MagniX Takes Step Toward Giving Small Workhorse Planes An Electric Makeover

Hybrid engines might be the more practical near-term approach to ushering in the era of electric flight, but some companies are trying to make the jump to all-electric now.

A startup called MagniX says it’s making rapid progress toward a battery-electric propulsion system that could replace turboprop engines on existing six- to 20-seat planes like the Cessna Caravan, Beechcraft King Air or Viking Twin Otter.

The company, which was founded nine years ago in Australia and recently moved its headquarters to Redmond, Wash., has successfully tested a power-dense 350-horsepower electric motor with a propeller mounted on a Cessna "iron bird" test rig, it announced Thursday.

Tipping the scales at about 50 kilograms (110 pounds), the motor puts out 5 kilowatts of power per kilogram, a ratio that makes it viable for flight, with a max rating of 3,000 rpm.

MagniX aims to scale it up to a 750-horsepower model that it plans to flight test next fall in a Cessna 208 Caravan, a plane that’s a workhorse for cargo delivery companies like FedEx, as well as widely used for short-hop passenger service.

CEO Roei Ganzarski says MagniX’s motor should cost roughly the same as the venerable Pratt & Whitney PT6 engines it would replace, while improving operating costs on the order of 40% to 60%. In his vision it’s a no-brainer switch for cargo companies, and could open up new possibilities for passenger service between smaller communities with under-utilized airfields.

“You can truly do on-demand operation, both of packages and transportation of people, that opens up business models in rural communities,” he told Forbes.

With existing lithium-ion battery technology, Ganzarski says MagniX’s motor will be able to enable a loaded Caravan to fly up to 105 miles, long enough for many delivery routes. He says MagniX is working with battery companies that believe they can improve range to 250 miles within a few years. “Now you’re talking Seattle-Portland, Seattle-Vancouver, Seattle-Spokane: real regional transportation, but at a fraction of the cost of what’s being used today,” he says.

Ganzarski, who spent five years as chief customer officer in Boeing's flight services division before leaving to run a scheduling software company, says MagniX's current system will have charging time equivalent to flight time – a one-hour flight would require an hour on the ground plugged in – but he says the company is working to halve that within the next two years.

Ganzarski says MagniX is in discussions with small plane makers to incorporate the motors into existing models, as well as with startups developing new aircraft optimized for electric propulsion.

He believes electric propulsion could make significant inroads into the "middle mile" market within five years.

MagniX is playing catch-up with Siemens, which started test flights of a plane equipped with a 50-kg, 260-kw electric motor in 2015. That’s roughly equivalent to the specs of the motor MagniX has on a test rig now. Siemens has developed an electric motor that puts out “better” than 5 kw/kg, and is aiming to improve performance to 10 kw/kg in two years, according to Frank Anton, who heads the German company’s electric aircraft program.

Siemens has over 300 hours of flight test time on small aircraft with electric motors that put out 260 kw or less, and is supplying small motors for the Sunflyer 2, a two-seat electric plane from Denver’s Bye Aerospace.

Unlike MagniX, Siemens aims to side-step the limitations of current battery technology. Its primary goal is to commercialize hybrid-electric systems that can power larger aircraft with greater range, with a gas turbine providing power for electric motors while the aircraft is cruising, and batteries providing supplemental power for takeoff and climb. At the larger end, Siemens expects that by 2035 its propulsion systems could be powering 50- to 100-seat commercial aircraft with a range of 500 miles.

Siemens is working with Airbus and Rolls-Royce to develop a 2-megawatt hybrid-electric regional aircraft demonstrator called the E-Fan X, as well as with Airbus on a quadcopter urban air taxi, the CityAirbus, that could take its first test flight in the next six months.  

MagniX expects smaller electric aircraft to be able to travel 500 miles as early as 2022. Ganzarski believes that in committing to battery-electric technology, the company could play a role akin to Tesla in the automotive sector, helping push the aerospace industry to faster progress toward full electrification and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Another Seattle-area company, Zunum Aero, is developing 12-seat planes based on its own hybrid-electric propulsion system to provide service on 350- to 500-mile routes that major airlines have pulled back from. It's backed by Boeing and JetBlue.

Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group, says the engineering challenges may be surmountable, but efforts to develop electric regional passenger planes could founder on the same economics that have led airlines to upsize their planes and reduce regional service.

“It’s really a dog of a market," he says. “Crew cost inflation, slot inflation — there’s a whole host of factors that have nothing to do with whether [the plane] burns jet fuel or not. Still, if this technology goes somewhere and can be migrated over to bigger planes, there might be something.”