Electra’s eSTOL Goldfinch completes first piloted electric flight at NASA’s Langley Research Center

Elec­tra suc­cess­ful­ly demon­strat­ed the flight capa­bil­i­ties of its EL‑2 Goldfinch hybrid eSTOL tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor air­craft at NASA’s Lan­g­ley Research Cen­ter last month.

The achieve­ment, which took place on July 15th, marks the first flight of an elec­tric air­craft with a pilot onboard at the NASA facil­i­ty in Hamp­ton, Vir­ginia.

Elec­tra and NASA are work­ing togeth­er on Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty (AAM) research, demon­stra­tions and infor­ma­tion shar­ing under a NASA Space Act Agree­ment.

The flight demo for NASA Langley’s research com­mu­ni­ty show­cased the eSTOL aircraft’s use of dis­trib­uted elec­tric propul­sion (DEP) with blown lift tech­nol­o­gy, which is capa­ble of tak­ing off and land­ing in under 150 feet.

JP Stew­art, Electra’s Vice Pres­i­dent and Gen­er­al Man­ag­er, said: “NASA is an incred­i­ble insti­tu­tion that has devel­oped many of the foun­da­tion­al tech­nolo­gies under­pin­ning today’s avi­a­tion indus­try. They are now pio­neer­ing the future with advanced air mobil­i­ty inno­va­tions.

“We look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing our col­lab­o­ra­tion with them on new tech­nolo­gies that will extend seam­less and con­ve­nient air trav­el to all com­mu­ni­ties.”

The demon­stra­tion high­light­ed the aircraft’s hybrid-elec­tric capa­bil­i­ties for longer range poten­tial and bat­tery-elec­tric flight for qui­et, com­mu­ni­ty-friend­ly oper­a­tions. Ear­li­er that day, the air­craft com­plet­ed the 120-mile cross-coun­try flight from Electra’s site in Man­as­sas facil­i­ty to Hamp­ton, using the hybrid propul­sion sys­tem.

In a sep­a­rate effort, Elec­tra is work­ing under a NASA Small Busi­ness Inno­va­tion Research (SBIR) project on solar-elec­tric, high-alti­tude, long-endurance air­craft research called a “high-alti­tude plat­form sta­tion” or HAPS.

Elec­tra has also con­tributed to a NASA study on con­nect­ing com­mu­ni­ties into the nation­al trans­porta­tion net­work through Region­al Air Mobil­i­ty (RAM) using under­uti­lized air­ports.

Elec­tra is devel­op­ing a 9‑passenger eSTOL pro­duc­tion air­craft designed to replace short- and medi­um-dis­tance vehi­cle trips up to 500 miles with decar­bonized, qui­et and afford­able air trav­el. This air­craft would be able to con­nect Northen Vir­ginia to the Hamp­ton Roads area in a quick 35-minute flight, rather than the 2.5 hours it takes to dri­ve today. 
 
Elec­tra says its tech­nol­o­gy deliv­ers 2.5x the pay­load and 10 times longer range with 70 per cent low­er oper­at­ing costs than ver­ti­cal take­off alter­na­tives with far less cer­ti­fi­ca­tion risk.