PK in The National: E-planes sound far-fetched – but they’re coming to Scottish skies

LoganAir looks like being a pioneer of electric aerospace

This is a fully-research-linked, mildly updated version of my paywalled column for The National, published Saturday, 7th September, 2024

LoganAir lands on Fair Isle (from Wikimedia)

"ELECTRIC airplane" sounds like some long-lost psychedelic band from the Bay Area. It’s actually, after the current maturation of electric vehicles, one of the coming massive waves in greentech.

And this week we learned that Scotland’s leading airline (not a big field, admittedly) is aiming to ride it. I won’t need to tell many Highlands and Islands readers about Loganair’s abilities to connect them to the wider world. I still haven’t had a more dramatic flight experience than swooping down to land on Barra’s Traigh Mhòr (though that was a marriage ago).

The mix of white sands and the whiff of kerosene made the senses reel deliciously. The idea such a beautiful landing could be made on a fossil-free flight induces near-ecogasm.

Loganair are getting a big step closer to it. They’re committing to have hybrid (electric and biofuel) aircraft from Sweden’s Heart Aerospace in service by 2030 (they are also joining Heart’s advisory board). The ES-30 can fly “fully electric zero-emissions” for 200km, and another 400km on “extended hybrid range”. That combined range easily covers Glasgow to Orkney, or Aberdeen to Derry, or indeed most of Loganair’s many (and surprising) “regional” routes.

Somewhat like hybrid cars, hybrid planes are a transition technology towards fully electrified flying transport. However, you may be feeling a twinge of engineering common sense here. Batteries are already 30% of an electric car’s bulk—and planes have to get off the ground, not just trundle along it. How could fully electric flight even be possible, especially on international routes?

There are big answers afoot. But think of all the reasons why we’d wish it – indeed, need it – to be possible.

The urgency to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, as a contributor to global warming, is real. Flight emissions alone have contributed 4% to global temperature rise since industrial times, according to Hannah Ritchie at Our World In Data.

In its rate of carbon reduction, aviation is way behind other sectors like electricity generation, roads and transport, even cement and steel. Green politicians often have the sector squarely in their sights.

Yet there’s a hair-shirt effect of reducing access to national or international flying. What, the world was opened up for us, and now you’re closing it off to us? Or worse, you’re carbon-taxing it so much that all flights become a privilege for the super-rich?

There’s a simmering backlash against the lifestyle constraints that climate worsening seems to demand of us. Do we want to add flight to the discomfiting feeling that environmental urgencies are depriving us of our modernity?

“Fossil-free flying” is worth setting as goal for business and regulation, especially as it maintains a civility and mobility in our lives. We shouldn’t deride it as an absurd, heedless or planet-destroying behaviour. If so, let’s dive in.

The best guide to all this is the veteran US “king of efficiency” Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute. His work on the Hypercar 20 years ago opened the minds of American car-makers to the prospect of super-efficient electric vehicles. In a recent position paper (written for anti-airport-expansion activists in his Aspen home), Lovins maps the current status of fossil-free flying machines (using his term, “EP’s”) to the early lift-off days of electric vehicles (or ‘EV’s”).

By comparison, EPs start with – and forgive the aerial metaphor again – an extremely fair wind. Indeed, much of that wind comes from EV development itself. There’s been a furious struggle to improve battery performance, as well as an ultra-lightening of the car body materials, so hundreds more road miles/kms can be travelled on one charge.

EP entrants are jumping on these EV engineering advances, often (notes Amory) in a mutual and virtuous cycle of development.

However, there’s a very distinct bottleneck to the deployment of electric airplanes that Lovins points out. “Aviation’s inherent hazards, and the resulting rigorous regulatory framework, make airplane manufacturers shun risk”, he writes. “One defective product can shatter or endanger a giant company.”

“Ferocious competition and vulnerability to external shocks like economic downturns, wars, and pandemics make most commercial air carriers risk-averse too, and often financially crimped.”

Within this context (see Boeing’s recent travails), the air-carriers appetite for innovation – even with proven new technology – is not high.

Yet throughout his paper, Lovins shows mockups from large and small companies (and state entities like NASA and the military) of aircraft designs that seem to come from a parallel universe to ours.

There are whale-like passenger cabins, craft with long spindly wings, Star-Wars-style delta shapes – all of them made from new ultralight materials, and shaped by computationally-advanced aerodynamics.

Produced over ten years ago, the claim from these prototypes was that they’d improve existing fossil-fuel efficiency by between 50 and 80 percent. Yet you’ll see nothing like them in current air fleets.

For a planet-friendly environmental guru, Lovins has a refreshingly entrepreneurial edge to him. So he sees breakthrough to a new aviation model coming from start-ups and non-incumbents. Imagine an early Tesla that might still be worthy of admiration (as opposed to Musk’s current and degraded spectacle).

Although we might lament that Scotland is nowhere when it comes to making the machinery, we can be pretty chuffed that Loganair is taking initial steps with Heart Aerospace’s ES-30. Lovins’s late 2023 paper has a large section on this craft and manufacturer, he identifies one of their markets as “trips over mountainous terrain, where the flight distance is significantly less than the road routes available.”

That surely fits Scotland. Does Loganair’s flight map – connecting mid-side cities to large towns, across these islands – support a wider change in the business model? Instead of flights being broken up by hub-and-spoke large airports, suggests Lovins, “flying straight from A to B [avoiding C] as we once did would reduce delays, tensions, mishaps, emissions, perhaps illness, and ticket prices.”

"Emerging ultraclean aircraft are often well sized for more frequent service to more destinations, eliminating one or more segments”, Lovins continues. They also deliver “lower capital and operating costs that support this point-to-point route architecture. And at a lower total cost per ticket.”

In short: these efficiencies can be translated into both affordability and profits. He even has a vision for hydrogen-powered intercontinental flights, assuming that it’s green hydrogen (produced with renewably-sourced electricity) than blue hydrogen (electricity made with fossil fuel resources).

There’s a phrase Amory uses which has some poetry about it: “lightness multiplies”. He means that if we are bold enough to apply our ingenuity to building from light but strong materials, we make the most from our energy and engines.

He points to EV technology that now enables cars to be powered by electricity from their own surface solar panels. (This is a swap-over from military tech, that now keeps observation planes permanently aloft). Can we rule this out, he asks, as an energy input to our bigger electric aircraft, hybrid or fully electric?

Another Greek myth falls. Icarus is still aloft – but the wax that holds his feathers together doesn’t melt in the sun; instead, it’s strengthened by the sun. The human dream of flight, the evolutionary path we didn’t take but clearly envy, can persist. And it will do so by means of planet-friendly ingenuity and application.

I look forward to the prospect, a decade or so hence, of my looping descent to the sands of Traigh Mhòr: a steady and virtuous hum, all the way to the white sands and the nearby waves.

Subscribe to The National here.