An aviation first this Tuesday as the world’s first all-electric passenger plane took flight! Named after Alice in Wonderland, the plane made a successful, inaugural 8-minute flight in Washington, reaching an altitude of 3500 feet.
World’s first all-electric passenger plane makes inaugural flight
Israeli company Eviation Aircraft successfully launched its all-electric passenger plane, named Alice, on Tuesday morning from Washington’s Grant County International Airport. The zero-emission plane is the first of its kind–and it could change the way we fly forever.
A historic leap forward in airplane technology
Eviation was founded in 2015 and has worked on developing the all-electric Alice plane ever since.
“This is history,” said Gregory Davis, Eviation’s president and CEO. “We have not seen the propulsion technology change on the aircraft since we went from the piston engine to the turbine engine. It was the 1950s that was the last time you saw an entirely new technology like this come together.”
“We’ve actually generated, frankly, terabytes of data with the data acquisition systems that we had on the aircraft,” Davis continued, “so we’re going to take a couple of weeks actually and review it to see how the aircraft performs versus our models and our analysis.”
“From there, we’ll understand what we need to do next,” Davis added.
Tech specs: Speed, distance, power, and more
Alice is powered by two 640-kilowatt electric motors. Impressively, it reached an altitude of 3,500 feet during its 8-minute flight in the skies above Moses Lake, Washington, the Daily Mail reported.
The all-electric plane uses battery technology that is similar to that used in electric cars and cell phones. The plane can fly for one hour and roughly 440 nautical miles on only a 30-minute charge, CNN reported.
The plane has a maximum cruising speed of 287 mph. By comparison, a Boeing 730 has a maximum cruising speed of 588 mph.
Alice holds nine passengers and is targeted toward commuter and cargo customers, operating flights that range between 150 and 250 miles. For comparison, a flight from New York City to Washington, D.C. is roughly 206 miles by air.
3 more versions of the Alice electric airplane coming soon
Eviation says it has three different versions of its all-electric plane that are in prototype stages.
One is a “commuter” version, which holds two pilots and nine passengers.
Another version is specialized for transporting 850 pounds of cargo and 450 cubic feet of volume.
In addition, there is an executive version, which holds two pilots and six passengers, with its design offering a more spacious passenger area.
