 15m) Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina (1h 25m) Charlotte, North Carolina (1h 45m) Greensboro, North Carolina (1h 30m) Charleston, South Carolina (2h) Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (1h 45m) Savannah, Georgia (2h)
If it gets a little better than current 2 hour flight time then Detroit Chicago and Atlanta are in range - very significant.
by xyzelement - Heart Aerospace (YC W19) just flew the largest electric airplane ever flown — a 100-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and $5 of electricity to get it off the ground.by feb
- Nit: When they did the actual flight I did the math on the $5 worth of power claim, and it just doesn’t pencil out even at the lowest power rates in North America. Just to illustrate: at $.05 per kWh (which is less than half the price of electricity where they flew), you get 100kwh for $5. 100kw is what it takes to takeoff a 1200 pound Cessna. Probably about 75kw for an efficient cruise in that same plane.
Still an incredible feat, but no idea where the $5 comes from. Maybe that’s just the power they use to get from the threshold of the runway to wheels up.
by dghlsakjg - Would be interested to see this compared to the costs to take off a comparable small jet fuel aircraft.by solfox
- These kind of startup excite me. More so than the "next killer app" or "look what we shoved AI into."
Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes and attack Europe's short flight market (which is already cheap). Now we need bigger planes or more frequent planes and the next startup to solve the energy needs.
- Realistically, you can't replace the entire global fleet on any reasonable timescale. And when climate change starts being such a problem that even politicians can't ignore it anymore, I think we'll have much bigger fish to fry than building electric planes. Flying is a luxury, after all.
Now, I think this is very neat, but I doubt we'll ever set foot on an electric plane this century.
by thrance - I don't think 30 pax airplanes are competing with 500 pax high speed trains.
125 mile range is also far from being suitable for all <2 hr flights. I don't think there are many sub 125 mile connections either.
Love to see this work out. 100 pax and 500 mile (electricity) range minimum is where I see it having a (good!) chance for mainstream.
by brnt - USA's lacking rail commutes come down to the fact that America's leaders made the deliberate decision to destroy its own rail network and force people onto planes. The electric range of this aircraft is 125 miles[0], which is at the low end of the range where conventional intercity rail is time-competitive with the plane. A bullet train would absolutely smoke this.
tl;dr I have a few qualms with this app[1].
Now, this thing might take off (pun intended) anyway, for one simple reason: a theoretically faster train does not compete with it if it doesn't exist. The midwest and west are chock full of towns whose rail connections were either abandoned or never existed in the first place, but have regional airports. This thing would be perfect to service feeder flights from hub airports to regionals or as a charter plane.
That being said I wouldn't expect this to revolutionize air travel. You're still going to be packed into a sardine can and made to pay extra for the privilege of bringing a reasonable amount of toiletries with you. And all the long-haul flights are still going to be using fossil fuels because the energy density of batteries sucks. But still, I'd rather have this than 10 million AI companies.
[0] 500 miles for hybrid operation on SAF, because the FAA would not certify a plane with such a small range
by kmeisthax