- Air travel accounts for 12% of
U.S. transportation emissions,
the largest contributor of greenhouse gases
in the country.
It can also be pretty inconvenient.
- Today, if people think about traveling by air,
it's a thing.
How will I get to the airport?
And if I have to go on line. And will I have food? And...
it's a hassle.
- Electric aviation presents an exciting solution
to the environmental impact of air travel.
But it could also make flying a lot easier for travelers.
- We are building a world where flying in these planes
is no different than getting on a bus or a subway.
It will be, instead of driving or not going,
“Oh, I'll get on an electric plane”
because the airport's just 15 minutes away from me.
I'll just walk there,
get there 15 minutes ahead of time. I'll fly quietly.
I'll land at the airport and drive 15 minutes
to my destination.
- If electric planes are so great for the environment
and so convenient,
when will we start to see them?
This is Make It Count,
a series on environmental innovations
and the math it takes to bring them to the masses.
You might think that electric planes aren't mainstream
because of batteries, but that's not exactly the issue.
Not for all flights.
- Energy storage, in general, is today the challenge
that aviation needs to solve to make this mainstream.
Out of all flights done by airlines today,
30% are over a thousand miles.
70% are less than a thousand miles.
Mainstream would be the ability to contribute to
and fly, those 70%.
Most people don't fly more than 5 to 750,
maybe a thousand miles in range.
Why try to solve for a problem
that's the minority of flights?
Let's try to, first of all,
solve the majority of flights.
In this case, take a 40 passenger plane
and go five, 800 miles.
That's where we are right now with storage.
And we can do that
with today’s batteries and fuel cells.
- So, battery capacity for short flights
with smaller planes is already possible.
What about motors?
Electric planes have unique requirements when it comes to
to performance and reliability.
- You can't pull to the side of the road like you can
with a car.
You're in the air, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 feet in the air.
And if something goes wrong, it's not good.
- The other issue is heating.
Because of their electric components, electric motors
can easily overheat, and the cooling systems
you'd need to cool them down add too much weight.
- So we developed our own proprietary internal
cooling system that allows us to maintain the light weight
but still maintain the temperature.
Last year, magniX made history
with its 750 horsepower electric propulsion system
by powering a retrofitted Cessna.
It was the largest aircraft ever to fly
solely on electricity.
But when will we see these aircraft everywhere?
A lot of that comes down to costs.
The good news is that electric planes have certain economic
advantages over traditional planes.
- Let's take an hour and a half trip on a Cessna caravan -
You'll spend about $420 on fuel alone.
For an hour and a half trip,
with an electric motor turning the propeller
instead of a gas one, you'll spend about $24 in electricity.
- The other savings comes from operating costs.
- About 50%, half of an hourly cost in an airplane,
is the fuel and the maintenance on the engines.
And so the costs per hour are significantly less
because just like your electric car,
or your electric washing machine,
or your electric dishwasher,
there's not a lot that goes wrong.
The complexity and sophistication
of that technology
is, in fact, in how do you create a simple motor?
- All of this works for shorter flights
where battery capacity is less of an issue.
The real challenge is when battery capacity will be able
to compete with the energy density of jet fuel.
Something experts aren't even sure
is technically possible.
Yet, for the time being, reducing carbon emissions
for domestic air travel would make a sizeable dent
in the U.S.’ transportation emissions.
Similar to electric cars,
the other hurdle to electric planes becoming mainstream
is the infrastructure.
You'd need thousands of airports around the country
to make this work.
Surprisingly, a lot of that infrastructure already exists,
just not in the places you'd think.
- In the United States today there are over
10,000 airports available.
Airlines use between five to 600 of them.
So you have these giant airports, and you have less
and less of them in the large populated areas.
And so if you want to fly anywhere,
you have to drive 30, 45 minutes, an hour,
three hours to get to one of the few airports
where you can actually get a plane to,
even though there are airports where you live
and where you want to go to.
They're just not being used.
- If we could convert the thousands of smaller
public use and private airports into hubs
for commercial electric aviation, it could put
the average American only minutes away from an airport.
Imagine the reduction of carbon emissions just from not
not having people drive so far to catch a flight.
It could be decades before electric planes
are everywhere.
But if companies like magniX are successful,
regional electric flight could be here by 2026.
And the impact would go far beyond the environment.
- There are many people just here in the United States
that haven't traveled outside of their own state,
let alone across the country, because they can't afford to.
What if I could fly for an hour, 45 minutes,
and do so at about the same cost
than driving my car there and back?
If we're successful, we will make it so accessible
and so affordable, that going to see the rest of the country
will be a normal course of action.
We will have truly changed the face of transportation.
The way people commute, the way people connect.
- Roei's vision might seem far away,
but this type of entrepreneurial thinking
to imagine the world not as it is, but as it could be
and figuring out how to align the incentives
to make it a reality,
it's this type of approach that’s strategic enough
to actually change the world.