Alice, an all-electric passenger aircraft being created by Israeli startup Eviation (Arlington, WA), has not yet been certified by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), but Massachusetts-based regional carrier Cape Air (9K, Hyannis) has announced the first order for it.
The three-engine, battery-powered aircraft will have a 1000km range on a single charge and will be delivered to Cape Air in 2022, Lior Zivan, Eviation’s chief technical officer, told IEEE Spectrum, a New York-based magazine issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The 900-kilowatt-hour (kWH) lithium-ion battery is being manufactured by South Korea's Kokam Battery.
Alice “makes sense for us because we are a short-haul carrier,” said Trish Lorino, Cape Air's vice president of marketing. “Short-haul routes ‘in our backyard’ such as Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Provincetown would be the likely routes.”
Eviation CEO Omar Bar-Ohay unveiled Alice at the Paris Air Show in June, highlighting that it has a maximum takeoff weight of 6,350kg, but that 3,700kg of this is the battery. He added that each of the three motors would have one moving part, as opposed to ten in a conventional petroleum-fuelled piston engine, meaning that “electric propulsion has a major advantage in both reliability and maintenance”.
Cape Air has not yet decided on the number of the electric aircraft that will join its fleet, Lorino said.
Earlier this week, ch-aviation reported that Cape Air accepted the first two of twenty (with a further eighty options) of the new twin-engine Costruzioni Aeronautiche TECNAM P2012 Travellers, the first commercial aircraft type to be created by the Italian aeronautics manufacturer. Cape Air's fleet currently consists of eighty-eight Cessna (twin piston) aircraft and four BN-2s.
