Hart Aerospace ES-30: Inside the World's Largest Electric Airplane
Hart Aerospace flew the world's largest electric airplane. Here's how its hybrid-electric design works and why it's targeting regional air travel.
What is the Hart Aerospace ES-30?
The ES-30 is a hybrid-electric regional airliner from Hart Aerospace, a Los Angeles startup built to replace the aging turboprops that fly most short regional routes. Its demonstrator aircraft, a 100-foot-wingspan plane weighing 25,000 pounds at takeoff, recently completed taxi testing and flight trials in Plattsburgh, New York, making it the largest electric aircraft ever flown, roughly twice the size of anything else in the category. The production version, the ES-30, is designed to fly up to 125 miles on battery power alone, or up to 500 miles using a hybrid-electric system, with a recharge time of about 30 minutes.
TL;DR
- Hart Aerospace flew the largest electric airplane ever built, a 100-foot-wingspan, 25,000-pound demonstrator, with electricity costs for that flight reportedly around five dollars.
- The production ES-30 is designed for 125 miles on battery alone and up to 500 miles in hybrid mode, recharging in roughly 30 minutes.
- The company swapped jet engines for electric motors with essentially one moving part, which cuts manufacturing complexity and wear compared to turbine engines.
- A small turboprop hybrid system exists mainly to cover safety reserves, since batteries (unlike jet fuel) don’t get lighter as they’re consumed during flight.
- Hart’s aircraft intentionally looks like a conventional turboprop rather than a futuristic concept, because the company is targeting airline operators, not novelty buyers.
- The business case rests on the fact that half of all flights worldwide are under two hours, a segment poorly served by aircraft designs that are decades old.
- Early customers, including United Airlines, came through direct outreach and a cold email that Hart almost missed in a spam folder.
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How does the hybrid-electric design actually work?
Hart’s aircraft runs on eight battery packs distributed across the floor of the fuselage, roughly equivalent in energy terms to four Tesla battery packs. Those packs power electric motors that replace the plane’s jet engines. According to Hart CEO Anders Forslund, a jet engine has thousands of moving parts and burns fuel hot enough to melt metal, while an electric motor scaled up for aviation has essentially one moving part, no combustion, and close to zero wear over time.
That simplicity extends to how the plane behaves at low power. A jet engine held at idle speed while taxiing still generates disproportionate noise and wasted fuel, since combustion engines don’t scale down efficiently. An electric motor has a constant torque profile, so it can run at a fraction of its top speed, making the plane close to silent from roughly 100 feet away during ground operations.
The hybrid part comes from a small, relatively simple turboprop engine that supplements the batteries. Hart’s team said this system is one of the least complex on the market and adds around 20 percent to the aircraft’s upfront cost. The reasoning is practical: aviation safety rules require enough energy reserve to divert to an alternate airport (potentially 100 miles away) and loiter for 45 minutes if something goes wrong, and roughly one in every thousand US flights gets diverted. Since batteries don’t lose weight as they discharge the way jet fuel does, an all-electric plane would need to carry about two-thirds of its total battery capacity purely as reserve. The turboprop backup lets Hart avoid hauling that much dead weight on every flight while still meeting safety requirements.
Why target regional routes instead of building a flashier aircraft?
Hart’s strategy is deliberately narrow: short-haul regional flights, not urban air taxis, not long-haul jets. The logic comes down to aircraft economics. Building a jet engine for a 30-seat plane costs about the same as building one for a 70-seat plane, and jet engines wear out at the same rate whether they’re flying 100 miles or 1,000. That economic reality has pushed the aviation industry toward larger planes on longer routes for decades, leaving short regional hops served by aircraft designs that are around 40 years old.
Those older turboprops are especially inefficient on short flights because taxiing, takeoff, and landing eat up a disproportionate share of total fuel burned. On a short flight, taxiing alone can consume roughly 10 percent of fuel used. Hart’s pitch is that its aircraft performs best precisely on the shortest routes, the kind that connect island communities in Hawaii or shrink a six-hour drive between Norwegian fjord towns into a 20-minute flight.
The market size backs this up: about half of all flights globally run under two hours. Rising jet fuel prices have sharpened the case further. Hart’s team noted that the operating-economics advantage of their aircraft over conventional turboprops grew from roughly 33 percent to 48 percent within a year, driven largely by higher oil prices.
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Why did Hart make the plane look conventional instead of futuristic?
Many electric aircraft startups design vehicles that look like something out of a concept-car showroom. Hart went the opposite direction on purpose. The ES-30 is styled to resemble the turboprops it’s meant to replace rather than look like a novel flying vehicle. Forslund has described the approach as building something that looks conventional but is “hiding its Superman cape under the hood.”
That choice reflects who the customer actually is: airlines that need to slot a new aircraft into existing routes, existing airport infrastructure, and existing pilot training and maintenance systems, not consumers buying a new kind of vehicle. Hart’s team points out that there are already about 5,000 airports in the US, infrastructure the company can use as-is rather than needing new vertiports or novel ground support systems, an advantage over electric air-taxi companies building three or four-passenger vehicles for point-to-point urban travel.
How did Hart Aerospace get started?
Founder Anders Forslund grew up in Sweden near an air force base and became fascinated with aircraft and paper airplanes as a kid. He later earned a PhD focused on jet engines and ended up at MIT, where, according to Forslund, a talk from Elon Musk about the electrification of transportation (including a reference to batteries reaching around 400 watt-hours per kilogram) became something of a catalyst. Forslund spent time working on jet engines by day and tinkering with drone motors at night, eventually doing government-funded research in Sweden that put him in front of Nordic airlines before he had a company at all.
Hart went through Y Combinator with no finished technology, just a 3D-printed model of the plane small enough to hold in one hand, plus letters of intent from Nordic carrier SAS. That early interest helped the team build a 400-kilowatt electric motor, roughly the size of a small jet engine, which in turn attracted pre-orders and additional capital. United Airlines became a customer after reaching out through Hart’s general info email, a message that nearly got filed away as spam before co-founder Clara Rincon flagged it as worth pursuing.
Is battery technology ready for an electric airliner?
Battery energy density is the central constraint on how far an electric aircraft can fly, and Hart runs its own battery cell lab to evaluate options from Chinese, American, and Korean manufacturers. The team is assessing cells for flight-cycle durability, safety, cost, and energy density. As of the most recent testing, the highest-density cell available on their test bench reached about 370 watt-hours per kilogram, short of the 400 watt-hour benchmark Musk referenced years earlier at MIT, though one manufacturer was expected to reach that 400 level within a few months. Hart’s team said even the current 370 watt-hour cells comfortably meet the targets set for the first generation of the aircraft.
Frequently Asked Questions
How big is the Hart Aerospace demonstrator plane?
It has a 100-foot wingspan and a takeoff weight of 25,000 pounds, making it the largest electric aircraft flown to date, about twice the size of the next-largest electric aircraft.
How far can the ES-30 fly?
The production ES-30 is designed to fly up to 125 miles on battery power alone, and up to 500 miles using its hybrid-electric turboprop system, with a roughly 30-minute recharge time.
Why does the ES-30 need a turboprop engine if it’s electric?
Aviation safety rules require reserve energy for diversions and loitering in case of an emergency landing situation. Since batteries don’t get lighter as they discharge the way jet fuel does, an all-battery plane would need to carry about two-thirds of its capacity just as reserve weight. A small turboprop backup covers that reserve requirement more efficiently.
How many passengers does the ES-30 carry?
The aircraft can technically fit up to 36 passengers, though the more likely operating configuration is around 30 seats, giving passengers extra legroom.
Is Hart Aerospace planning bigger aircraft in the future?
Yes. The company has said it wants to eventually build larger planes, potentially competing in the narrow-body category currently dominated by aircraft like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, a market with substantial existing order backlogs.