Vancouver airline plans to be the world's first commercial electric plane operator

Vancouver-based Harbour Air is developing a second battery-powered aircraft as part of its quest to offer the world’s first commercial electric passenger-plane service.

Harbour Air founder, president and CEO Greg McDougall said the company remains on track to become the world’s first electric plane operator to carry paying customers by the summer of 2023.

“We’re currently moving on to a sort of 2.0 version,” McDougall said in an interview with Research Money.

Harbour Air ranks as North America’s largest seaplane airline operator, with an average of 500,000 passengers each year before the pandemic. The company provides seaplane passenger service in British Columbia along with a Vancouver-Seattle route.

Harbour Air completed the world’s first electric plane, or eplane, test flight in Vancouver in 2019 with an electric-powered de Havilland Beaver aircraft retrofitted with a battery pack provided by Swiss-based partner H55. The company is now building a second eplane with a new battery system, according to McDougall.

Battery takes one hour to charge

The current battery pack can remain charged for one hour — half an hour of flying time and half an hour of reserve — and the battery pack takes one hour to charge for every flying hour. That's enough for Harbour Air's shorter routes.

McDougall expects battery-related technology to evolve and allow for faster charging times and longer power. The firm aims to electrify its whole fleet of planes eventually.

“I don’t think there’s any choice,” said McDougall. “The writing’s on the wall, at least for shorter-range commuter aircraft. They’re going to be electrified within a short period of time. So I think you either sit there and watch it happen, or you’re part of it, or you lead it. I choose to lead it, because our philosophy has always been to be innovative in what we do.”

The company became North America’s first carbon-neutral airline in 2007, and McDougall said they want to “do what’s best for the environment.”

The first major challenge for fleet electrification is to gain Transport Canada approval to offer commercial services. McDougall said the second challenge is to make the electrical propulsion economical enough in terms of flying distance and payload, or the number of passengers, that can be carried.

“Right now, some of our airplanes fly longer routes, so it’s going to be much more challenging to provide them with that propulsion system that’s going to work on a longer range and still be able to carry a viable payload,” he said.

Frequent test flights 

Harbour and H55 are collaborating with Magnix, an Everett, Wash.-based company that provides electric engines for aircraft, to get components related to the electrical motor's energy supply certified and permission to carry passengers.

It is not clear how many test flights will be completed before Harbour Air obtains the necessary certification from Transport Canada. McDougall said the process is a "bit fluid" because it has never been done before.

“[Test flights] are going all the time,” said McDougall. “They fly every week. We’re flying [the original eBeaver] as much as we can, because every flight that we do is recorded data which goes towards certifying the aircraft.”

“At the end of the day, we’re confident that criteria we have to meet are as safe, or safer, than what we currently have in the standard combustion engine — piston-driven engine. So that standard, we know we can meet it, and it’s just a matter of proving it. So the more flights we do, the better.”

A veteran pilot, McDougall has conducted many of the test flights himself.

“It’s very interesting to fly," he said. "The airframe is standard Beaver airframe, which I have thousands of hours in. So that part of it doesn’t feel foreign to me, obviously. The motor is so quiet for one thing and then the other thing is, it has a lot of torque. So the performance, from the amount of weight that the batteries are and everything else, is pretty striking."

“The major thing that’s exciting about it is the fact that it’s the first of its kind and it’s likely – likely – to be the first aircraft in the world carrying a passenger with an electric motor.”

B.C. government provided $1.6-million grant

Harbour Air received a $1.6-million B.C. government CleanBC Go Electric Advanced Research and Commercialization (ARC) grant in October. The grant requires the company to match the provincial funding dollar for dollar.

“We’re certainly happy to get that funding, because this is an expensive endeavour,” said McDougall, adding the company is “paving the way” for others who will seek regulatory approval of eplanes in the future.

He estimates that electrification will cost about $1 million per plane, the same required to convert a piston-engine-powered aircraft to one propelled by a turbine engine. “But the big payoff is that the operating cost is so much lower,” he said.

Harbour Air has applied for many other government grants, but has not received much other than federal tax credits, said McDougall. He said the company has not collaborated directly with academics on research, but that universities are welcome to “come and take a look.”

He expects criteria developed through the certification of an electrified retrofit aircraft to be applied to eplanes built from scratch. Harbour Air has partnered with San Francisco Bay Area-based Airflow on a project that could lead to the construction of a completely new eplane. It will take much longer, however, for that brand new eplane to become a reality.

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