Investors are betting billions on air travel’s next big things, from all-electric air taxis to supersonic jetliners. The chief executive of aerospace startup Electra says he’s looking to deliver a practical option: a hybrid-electric plane that can take off and land—quickly and quietly—on a surface no bigger than a soccer field.
“It’s just an airplane,” says Marc Allen, who was a Boeing executive before becoming Electra’s CEO last year. But he believes this hybrid, also known as an “ultra short,” will answer travelers’ desire to fly without traffic-clogged trips to the airport, long security lines or inconvenient connections. Helicopters are too loud and expensive, and small jets still must use traditional airports, while air taxis have limited range, he says. “We’re consolidating these existing technologies in a totally unique and novel way to finally deliver direct aviation, to make it real.”
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Electra is trying something relatively novel for hybrid planes, which run on a combination of jet fuel and electric power. The nine-seat EL9 uses eight propellers to blow air over the wings, re-creating the lift a plane gets from speeding down a runway. Known as “blown lift,” this allows the plane to take off from a shorter runway. Where a typical small plane must hit speeds of at least 70 knots, or around 80 miles an hour, to become airborne and requires a runway of at least 1,500 feet, Electra’s can take off at half that speed and lift off after rolling 150 feet on a 300-foot runway.
Backed by Lockheed Martin, the five-year-old Virginia-based startup aims to have the EL9 in the skies by 2029. Electra has been flying a two-passenger EL2 prototype for months. The plane would have a list price around $10 million but, with typical industry discounts, could sell for about half the cost, according to people familiar with the pricing. The company says the cost to buy and operate the plane would be roughly one-third that of a helicopter.
Allen talked with The Wall Street Journal about his vision.
Flying can be a nerve-racking experience for people. This is a different kind of takeoff. How do you convince the public that these are safe?
First off, there’s this tremendous redundancy in the propulsion system. There’s a hybrid-electric turbine generator, there are batteries and there are electric motors at the edge of the wing, all of which work together. If the turbine generator fails, it’s no problem, the batteries power the flight. If a battery fails, it’s no problem, there are four batteries and a [fuel-run] turbo generator. If all four batteries fail, there’s a turbo generator.
And then you have an airplane that if something does require an emergency descent it can land in a 300-foot space instead of looking for thousands of feet to land.
How does this work compared with a hybrid car? Where does the battery start? Where does the motor come in?
The technology makes it seamless to the pilot. The pilot just commands the thrust and the system takes care of determining where to draw the power from, whether that’s the turbo generator, or the batteries or a combination.
For a lot of people, the worst part of traveling is having to go to an airport. Will people ever be able to avoid the airport altogether?
It has this ultrashort landing and, because it’s ultra quiet, you can come into a neighborhood without noise. Those features are what will allow travelers to go to really novel, ultrashort access points.
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The ultra short can enter the aircraft environment like a helicopter, which means not congesting the air routes and instead landing on ramps and taxiways by the [jet terminals]. A passenger can get to an ultrashort access point at home, 200 miles away from a big airport like Dulles, land at Dulles, and take the courtesy car from there to the airplane that’s going to take him to London. It will radically improve their trip and shorten their time.
Why can’t this just be battery-powered?
Batteries aren’t right now at a level of development to support sufficient payload range.
[Here, noise of a plane flying at the reporter’s location could be heard.]
That sounded to me like conventional aviation. People are blown away when they come to watch EL2 fly and realize that on the all-electric takeoffs and landings they can’t hear a thing other than the birds in the background.
Could that be unsettling?
No one likes to yell to have a conversation. We all remember the first time when a Tesla went by us on the road ahead, and our head kind of snapped because we didn’t realize there was a car there. It was a little unsettling the first time. But now we all love that we’re seeing the noise pollution in our own environments reduced with electric vehicles. I think with aviation it will be the same thing.
What does it feel like to be in the plane?
When you get on, you’re going to almost be bored because you’re going to realize the experience is, frankly, just like getting on an airplane. The only thing that’s going to surprise you is that when you come in to land, you’re going to think you’re a lot higher than you should be and it’s just going to descend. But it doesn’t descend fast, it descends like car speeds. So when you are wheels down on the access point, you’ll be going 25 miles an hour and you’ll come to a stop.
How will this evolve? Will we see Electra go over the ocean, or cross the country, or become the size of a 737?
Our team is already working for the U.S. government on a research contract to explore advanced concepts of how to use hybrid-electric blown lift to create new capabilities. One of the elements we’re looking at is the ability to use that tremendous amount of lift we can generate with the electric architecture to rely on a wing that’s much smaller than anything you’ve ever seen on a conventional large airplane. You’re not doing that to land short, but you’re doing that to have a tremendous reduction in fuel burn. The larger the wing, the more surface area, the more drag, the more fuel gets burned. That’s just fun to think about.
We live in a world where 80% of human beings alive have never flown. And so what’s it going to look like for us to create technologies that make air travel so accessible and so inexpensive that the whole world can fly?
You mentioned your work with the military. What could these military applications look like?
The technology we’re talking about has profound implications for military and commercial use. On the military side, this is an airplane that can fly 1,000 pounds for 1,000 [nautical] miles and land on an unimproved surface in austere conditions. Think about what it means to be able to fly over hundreds of miles of open water and land with a logistics payload in a place only helicopters can get into.
It has the added advantage of being its own power-generation system. If you’ve ever seen a picture of a Chinook helicopter carrying a generator to an operating base on chains hanging below it, you’d never see that again. The EL9 will just land and it’s a 600-kilowatt generator. It can power a communication station, a command station, it can charge up and launch drones, it can power direct-energy systems.
Helicopter traffic is under a lot of scrutiny after the crash at Reagan airport in D.C. How do you get regulators and airports comfortable with another type of aircraft in the airspace?
We’ve been working with the [Federal Aviation Administration’s] emerging-technology team for the last several years. What’s been really encouraging about the exchanges is, one, the FAA’s commitment to enabling innovation to improve our air-traffic systems and our air platforms. Then, for us, it’s been a very strong confirmation of our approach, which is to build something that fits within the traditional infrastructure. We don’t need new regulatory regimes like many of the other advanced air-mobility systems.
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