Scandinavian Seaplanes Goes Electric with Retro-Fit Solution from Dovetail Electric Aviation

News broke this week that Scan­di­na­vian Sea­planes (SS), the only approved sea­plane oper­a­tor in the region and one of only four in Europe, is trans­form­ing its pow­er­train to elec­tric, thanks to Dovetail’s retro-fit solu­tion, reports a press release.

At present, the com­pa­ny is oper­at­ing six air­craft with over 1,200 com­mer­cial flights last year. This year, SS will also start a land based oper­a­tion with mul­ti-engine air­craft for up to 19 pas­sen­gers.

The com­pa­ny aims to be the first oper­a­tor of elec­tric sea­planes in Europe because the tech­ni­cal solu­tion of retro-fit air­craft is avail­able and the com­pa­ny runs a suc­cess­ful busi­ness mod­el with short flights that work with today’s bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy. 

The release explains, “Scan­di­na­vian Sea­planes plans elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of its fleet by con­ver­sion of already approved air­frames to elec­tric propul­sion, called retro-fit. New air­craft designs that need to be designed and cer­ti­fied from scratch will take many more years before they might become a real­i­ty.” 

The com­pa­ny has formed a part­ner­ship with Dove­tail Elec­tric Avi­a­tion (DEA) who is devel­op­ing an elec­tric and hydro­gen-elec­tric ver­sion of the pop­u­lar Cess­na Car­a­van. Com­pared to many oth­er projects the eCar­a­van and the eDHC‑2 Beaver have already been air­borne and retro-fit air­craft are lead­ing elec­tric avi­a­tion. DEA has con­firmed com­mer­cial cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the eCar­a­van dur­ing 2026.

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The com­pa­ny also includes in its future plan­ning the con­ver­sion of DHC‑6 Twin Otters, the only air­craft on floats in the 19 seat cat­e­go­ry. Cess­na Car­a­vans, Twin Otters and King Airs all share a sim­i­lar ver­sion of the PT‑6 pow­er­plant, and there­fore the ini­tial work Dove­tail is doing is direct­ly applic­a­ble to all plat­forms.

After intro­duc­tion of the eCar­a­van sea­plane the com­pa­ny will con­tin­ue to elec­tri­fy its land based oper­a­tion with the hydro­gen-elec­tric ver­sions of the Twin Otter and King Air. DEA has an active pres­ence in Aus­tralia and Spain and is the only com­pa­ny known to be work­ing on the retro­fit of a hydro­gen-elec­tric King Air, with ini­tial ground tests as ear­ly as June of this year.

Mean­while, Har­bour Air, the sec­ond biggest sea­plane oper­a­tor in the world, recent­ly announced the com­pa­ny would con­vert all their Beaver fleet to elec­tric by 2026.

Back­ground

Scan­di­na­vian Sea­planes is the only sea­plane oper­a­tor in Nor­way with its head office in Bergen and dif­fer­ent bases through­out Nor­way. The com­pa­ny was estab­lished in 2016 with an ambi­tion to con­tin­ue the long his­to­ry of com­mer­cial sea­plane oper­a­tions in the coun­try.

Nor­way has a long tra­di­tion of oper­at­ing sea­planes. From the ear­ly 1930s sea­planes kept the coun­try con­nect­ed for over 40 years before land planes and air­ports became more com­mon.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://seaplanes.no/

www.dovetail.aero

(Top image: Scan­di­na­vian Sea­planes)

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