Battery-Powered Airplanes: Certification, Turnaround and Airport Ops

Figure 1. Alice is Eviation’s nine-passenger, two-crew-member battery-powered aircraft which produces no carbon emissions, has reduced noise levels and costs significantly less to operate per flight hour.
Credit: Eviation

What Fixed-Wing Electrics Must Clear For Regional Routes To Pencil Out

Battery-electric aircraft are chasing a very specific prize: short regional hops that care about noise at the fence, predictable timetables at the gate, and total cost per block hour. The chemistry headlines are interesting; the buying decision rests on three more prosaic pillars—certification, airport ground systems, and turnaround discipline.

Regulators aren’t writing poetry; they’re mapping risk. Europe put a stake in the ground in 2020 by type-certifying Pipistrel’s two-seat Velis Electro—proof an all-electric airplane can pass a full airworthiness review and operate in day-to-day training. That programme forced evidence on battery thermal management, containment (so a single-cell fault doesn’t cascade), and maintainable state-of-charge estimation—habits the larger programs now inherit.

For bigger cabins, the rulebooks extend rather than reset. EASA’s Special Condition, Electric/Hybrid Propulsion Systems (SC E-19) is the backbone: applicants must show how energy storage, power distribution, cooling and protection behave across the envelope—and what the aircraft does next if any of it misbehaves. Means of Compliance under SC E-19 are now well-trodden, which shortens review cycles when applicants show their test cards upfront. In the U.S., most electric commuters aim at Part 23 with FAA-accepted ASTM means of compliance; guidance such as RTCA DO-311A for rechargeable lithium batteries and system-safety practice from ARP4761A anchor the battery and failure-effects analysis. Net effect: certification risk is increasingly legible to insurers and lessors when teams “speak section” and show their artefacts.

Airport Ops: From Jet-A Mindset To High-Power DC

An electric fleet asks airports for different muscle memory: high-power DC at the stand, cable management that won’t trip crews or tangle tugs, charger telemetry that operations can read, and updated fire procedures that account for lithium systems. On interfaces, the industry is converging: SAE’s AS6968 conductive charging standard for light electric aircraft—developed by the AE-7D committee—is the connector/protocol many OEMs and charger makers are aligning to, giving airports confidence they aren’t buying a stranded plug.

Airports will move faster when the charger is bundled like any other certified aircraft system: site survey, breaker schedule, cordon procedures, remote monitoring and audit logs in one package. Treat it as part of the airplane sale, not an afterthought for facilities.

This leads to the commercial question, which isn’t “what’s your kWh?”—it’s “how many cycles per day do you clear, predictably?” Early operations will live on playbooks rather than last-minute scrambling: thermal-condition packs so charging runs to plan in winter and summer; allocate chargers by departure criticality, not first-come; and, where regulators permit (likely trainers first), use spare-pack strategies to keep utilisation independent of a single plug. Publish a standard turn, prove D-5 performance with data, and you’ve turned technology into a timetable.

A Named Example: Eviation’s Alice In The Regional Slot

Eviation’s Alice (figure 1) puts a face to the category: a nine-passenger, two-crew all-electric commuter aimed at the very sectors that value quiet, clean, short hops. The company positions Alice as producing zero carbon emissions in flight, reduced noise, and significantly lower operating cost per flight hour—the ingredients that make thin routes and noise-sensitive airports viable again if the schedule math holds. Alice completed a first flight at Moses Lake in 2022, a public milestone on the road to Part 23 certification; Eviation continues to market the platform to regional and cargo operators. For buyers, the takeaway isn’t romance—it’s traction: a named airframe, a stated certification target, and a cost-and-noise proposition aligned to the business case above.

Training operators will retire aviation gasoline (a high-octane fuel, different from jet fuel, used by many small piston-engine aircraft) trainers where fuel and noise create pain points; public-service fleets will fly repeatable short sectors under community scrutiny; charter and thin regional routes will test 20–45-minute legs from hubs that can host chargers. What unlocks orders is not watt-hours on a slide but governance: a certification plan mapped to SC E-19/Part 23 artefacts, an airport retrofit bill that comes with a compatibility story (SAE/AE-7D), and service terms that de-risk battery calendar life and downtime (availability SLAs, spares pools, performance-based maintenance keyed to battery health).

The Path To Bankability

This category scales when three sentences are true in an RFP: (1) the certification basis is agreed and backed by test data, (2) the ground system is a product with a standard interface, not a bespoke project, and (3) turnaround performance is evidenced on real duty cycles—with winter and summer data, not just summer. Do that, and battery-electric stops being a technology pitch and becomes what operators actually buy: dispatch reliability at a lower noise and energy cost.