The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:01)
This is the largest electric airplane ever to fly. It's got 100 foot wingspan, takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and the electricity to get it off the ground cost just $5.
Its successor, the ES30, will fly up to 125 miles on battery alone, up to 500 miles as a hybrid, and recharge in about 30 minutes.

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

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

**Anders Forslund** (0:46)
It's surreal. Yeah, I came to YC with that 3D printed plane. That was like this size, and now it's, you know, 100 foot wingspan, hurtling down the runway, doing taxi testing.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:57)
So how do you go from basically a toy model to this? I visited Heart Aerospace's headquarters in LA to find out.
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 just describe Heart Aerospace in two sentences?

**Anders Forslund** (1:29)
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.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (1:35)
With a relatively small team, they're going after something that Boeing and Airbus have not been able to pull off. Heart's plane swapped the jet engine for electric motors.

**Anders Forslund** (1:45)
You'd be holding a motor that weighed a few grams that you can put on a drone and has one moving part, and then you look at the 400 kilowatt ones, it'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.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (2:07)
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.

**Anders Forslund** (2:19)
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 one-tenth of the speed. It's virtually silent if you stand 100 feet away from it.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (2:32)
The power source is eight battery packs laid across the floor of the plane.

**Anders Forslund** (2:36)
It's eight packs that are across the floor of the fuselage. It's actually only about four Tesla's for this one, carrying about $40 worth of fuel.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (2:46)
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.

**Anders Forslund** (2:52)
It's as complex to build a jet engine for a 30-seater as it is for a 70-seater, so it costs the same. It wears the same whether you fly 100 miles or 1,000 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.
For a short flight, you can spend 10 percent of your fuels just taxing up to the runway. Takeoff is inefficient, landing is inefficient. So that segment of flying regionally is really badly served by the technology they have today.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (3:29)
There's already an existing market. Half of all flights in the world are under two hours.

**Anders Forslund** (3:34)
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. This aircraft would be absolutely best if it was flying the shortest possible route.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (3:48)
Think island hopping in Hawaii or Norwegian fjord town that goes from being six-hour drive to 20-minute flight.

**Anders Forslund** (3:55)
In the last year, gone from being 33% better operating economics overall to 48% just because of this increase in price and oil.

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

**Anders Forslund** (4:06)
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 of these things.