Heart Aerospace Completes First Flight of Largest Electric Aircraft

Also a short video on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEudbAjschs

> It uses electric motors for zero-emission short hops up to 124 miles and backup reserve generators for an extended hybrid range up to 300–500 miles.

I was wondering how they're gonna deal with alternate airports and "fuel" reserves, but it seems they also have generators on board (supposedly used in case of emergency / unplanned detours).

beta also seems to do their flight testing in plattsburgh, ny, anyone know why?

could we relax the security around electric planes, because they don't carry as much highly explosive material?

that could make it much more convenient and appealing as a travel method

Electric regional air travel is something I’m really excited about.

At 120 miles of useful pure electric range, I can't imagine there are many US corridors where that pure electric range makes sense. That's still a range where the door to door time of a car can still win. I wonder why they don't push the idea of it being a hybrid more, as it seems to me a lot of useful routes are going to rely on the generators.

I'd love to see something that can do around 250mi. It would be nice to electrify transit in the Texas Triangle if we end up never being able to actually build useful HSR.

I wish them luck on continuing to try!

could someone explain to me how that $5 spend is lying to me. i know elec is cheap, but that cheap?

VTOL aircraft have the same distance capabilities and make more sense in a lot more scenarios than this, with way more flexibility. It’s obviously larger but I’m just not sure of potential advantages over other modes of transport currently available and in the near future

> Largest Electric Aircraft

"Largest" is just straight-up a false claim. [Solar Impulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse) and [Helios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype...) were electric and had over double the wingspan, just to name a few of the ~dozen examples.

Heart's engineers should be proud of this genuinely impressive accomplishment, but they need to rein in whoever is writing their PR pieces.