Finnair enters electric aircraft race with Heart Aerospace

Interesting news - again - from the Nordics!

While Norway has been getting much recent coverage with its electric flight plans, this time the news concern Finland and Sweden.

Finnair has just announced it is signing a letter of interest for 20 ES-19 electric aircraft, the clean sheet 19-seater all-electric aircraft being developed by Swedish startup Heart Aerospace.

The Finnish flag carrier is not the first airline to show interest in Heart’s very interesting aircraft type - small New Zealand regional airline Sounds Air made a similar announcement months ago - but it is the first major operator to do so.

To be clear, and to the best of my knowledge, these are not yet firm orders, since Heart has still some way to go before having even a flyable prototype.

In fact, this type of airline involvement in new aircraft development projects are not new, we have the cases of Wright Electric and Easyjet or the recently announced of Volotea and Air Nostrum with Dante Aeronautical in Spain and, of course, Wideroe’s partnership with Tecnam in Norway. Getting into specific figures is one step up, though, and I wonder whether there is any sort of financial commitment too.

Heart Aerospace’s aircraft came up also during a recent conversation I had with officials of the Kvarken area, a cross-border region that straddles northern Finland and Sweden, which has its own transport de-carbonization programme. Smaller costs would make it possible to open up many new air links between small communities, displacing also land transportation.