The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew

0:00Gustaf Alströmer:This is the largest electric airplane ever to fly. It's got a 100-foot wingspan, a take-off weight of 25 ,000 pounds, and the electricity to get it off the ground costs just$5. Its successor, the ES-30, will fly up to 125 miles on battery alone, up to 500 miles as a hybrid, and recharge in about 30 minutes.

0:20Anders Forslund:It's the world's largest electric aircraft by about a factor or two. It's the first clean sheet airliner to be flown in any category, electric or not, in the U.S. in the last 18 years.

0:35Gustaf Alströmer:This is Anders Forslund. He's the CEO of Hart Airspace. Seven years ago, Anders showed me this plane. It was a 3D printed model you can hold in your hand.

0:45Anders Forslund:It's surreal, yeah. I came to YC with that 3D printed plane that was like this size. and now it's, you know, a hundred foot wingspan hurtling down the runway doing taxi testing.

0:57Gustaf Alströmer:So how do you go from basically a toy model to this? I visited Hart Aerospace's headquarters in LA to find out.

1:14Gustaf Alströmer:I've worked with Anders since he came to YC seven years ago. Back then, it was Anders and his co-founder Clara and that 3D printed model. Today, it's a 40-person team in LA building a real airliner. How would you describe Hart Aerospace in two sentences? We build hybrid electric aircraft, but our mission is to reduce the cost of air travel, and we're building the technology to support that. With a relatively small team, they're going after something that Boeing and Airbus have not been able to pull off. Hart's plane swapped the jet engine for electric motors.

1:45Anders Forslund:You'd be holding a motor that weighed a few grams that you put on a drone and has one moving part and then you look at the 400 kilowatt ones that's just like scaled up. So it's this really, really simple thing that has very few moving parts so it means that you can produce them a lot cheaper. They don't break because they don't really have combustion or fluid so you get basically zero wear.

2:07Gustaf Alströmer:Let's break that down. A jet engine has thousands of parts and birds fuel hot enough to melt metal. An electric motor has essentially only one moving part, no combustion and doesn't really wear out.

2:18Anders Forslund:When you're taxiing with a jet engine, the rest of it is, by definition, is noise. In this, you have a constant torque profile, so you could spin it at like, you know, one-tenth of the speed.

2:28Gustaf Alströmer:It's virtually silent if you stand like 100 feet away from it. And the power source is eight battery packs laid across the floor of the plane. It's eight packs that are like across the floor of the fuselage.

2:40Anders Forslund:It's actually only about four Teslas for this one, carrying that$40 worth of fuel.

2:45Gustaf Alströmer:To understand why this is such a big deal, let's look at what's broken about the jet engine, especially when it comes to short flights. It's as complex to build a jet engine for a 30 seater as it is for a 70 seater, so it

2:56Anders Forslund:costs the same. It wears the same whether you fly 100 miles or 1000 miles. So it's pushing the industry into this direction of going larger and larger planes and longer and longer routes. They're extremely inefficient at taxi. You can spend, you know, for a short flight, you can spend 10 % of your fuels just taxing up to the runway. Takeoff is inefficient. Landing is inefficient. So that sort of segment of flying regionally is really badly served by the technology they all have today.

3:29Gustaf Alströmer:And there's already an existing market. Half of all flights in the world are under two hours.

3:34Anders Forslund:There's a replacement market here that's not even driven by cost. the aircraft that we're competing with are 40-year-old designs. Regional connectivity is not about how far you fly, it's about how cheap you fly.

3:43Gustaf Alströmer:This aircraft would be absolutely best if it was flying the shortest possible route. Think island hopping in Hawaii or a Norwegian fjord town that goes from being a six-hour drive to a 20-minute flight.

3:54Anders Forslund:In the last year, it's gone from being 33 % better operating economics overall to 48%, just because of this increased price in oil.

4:03Gustaf Alströmer:So why hasn't anyone built this before? It started in Sweden.

4:06Anders Forslund:And I grew up right next to an Air Force base in Sweden. You saw like the Viggen fighter jets going over the soccer field. And I was always super excited about that. Really into paper airplanes. Just been fascinated with planes, you know, rockets and all these things.

4:22Gustaf Alströmer:He did a PhD on jet engines and ended up at MIT. That's where the idea found him 12 years ago.

4:28Anders Forslund:He comes to MIT, this is 12 years ago. Elon shows up and he's talking about electric planes. He says at one point that, you know, eventually all modes of transportation will go electric, besides rockets. He's talking about like 400 watt-hours per kilogram, and it kind of felt like a call to arms. This time I was like working on jet engines during the day. I was like tinkering with drones at the kitchen table at night, becoming kind of obsessed with this. I was actually doing research on this, being paid by the Swedish government to go around, speak to all the airlines before I even had a company.

5:07Anders Forslund:It's established the relationships with the airlines and the Nordics before I even try to build something. When Anders got to YC, there was no playbook for this. With YC, we were all focused on getting some early interest from airlines. We got some LOIs from SAS and Brau and Vidra and the three Nordic airlines. We really had no technology. Like I came to YC Demo Day with a little 3D printed model. So we went from having the LOIs to them building like the 400 kilowatt motor, which was like the size of a small jet engine. That in turn attracted actual, you know, pre-orders. And then they came from United.

5:44Anders Forslund:And then that attracted more capital. And then we started building and now we're building towards the plane.

5:50Gustaf Alströmer:If you're a founder listening to this, the learning that you should have is every time you need more capital, there needs to be something material. Ideally, something physical you can touch that you can show that you've made. Their first big airline customer actually came out of the spam folder. United Airlines came through an inbound email through our info email.

6:10Anders Forslund:Clara was looking at it and she was like, I think this might be a thing. Like he was like cleaning out the spam and that led us like through the front door. We just brought them over, showed them the electric motor we built that was the size of the jet engines we tried to replace.

6:24Gustaf Alströmer:And they kind of immediately got it. And the design itself? Most electric aircraft startups try to look futuristic. Hart did the opposite, on purpose. It looks very much like the turboprops we're trying to replace.

6:36Anders Forslund:We're not trying to build a sports car. I'd rather build something that looks very conventional but is kind of hiding its Superman cape under the hood. This is the first one. We never even tested this one because we just realized that it wouldn't hold. And the new one just goes all the way through to the bottom here and it's like this big thing

6:52Gustaf Alströmer:so it's like really sturdy. This is the pilot plant. Most of this plane is designed and built right here.

7:00Anders Forslund:This is a cylinder body for the actuator, 6061 aerospace aluminum. There's about 15 machine components in the actuator that we're working on developing in-house processes for. In traditional aerospace, this would be a supplier. And you'd source it to get a year to get one. and now you can just play around with it and test it. This is the same basic architecture for aileron, rudder, landing gear extension, braking, even in the pitch of the propellers. If you want to build something in-house, you should start with the things that you don't have to go to one supplier, but you go to like eight different, so then it just scales with the number of technologies rather than the number of suppliers.

7:44Gustaf Alströmer:The whole plant is wired like one giant test bench.

7:47Anders Forslund:You can deconstruct it like a Picasso painting. Here's the cockpit, here's the cabin, here's the tail. And all of this is being fed 1.6 megawatts of power. You could keep the aircraft in the air from just everything that's happening here. We're going to be testing fault injection. So everything from putting in programming error to cutting a wire, everything's got to work, even if everything goes wrong. It looks like the first time you get into model 3 and you're like, there's just one screen. I think that's a lot of the idea here. As the guy designing this, he worked on the Dragon Space capsule.

8:26Anders Forslund:You can fit up to 36 passengers, but most common probably going to be 30 passengers, which means everybody's going to get like six inches of extra leg room.

8:35Gustaf Alströmer:And the heart of the operation is the battery lab, where the team is choosing the cell for the next aircraft.

8:41Anders Forslund:This is the battery cell lab where we are trying to determine what our cell is going to be. We have lots of different cells which are on display here from Chinese, American, and Korean manufacturers. We can determine which one's going to have the most flight cycles, best safety, cost, and energy density. We talked about Elon coming to MIT 12 years ago and talking about like 400 watt-hour per per kilogram batteries. Do we have any cells that are like 400 watt hour per kilogram? The highest thing that we have on this table right now is about 370. One of the manufacturers is producing something at that 400 level that we're expecting to have within the next couple of months.

9:20Anders Forslund:Easily meets our targets for the first generation of the aircraft. So you've got the countdown timer there. 23 days. Inspired by YC Demo Day.

9:30Gustaf Alströmer:Yes. Chrome extension. The hardest problem had nothing to do with the motor or the battery.

9:35Anders Forslund:It's probably the biggest challenge we've had in the company. One in every thousand flights in the U.S. gets diverted to another airport. You kind of need 45 minutes of loiter, and then you need to go to something that could be like 100 miles away. So if you build a battery electric aircraft, you kind of have to carry two-thirds of your battery needs to be for reserves.

9:56Gustaf Alströmer:And unlike Jeff Fules, batteries don't get lighter. Their answer is a hybrid engine.

10:01Anders Forslund:We're basing it on a very simple turboprop engine. It's one of the most inexpensive ones. We don't have to use it for most flights. But it's still adding about, I guess, 20 % of the upfront cost of the aircraft. And I think it's worth it. You can fly up to 125 miles all electrically, and then you fly up to 500 miles with a hybrid system operational range.

10:23Gustaf Alströmer:That call comes out of the philosophy that Anders borrowed from SpaceX about how you should treat risk.