The world's first all-electric passenger aircraft has successfully taken to the sky.
Israeli company Eviation Aircraft successfully launched the Alice on Tuesday morning from Washington's Grant County International Airport. The zero-emission plane traveled at an altitude of 3,500 feet for its eight-minute inaugural flight.
With battery technology similar to that of an electric car or a cell phone and 30 minutes of charging, the nine-passenger Alice will be able to fly for one hour, and about 440 nautical miles. The plane has a max cruise speed of 250 knots, or 287 miles per hour. For reference, a Boeing 737 has a max cruise speed of 588 miles per hour.
"We've actually generated, frankly, terabytes of data with the data acquisition systems that we had on the aircraft, 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," Davis said."From there, we'll understand what we need to do next."
Three different versions of the Alice are in protoype stages: a"commuter" variant, an executive version, and one specialized for cargo. The commuter configuration holds nine passengers and two pilots, as well as 850 pounds of cargo. The executive design has six passenger seats for a more spacious flight, and the cargo plane holds 450 cubic feet of volume.
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