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When an all-electric passenger airplane took a test flight in 2022, it didn’t have much room on board—the design, from a startup called Eviation, has space for only nine passengers. Other battery-electric planes in development are also relatively small, and studies have suggested that all-electric planes can only carry up to 19 people. But a Dutch startup called Elysian is now working on a 90-seat plane that’s expected to be able to travel nearly 500 miles on a charge.
The conventional wisdom about battery-electric planes is that they can’t be large or travel very long distances because of the weight of the batteries. “That’s actually based on a handful of calculations that people did,” says Reynard de Vries, Elysian’s director of design and engineering. “They said, ‘Let’s take the best possible short-range aircraft today, like a good turbo prop, and let’s try to electrify that—what happens if instead of using fuel, I would use batteries?’ And indeed, if you would run the numbers on that, you would see that it’s a very poor performing aircraft. The range will be limited.”
[Image: Elysian]
That can change, he says, by rethinking the design of the plane rather than trying to retrofit a basic modern plane. One of Elysian’s cofounders, aerospace engineer Rob Wolleswinkel, looked at older plane designs for inspiration, and then started working with researchers at Delft University of Technology to calculate the potential for a new approach to electric planes.
“We realized that in some of the old design books, you actually find information hidden in there that’s never been applied to battery-electric aircraft,” says de Vries. The startup’s conceptual design is inspired by older, larger planes that were designed to travel very long distances and carry a lot of fuel.
[Image: Elysian]
The design for the new aircraft has wide wings and a smaller body than a typical plane, which helps improve the aerodynamics. (The wings are so big—with a 141-foot span—that the tips are designed to fold up so the plane can fit into airport gates.)
The batteries are placed on the wings, making use of the extra space, and making the body of the plane lighter. Having the heavy batteries on the wings rather than the body “is very beneficial from a structural point of view,” de Vries says. The weight is evenly spread through the wings rather than weighing down the fuselage. A gas reserve system can be used if a flight is delayed or unexpectedly rerouted. But on a standard flight, with batteries that have an energy density of 360 watt-hours per kilogram, the plane can go 800 kilometers, or 497 miles, on the batteries alone.
Two new research papers that the company co-authored with Delft University of Technology outline why larger battery-electric planes are feasible, and the basic design of a 90-seat plane. The team is now working through a list of technical challenges, from the battery development to how power moves through the plane. They plan to have an updated design by the end of the year, and then dive into more detailed development. If all goes as planned, the first flights could begin in 2033.
Electric planes of this size could replace a large number of flights. “Around half of flights globally are under 1,000 kilometers [621 miles],” says Daniel Rosen Jacobson, Elysian co-CEO and chief business officer. “That represents about a fifth of all CO2 emissions in aviation. With an aircraft like this, that has no emissions, you can already tackle a significant part of the total problem.”
Airlines are ramping up their plans for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), though some forms of the fuel may not actually be very sustainable. There also isn’t enough supply yet of SAF, so if more flights can be electric, it will help. For each passenger mile traveled, the new electric plane would also be five times more efficient than a plane running on sustainable aviation fuel.
SAF is also more expensive than standard jet fuel. As governments like the EU require airlines to begin using more of it, electric planes can start to compete on cost. Elysian’s new plane is designed to compete with other planes that travel around 500 miles, like the Boeing 737 MAX series, or Airbus A320. If the cost of fuel increases enough, that’s possible.
“We think that we can deliver a plane by 2033 that can compete on costs to actually be a good economic decision for airlines, and not just a sustainable one,” Jacobson says.
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