According to many, what Heart Aerospace does in its hangar at Säve Airport outside Gothenburg is impossible: to create an electric aircraft for commercial traffic.
Despite the least exciting assignment, to help electrify aviation, the company works internally to be boring.
– The principles of aircraft design are slow speed, low altitude, conventional design to be safe, low risk, boring, and easier to certify, says Philip Keenan, Head of Airworthiness & Certification at Heart Aerospace, and also our host during the visit to the hangar.
Warp News has visited Heart Aerospace twice before. This time, about twenty of our Premium Supporters also got to see the hangar.
"They are not trying to be Tesla, instead they focus on proven technology and products to get a mass-produced electric aircraft," says Alexandra Kafka Larsson, Premium Supporter, CEO, founder of Parsd and former intelligence officer in the Air Force.
Understanding the future
Our Premium Supporters get the chance to discover the future before everyone else, in order to better take advantage of all the opportunities that are created, and what the pessimists miss out on.
The pessimists believe that electric flying is impossible. Engineers say that they calculated and that it is physically impossible to get the equation with batteries and aircraft to be together. Sometimes they may be right if something is really against the laws of physics, but in this case, it is not. In Gothenburg, an electric aircraft for 19 passengers is now being constructed, with the aim of having it in commercial traffic by 2026.
Now our Premium Supporters have seen for themselves the development on the spot and can make their own assessment if they think the doubters are right or wrong.
"I am a Premium Supporter and a volunteer at the Warp Institute for the reason that the future must only come faster. If we decide together on the path forward, we will achieve everything we want to achieve. Therefore, the visit was important for me to see with my own eyes that the future will actually come faster. Where the aim is to put electric aircraft into use by the end of 2026," says Martin Olsson.
Boring path to success
Of course, it is not easy to construct an electric aircraft. Not least, the certification of the aircraft is difficult, which Heart Aerospace realized from the beginning, and therefore the founders Anders Forslund and Klara Forslund chose the boring route. You do not design a completely new aircraft in all its parts, instead, you use proven parts and adapt and develop what is required when you have batteries and electric motors, instead of aviation fuel and internal combustion engines.
We asked two of the participants on the visit what they learned from the visit?
"I am reminded of how regulated the aviation industry is to get a permit to operate, but Heart is prepared for that and has recruited professionals with long experience in the aviation industry," says Alexandra Kafka Larsson.
"An important insight was that technical development has come a long way in a short period of time regarding electrification. Something we never really believed in was the idea of fossil-free cars and planes. Now we are getting there, and truck transports are also underway," Martin Olsson answers.
