Maiden flight success for World’s largest all-electric commercial aircraft

The world’s largest all-elec­tric com­mer­cial air­craft has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed its first flight — mark­ing a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in accel­er­at­ing the elec­tric avi­a­tion rev­o­lu­tion.

The Cess­na Grand Car­a­van 208B, which typ­i­cal­ly seats nine pas­sen­gers, was pow­ered by a 750-horse­pow­er (560 kW) magni500 propul­sion sys­tem, which has been devel­oped by elec­tric motor man­u­fac­tur­er mag­niX.

The air­craft was con­vert­ed by mag­niX and aero­space test­ing, engi­neer­ing and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion firm AeroTEC, and took off from the AeroTEC Flight Test Cen­ter at Grant Coun­ty Inter­na­tion­al Air­port in Moses Lake, Wash­ing­ton, USA, on Thurs­day.

Roei Gan­zars­ki, CEO of mag­niX, said: “The icon­ic Car­a­van has been a work­horse of indus­try mov­ing peo­ple and trans­port­ing goods on short routes for decades.

“This first flight of the eCar­a­van is yet anoth­er step on the road to oper­at­ing these mid­dle-mile air­craft at a frac­tion of the cost, with zero emis­sions, from and to small­er air­ports. These elec­tric com­mer­cial air­craft will enable the offer­ing of fly­ing ser­vices of peo­ple and pack­ages in a way pre­vi­ous­ly not pos­si­ble.”

The his­toric 30-minute flight is the lat­est exam­ple of zero-emis­sions avi­a­tion trans­porta­tion and was cap­tured via livestream on Face­book and Twit­ter, watched by peo­ple around the world. on social media. Fol­low­ing the flight, a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence was held in the Test Center’s hangar. 

“I’m proud of the pio­neer­ing work per­formed by our engi­neers, tech­ni­cians and flight test team,” said Lee Human, Pres­i­dent and CEO of AeroTEC.

“There’s no roadmap for test­ing and cer­ti­fy­ing elec­tric air­craft – this is a new fron­tier and AeroTEC is on the front lines devel­op­ing the process­es and best prac­tices that will pave the way for elec­tric avi­a­tion.”

The fly­ing of the eCar­a­van serves as anoth­er crit­i­cal step in the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and approval process of the magni500 propul­sion sys­tem, enabling future con­ver­sions of addi­tion­al air­craft to magniX’s all-elec­tric propul­sion tech­nol­o­gy.