The World’s Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew

00:00:00 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders ForslundPlay from here

[00:00:00] S0: This is the largest electric airplane ever to fly. It's got a 100 foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, and the electricity to get it off the ground costs just $5 Its successor, the ES30, fly will up to 125 miles on battery alone, up to 500 miles as a hybrid, and recharge in about thirty minutes. [00:00:20] S1: It's the world's largest electric aircraft by about a factor or two. It's the first clean sheet airliner to be flown in any category, electric or not, in The US in the last eighteen years. [00:00:35] S0: This is Anders Forslund. He's the CEO of Heart Aerospace. Seven years ago, Anders showed me this plane. It was a three d printed model that you can hold in your hand. [00:00:45] S1: It's surreal. Yeah. I came to YC with that three d printed plane that was like this this size, and now it's, you know, a 100 foot wingspan, hurdling down the runway, doing taxi testing. [00:00:57] S0: 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 through YC seven years ago. Back then, it was Anders and his co founder Clara and that three d printed model. Today, it's a 40 person team in LA building a real airliner. How would you describe Heart Aerospace in two sentences? [00:01:29] S1: 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.

00:01:29 · Anders Forslund, Gustaf AlstromerPlay from here

[00:01:29] S1: 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. [00:01:35] S0: 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. [00:01:45] S1: You'd be holding a motor that weighed a few grams that you 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, you get basically zero wear. [00:02:07] S0: Let's break that down. A jet engine has thousands of parts and burns fuel hot enough to melt metal. An electric motor has essentially only one moving part. No combustion and doesn't really wear out. [00:02:19] S1: 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, you could spin it at like, you [00:02:27] S0: know, one tenth of the speed. It's virtually silent if you stand like a 100 feet away from it. And the power source is eight battery packs laid across the floor of a plane. [00:02:36] S1: It's eight packs that are like across the floor of the fuselage. It's actually only about four Teslas for this one, carrying that $40 worth of fuel.

00:02:36 · Anders Forslund, Gustaf AlstromerPlay from here

[00:02:36] S1: It's eight packs that are like across the floor of the fuselage. It's actually only about four Teslas for this one, carrying that $40 worth of fuel. [00:02:45] S0: 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. [00:02:52] S1: 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 a 100 miles or a thousand miles. Mhmm. 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. You can spend, you know, for a short flight, you can spend 10% of your fuels just taxing up to the runway. Takeoff is inefficient. Landing is inefficient. So that sort of segment of flying regionally is really badly served by the technology that we have today. [00:03:29] S0: And there's already an existing market. Half of all flights in the world are under two hours. [00:03:34] S1: 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. Right. This aircraft will be absolutely best if it was flying the shortest possible route. [00:03:48] S0: Think island hopping in Hawaii or Norwegian Fjord town that goes from being six hour drive to twenty minute flight.

00:03:48 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders ForslundPlay from here

[00:03:48] S0: Think island hopping in Hawaii or Norwegian Fjord town that goes from being six hour drive to twenty minute flight. [00:03:55] S1: In the last year, we've gone from, like, being 33% better operating economics overall to 48% just because of this increased price in oil. [00:04:03] S0: So why hasn't anyone built this before? It started in Sweden. [00:04:06] S1: 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, I think, super excited about that. Really into paper airplanes. Just been fascinated with planes, know, rockets and all of these things. [00:04:22] S0: He did a PhD on jet engines and ended up at MIT. That's where the idea found him twelve years ago. [00:04:28] S1: He comes to MIT. This is twelve years ago. Yoland shows up and he's talking about electric planes. He says at one point that, you know, eventually all modes of transportation will go electric besides rockets. He's talking about like 400 watt hours per kilogram. It kind of felt like a call to arms. This time I was like working on jet engines during the day. I was like tinkering with drones at the kitchen table at night, becoming kind of obsessed with this. I was actually doing research on this, being paid by the Swedish government to go around, speak to all the airlines before I even had a company. Mhmm. Establish the relationships with the airlines and the Nordics before I even try to build something. [00:05:14] S0: When Anders got to YC, there was no playbook for this.

00:05:14 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders ForslundPlay from here

[00:05:14] S0: When Anders got to YC, there was no playbook for this. [00:05:17] S1: With YC, we were all focused on getting some early interest from airlines. We got some LOIs from SAS and Braun and Lidra and the three Nordic airlines. We really had no technology. Like, I came to YC Demo Day with a little three d printed model. So we we went from having the LOIs to them building, like, the 400 kilowatt motor, which was, the size of a small jet engine. That, in turn, attracted actual, you know, preorders, and then they came from United. And then that attracted more capital, and then we started building, and now we're building towards the plane. [00:05:50] S0: If you're a founder listening to this, the learning that you should have is every time you need more capital, it needs to be something material Yeah. Ideally, something physical you can touch Yeah. That you can show that you made. Their first big airline customer actually came out of the spam folder. [00:06:06] S1: United Airlines came through an inbound email through our info email. Clara was looking at it, she was like, I think this might be a thing. Like, he was, like, cleaning out the spam, and that led us, like, through the front door. We just brought them over, showed showed them the electric motor we built that was the size of the jet engines we tried to replace, and they kind of immediately got it. [00:06:26] S0: And the design itself? Most electric aircraft startups try to look futuristic. Heart did the opposite on purpose.

00:06:26 · Gustaf Alstromer, Anders Forslund, S2Play from here

[00:06:26] S0: And the design itself? Most electric aircraft startups try to look futuristic. Heart did the opposite on purpose. [00:06:33] S1: It looks very much like the turboprops we're trying to replace. We're not trying to build a sports car. I'd rather build something that looks very conventional, but is kind of hiding its Superman cape under the hood. This is the first one. [00:06:45] S0: Yes. [00:06:45] S1: We never even tested this one because we just realized that it wouldn't hold. And the new one just goes all the way through to the bottom here and like this big thing. So it's like really [00:06:54] S0: sturdy. This is the pilot plant. Most of this plane is designed and built right here. [00:07:00] S2: This is a cylinder body for the actuator 6,061 aerospace aluminum. There's about 15 machine components in the actuator that we're working on developing in house processes for. [00:07:13] S0: In traditional aerospace, this would be a supplier. [00:07:16] S1: And you'd source it, and you'd them a year to get one. And now you can just play around with it and test it. This is the same basic architecture for aileron, rudder, landing gear extension, braking, even in the pitch of the propellers. If you want to build something in house, you should start with the things that you don't have to go to one supplier, you go to like eight different, like so. Then it just scales with the number of technologies rather than the number of suppliers. [00:07:44] S0: The whole plant is wired like one giant test bench.