Ampaire's hybrid EEL aircraft completes longest flight

Picture: Ampaire

We better get used to the stream of new records that are going to be broken in electric and hybrid flying in times to come. Today is the turn of Ampaire, a California-based startup to announce that its EEL hybrid-electric aircraft has completed the longest flight to date.

Its EEL, a specially-modified hybrid-electric Cessna 337 aircraft completed a 341 mile long flight between Camarillo Airport, in the Los Angeles area, and Hayward Executive Airport, in the Bay Area. The flight took 2 hour and 32 minutes at an average cruise speed of around 135 mph.

To be clear, this was not an all-electric flight, like the “Alps to the North Sea” expedition that broke several all-electric flight records las summer with an electric Pipistrel aircraft (will soon publish a podcast with the organizers!)

The EEL is powered by two engines, a 130 kW electric propulsion system at the front of the aircraft and a conventionally-powered rear engine (a continental IO-550) able to produce 224kW of max power output. The two power plants are operated independently of each other. The electric is mainly used during takeoff and climb as well as taxiing after landing, but during most, if not all, of the cruising stage of the flight, the electric engine is either feathered or running at low power.

Ampaire, which was started in 2016 by two aviation professionals, has chosen to focus on hybrids as a carbon-reducing technology for green flights, because they think they bring significant cost reduction and good performance without the regulatory complexity of pure electric aircraft.

The EEL is soon to be shipped to Hawaii to conduct tests with Mokulele Airlines, a Hawaiian airline that operates local flights in the islands. The flights that Ampaire’s EEL conducts in Hawaii are still going to be experimental (the aircraft is not yet certified by the FAA for commercial service), yet, if successful, these tests open up interesting perspectives for the electrification of local, commuter segment of air transport (hydrogen seems, so far, to be a more promising technology for larger airliners).