Maeve thinks its full-electric 44-seater hits the sweet spot

Dutch start-up Maeve Aerospace thinks it can hit the sweet spot with its full electric 44-seater that would perfectly fit in between net zero aircraft that other OEMs are planning to bring to the market. With the potential to grow the design, the Maeve would be more attractive to airlines than the smaller Heart Aerospace ES-30 30-seater, says CEO and co-founder Jan Willem Heinen. Maeve thinks its full-electric 44-seater hits the sweet spot. AirInsight spoke to Heinen this week at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam, where it had a small booth to invite visitors to see a model of the Maeve 01. By coincidence, the author dropped by at the same time when IATA Director-General Willie Walsh had a close look at the aircraft. (main picture, with Walsh in the center and Heinen on the right). Heinen and partner Joost Dieben started Maeve last year as Venturi Aero, but changed the name because they weren’t able to trademark it well enough. Last January, the project was officially unveiled during a media event. Since then, the company that is closely linked to the YesDelft Incubator of Delft Technical University has grown its organization to twenty. On display in Amsterdam was a model of the current version of the aircraft, a 44-seater with an operational range of 550 kilometers and a cruising speed of 490 kilometers/hour. The batteries are located under the cabin floor within the wide cross-section of the fuselage, which seats passengers in a 2-1 configuration or optionally a 2-2 configuration. Luggage is placed in a hold around 2.2 cubic meters aft in the fuselage. The high-wing aircraft has eight electric motors under each wing. Heinen explains that the airframe is weight-restricted, which limits seat capacity to 44. “It means that we have the volume for more seats, but we can’t use it all as we are restricted by the capacity of the batteries. As battery technology develops, you could turn this 44-seater into a 60-seater.” Design update in March Maeve plans to unveil an updated version in March of next year. “I can’t disclose what exactly will change, because that’s part of the unveiling”, said Heinen. “Last year, we did an extensive feasibility study with a ten percent design margin of every aspect of the aircraft, range, size, all. Now, we are a year later, have raised €3.4 million in funding, and are with a team of twenty, so we have been able to better evaluate how we want the aircraft to be.” “We want to decide how the powertrain will look like and what should be the configuration of the batteries. Who are the key suppliers and are they able to deliver? All with the aim that we can say in 2025: pencils down, this is our design. We are now in the most important phase of decision-making.” The Maeve 01 has a cabin with a wide cross-section, in which the batteries are positioned in the cargo hold. (Richard Schuurman) Ideal size Maeve is not the first to try its luck in the full-electric aircraft segment. US start-up Eviation recently did the first flight with its all-battery Alice 9-seater. Sweden’s Heart Aerospace recently unveiled a redesign of its electric regional aircraft. From a 19-seater, it has gone to a 30-seater after potential airline customers like SAS, United Airlines, and Mesa pushed for a higher-capacity design. The result is the somewhat bulky-looking ES-30, which has a huge battery package underneath the fuselage. Jan Willem Heinen is convinced that these aircraft are too small to be successful. “It’s a simple calculation: you have your crew on the flight deck, you have the cabin crew, you have your landing slots and operations. To do this with a 9-seater isn’t going to work. The bigger the aircraft, the better the economics of the aircraft become. That’s why we consciously started looking at the boundaries of the design of electric aircraft and, for now, we think the best option is a 44-seater. And we think this is the limit of what an electric aircraft can be, given battery technology in 2030.” Jan Willem Heinen thinks that the Heart ES-30 is still too small for an electric aircraft. (Heart Aerospace) Maeve still has to do some touring along airlines to present the 01 and the updated design. “Airlines that we have spoken with all find it most interesting, but mind you that we only exist for 1.5 years. When we compare our roadmap to that of Heart, you see that they started in 2018 and are now active for four years. We are there for just 1.5 years, so we are at the beginning and we are about to start now with trying to bring airlines on board. That’s something we actually haven’t done that much. That’s the phase we are now about to start.” Heinen acknowledges that this is a most difficult phase. But he adds: “We know that making aviation sustainable will become hugely important and priority number 1. When all airlines want a fully-sustainable aircraft at the same time, we know that the production capacity of the current OEMs by far won’t be enough. We are about to witness that airlines are taking up their positions because if you are the last in the row, you are in trouble.” Rethinking aircraft The first flight of the Eviation is important for the industry, says Heinen: “It’s crucial that we see more of those first flights because it will take something extra before people realize that electric flying is here and now and that it is a really good alternative towards sustainability.” While still a minnow with an aircraft that still needs to get off the drawing board, the Maeve 01 at the same time has some ingredients to make it a direct competitor of ATR. The well-established airframer is working on the EVO, which will have mild hybridization and maybe hydrogen system in the more distant future. A successful full-electric 44-seater could be cause for concern in Toulouse. Heinen has a clear opinion on ATR’s position: “An aircraft has a certain wing and wing span, designed for a certain mission. If you make the aircraft double the weight, you have to start all over again, because you can’t continue with the existing design. Instead of passengers, you would be flying batteries. It is very difficult for an existing airframer to think out of its current design. He will have to start again. That’s their catch-22: they will want to leverage what they have, but at the same time, all-electric requires a whole new approach. We are that new approach.” Tesla effect Again, start-ups like Heart, Eviation, and Maeve will have some convincing to do before they are taken seriously enough by airlines and competing airframers. At one moment, they will have to industrialize their projects and start building aircraft, which will require huge sums of money. Heinen likes to compare this phase with the arrival of Tesla in the automobile market. “About Tesla, they said that when the big OEMs were to go electric, they would disappear. The opposite happened: demand for Tesla’s is so high that they can hardly cope. I think we will see the same in the aerospace industry, but then on a four-fold scale. Again, all airlines would like to become sustainable by the end of this decade and there isn’t enough production capacity. This will be key. It will also determine the price for aircraft: if demand is infinite, price is too.” Heinen sees no reason why building electric aircraft would not be possible in The Netherlands, a country with a strong aviation heritage with Koolhoven and Fokker. But the demise of Fokker in 1996 also left some painful scars and sentiments that never again, building aircraft should become a cash-drain to the Dutch state. “The mindset has to change. For example, a start-up like Lightyear (a company that designs cars with integrated solar cells) has had a tough ride. Many liked it, but typically Dutch, it didn’t get state support. It was insane how long it took. The same could happen here. That’s why I say that’s time to establish a clear industrial policy.” Fokker used up millions of guilders in subsidies for each aircraft it built. Maeve has no intention to go that same road, says Heinen. “We absolutely will not require state subsidies, but we will need state financing. This could be through Invest NL, (a fund) which supports venture capital that is seen as too risky by traditional capital markets.” Maeve Aerospace isn’t waiting for that. It wants to start flight testing the battery technology in 2023. That all fits the roadmap toward certification. “Test flying and certification of the aircraft will take 2.5 to three years. If you want to fly in 2027, you should start building the flying prototype in 2026, in 2025 you have to start on your iron bird. Before you can start with that, you have to complete your design. So we have two years and three months to complete the design. What I hope is that we can continue the way towards certification, based on the existing regulations, but that’s looking good.” Fast forward ten years from now: there is the Heart with the 30-seater, ATR and Embraer with their updated and new turboprops with over 50 seats, and in between, there is the Maeve 44-seater in a niche market. “That’s spot on, that’s the position we would like to be in.”

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