My hair-raising flight in the world’s first electric aircraft

There is an airfield not far from my home, which means that light aircraft often fly directly over the garden. They are noisy things and my two-year-old son makes a “pshyoooo” sound whenever one flies overhead, with his arms stretched out like wings.

But soon his plane impersonation might need to evolve into more of a “whrrrrr” sound, like a Tesla pulling away at traffic lights. Electric planes are taking flight in British skies, and this week I was invited to go up in one.

Now, I know very little about aviation engineering, but what I do know about batteries is that they are heavy, they run out of juice when they get cold and there have been one or two teething problems with electric-powered cars. So yes, I was excited to give the Pipistrel Velis Electro a spin, but I also felt a few pre-flight nerves as I arrived at Fairoaks Airport in Surrey.

‘Closer to a Lego plane than a Boeing’

In the hangar, the Electro was connected to a portable power unit that could be mistaken for a bouncy castle generator. The light aircraft was being charged up for our flight. And “light” is the operative word here: by all measures it is closer in weight and size to a Lego plane than a Boeing 747.

Despite its modest proportions, there’s a lot of buzz surrounding this little aircraft. Built in Slovenia, Pipistrel’s Velis Electro is the first fully electric aircraft to be certified for flight in the UK, and the Federal Aviation Authority in the USA has just given it the nod too.

Now, a flight training company called Synergy, along with sustainability solutions provider 4AIR, have established Britain’s first zero-emissions flight training platform. This means that student pilots like Cameron Taylor, 19, will be able to do a good chunk of their training without pumping any emissions into the atmosphere (4AIR offsets the energy required to charge the batteries).

“It’s really exciting,” says Taylor, who has been flying since he was 14. “You could carry out a lot of your training without producing any carbon emissions at all.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if electric aircraft do become the future. It’s one of those things where you start off with a mobile phone that’s large, and you can’t do much with it, but now you have phones which are 50 per cent screen. There’s a lot of progress to be made,” added Taylor.

“The opportunity to decarbonise aircraft training is huge,” added Kennedy Ricci of 4AIR. “Students need to do around 40 to 50 hours of flight training to get their first licence. This will cover about three quarters of that, although some of the trips would have to be longer and so wouldn’t be able to be covered by this aircraft.”

There are now more than a dozen UK airfields with electric charging points installed and more than 500 companies are developing electric aircraft, something that was expedited by the three Uber Elevate conferences that took place before the pandemic. In the wake of these events, investors saw an opportunity in electric aviation and the money poured in, perhaps disproportionately so compared to the other (admittedly, less glamorous) solutions such as Sustainable Aviation Fuel.

Since Cameron Taylor was still in training, my life was instead put in the hands of former RAF pilot, Adam Twidell, 52, who enlisted me to help him to push the aircraft out of the hangar. I asked him what were the main differences between flying this and a combustion engine aircraft.

“It just feels wonderful. It’s quiet, but the simplicity is the main difference,” he said, adding that there are effectively only a few buttons you need to press to get the plane in the air. “You’re taking away a lot of the complication of managing a combustion engine. It has instant power. But on the other hand, with the battery technology, we are limited to how long we can fly.”

A traditional training aircraft can fly for a few hours, but on the Electro you are limited to just an hour. Twidell says that they always land the Electro with around a third of its battery life remaining, allowing for a 20-minute buffer, but he reassured me that running out of battery wouldn’t be a disaster anyway: “It’s a super light aircraft with a large wing, which means it glides probably twice as far as a conventional aircraft,” he said.

As we climbed into the cockpit he clicked the machine into life and I saw that the green battery icon was charged to 100. With the flick of another button the propeller jumped into action, smooth as anything.

‘Do you want to fly it?’

On the runway, Twidell pressed a button and asked for approval for take off (a request he probably could have yelled across the airfield to the air traffic control hut). He said my job was to look out for other planes, and I couldn’t tell for certain if he was joking or not. With permission granted from air traffic control, we were soon zooming along the runway, feeling every pebble and bump in the tarmac. And then, airbound.

We wore noise cancelling headphones during the flight, but even without these the cockpit was remarkably quiet. The Velis Electro has noise levels of only 60 decibels, considerably easier on the ears than Cessnas, which can push closer to 100 decibels in volume.

At our maximum height of around 1,000ft, we looked down on mansions with large swimming pools (“I have a couple of favourites,” said Twidell). Woking’s carbuncular clustered towers poked up in the near distance, the M25 snaked below like a toy car track. And then Twidell proposed something unexpected.

“Want to fly it?” he said, nodding to the throttle between my legs.

I took hold of the lever and, on Twidell’s instruction, slowly pulled it towards me to raise the nose, then levelled it out again. Next, I softly banked the plane to the left to see Twidell framed against the verdant Surrey fields.

Flying in the Velis Electro was a joy, nothing less, and I could fully understand why Twidell and Taylor are so enthusiastic about the new technology. When I glanced at the battery pack to see that the charge had dropped to below 50 per cent, I felt a pang of disappointment. Twidell looped back towards the Fairoaks runway. Short but sweet, our zero-emission flight was over, and as we taxied along the runway I saw that a few engineers on the airfield were signalling a strange gesture at us.

“They’re pretending to wind up the aircraft,” Twidell laughed, adding, “People are very fond of this plane. It’s made a big impact at Fairoaks already.”

A big impact at a small airport, sure. But do electric planes spell the future of aviation? It seems unlikely that we will see electric planes flying to New York any time soon, or even Paris – batteries store far less energy than fuel, and would need to be inordinately big to power a jumbo jet. It may never be possible.

But electric light aircraft could still have a big impact in another way: if tens of thousands of flight training hours are conducted in electric planes, this will add up to millions of litres of kerosene removed from the atmosphere. The high-polluting private jet market, which often operates small distances, could also be an area of growth. And where you and I are concerned, regional flights on planes bigger than this one could be a possibility within the next few decades, which could transform how we travel around the UK.

“The exciting thing is what other aircraft will follow,” says Twidell, “and the huge step up in endurance and capabilities that we’re about to see.”