Heart Aerospace flew the X1 demonstrator at Plattsburgh International Airport on August 12, burning $5 of electricity across a 30-minute flight. The aircraft weighs over 25,000 pounds at max takeoff, runs four wing-mounted electric motors, and pushed more than one megawatt of power through its battery system. It is the largest battery-electric aircraft ever flown.
The timing is not incidental. Jet fuel prices are spiking under the pressure of the US-Iran war, and the X1 flight puts a hard number on the cost gap between electric and conventional propulsion at regional airliner scale.
The full article is worth reading for the technical breakdown of the propulsion system and what Heart Aerospace's roadmap looks like beyond the X1 demonstrator. The $5 figure is the headline, but the megawatt power delivery is the engineering story.
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