> "It's a prototype for sure," said McDougall, "but in every way it's a high-tech piece of equipment, which is kind of ironic considering the airframe that it's attached to is actually one year younger than me — 62 years old."
> McDougall's flight is the first exercise in what is expected to be a two-year process to get the e-plane certified for commercial use.
For some context Harbour Air is a scheduled floatplane airline operating primarily between Vancouver and Victoria in BC. Since there is no bridge connecting the capital Victoria to the largest city Vancouver, they offer short flights on seaplanes that connect downtown to downtown as an alternative to ferries or larger airplanes that arrive at the airports further outside of the downtown core of either city.
In this constrained context it seems like an electric airplane could work really well and provide fuel savings and a quieter ride. They also seem to have some ambition with these electric aircraft to provide other short range flights.
> MagniX CEO Roei Ganzarski said Dec. 10, 2019, will go down in history as the start of the electric aviation age, and believes the e-plane will eventually revolutionize how people travel by making short- to mid-range flights more economical than driving. "It means you can stop driving for three, five, seven hours to get to a destination because there's no other way to get there," he said. "It means you can fly in a small aircraft from a small airport to a small airport.... It's faster, cheaper and more convenient than any other method of travel, including going with a standard airline."