Heart Aerospace flew a 30-seat clean-sheet airliner on $5 worth of electricity on 12 August, and says it is the first clean-sheet airliner of any size to fly in the United States in seventeen years. Every other attempt at electric aviation has been a one-seat technology demonstrator arguing about range; Anders Forslund says range is the wrong argument and cost is the only one that matters.
"So this aircraft is going to operating cost overall going to be 40% lower than the most efficient regional aircraft."
Forslund did his doctorate on jet engines, concluded the technology had hit the limit of thermodynamics, and left to build the aircraft around the engine instead. United Airlines and Air Canada are his anchor customers.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 19 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Anders Forslund, founder and chief executive of Heart Aerospace, who did a PhD on jet engines and was at MIT's aeronautics department when Elon Musk gave a talk there on electric flight
🎙️ Host: Jason Calacanis, who has hosted This Week in Startups for seventeen years and runs the LAUNCH venture fund
👥 Also on: Lon Harris, editorial director at LAUNCH, who produces and co-hosts the show
📰 Published: 31 August 2026 on YouTube (This Week in Startups)
🔴 YouTube | ⏱️ 19 min | ✅ Time saved: 6 min
Key Takeaways
A full-size electric airliner flew on $5 of electricity, and that number is the product
Twice the size of any electric aircraft before it, and the first clean-sheet airliner to fly in the US since the Dreamliner
Battery energy density crossed the threshold Musk named at MIT 12 years ago
250 Wh/kg then, 400 Wh/kg the number he said would make regional flight work
Range is the wrong argument and Forslund will not have it
He is not trying to beat an A350; he is trying to beat a regional jet on operating cost
Operating cost 40% below the most efficient regional aircraft in service
The charging problem was solved by the trucking industry, not by aviation
A 30-minute charge on power electronics already two orders of magnitude cheaper because cars and trucks bought them first
The United States has 5,000 airports and no aircraft small enough to use them
He puts 98% of the population within 20 miles of one
The 30-seater died in the 1990s for reasons that were not technical
Publicized turboprop crashes, cheap oil and aspirational regional jets, and hundreds of communities lost service
Boeing is not doing this because there was nothing left for engineering to win
Jet engines are near the thermodynamic limit, so management was selected for sales and 10-year backlogs
$200M raised, and about $1B of equity between here and a certified aircraft
Hybrid pre-production aircraft flying by the 2028 LA Olympics, production aircraft in 2031
Regional airlines are the tributaries that feed the hubs, which is why United and Air Canada signed
1. $5 of Electricity
Calacanis introduced Heart Aerospace on the news that it had flown the largest electric aircraft ever built, on 12 August, and asked Forslund to explain what viewers were looking at.
"This is the world's largest electric airplane. It's the first electric airliner and it's the full scale demonstrator of a hybrid electric aircraft that we're bringing to market."
The size claim is a doubling, not an increment. Forslund said it is twice the size of anything that has flown before
The rarer claim is about the design. "It's a clean sheet aircraft that's been built by our team, which makes it actually the first clean sheet airliner in any category to fly in the US in the last 17 years."
He named the previous one as the Dreamliner
The electricity bill is the argument. "So it is we think demonstrating the revolutionary economics that we can get with electric and hybrid electric aircraft", he said, describing the goal as abundant air travel and better connectivity
2. Musk's 400 Wh/kg Threshold
Calacanis put the physics objection: jet fuel has weight but burns usefully, and twenty years ago the industry consensus was that battery density made electric flight impossible. What changed?
Forslund heard the threshold stated in a lecture room and has been working toward it since. He said Elon Musk turned up at MIT's aeronautics and astronautics department twelve years ago and gave a talk on electric aircraft
The number then was 250 watt hours per kilogram. That is gravimetric energy density — the energy a battery carries per unit of its own weight, which is the figure that decides whether a plane can lift its own power supply
"And he basically shared his calculations that at 400 watt hours per kilogram, this is when this starts making sense."
Not for transatlantic flights or crossing oceans, Forslund said, but for regional and continental ones
On his account the industry is at that point now, twelve years later
His own reason for leaving jet engines was that the field had stopped moving. He was working on them at the time and said he could see a dead end
3. Range Is a Red Herring
The most-repeated question about electric aircraft is how far they go, and Forslund's answer is that it is the wrong question.
He will not compete on the incumbents' terms. He said range is a bit of a red herring, because an electric plane is not going to beat an A350 or a Dreamliner any time soon — but it can beat them on cost
He named the pattern he is following. This is the nature of disruptive innovation, he said: create new value that challenges the norms rather than matching an existing product feature for feature
The routes he wants are the ones nobody flies on a widebody. Puddle jumpers and island hoppers, in his words — hour-long flights between islands, which he was careful to say are not derogatory categories but important routes
Small aircraft exist because the demand is small. There is not enough traffic to fly 400 people to Nantucket three times a day, he said, and he pointed to Cape Air as an operator that ran that kind of service out of New York
4. A 30-Min Charge From Trucks
Calacanis asked how the aircraft charges, and whether it has to sit for twelve hours.
It is a thirty-minute charge, and none of the equipment is new. Forslund said the charging technology was developed for electric trucks and pointed to the Tesla Semi
That is the reason for starting at 30 seats. The power electronics and the charging infrastructure for an aircraft that size have already been built for cars and trucks, and he said that when an industry inherits equipment that way the cost is already two orders of magnitude lower
The strategy is explicitly parasitic on the automotive industry. Batteries, electric motors, power electronics, software and autonomy all come from a much larger industry, and the aircraft is where they get assembled
The output of all that borrowing is a single number. "So this aircraft is going to operating cost overall going to be 40% lower than the most efficient regional aircraft."
5. What the Cost Line Buys
Forslund set the 40% against an industry that is already thin, not a fat one.
Regional flying is not expensive to buy and is barely profitable to sell. He put an average regional ticket at $200 or $300 and said regional airlines are struggling at that price
The battery aircraft flies 125 miles; the hybrid flies 500. "So our aircraft with the battery technology we have today can fly 125 miles all electrically and with the hybrid system we can fly 500 miles plus reserves redirection etc."
Those numbers were chosen against a historical route map, not a wish list. He said 30-seat aircraft flew across the United States in the 1990s serving hundreds of communities that have since lost service, and that the average route length then was about 172 miles
6. Why Turboprops Lost
Calacanis asked whether the public believes jets are safer than turboprops, and whether that belief is true.
Forslund said the belief is real and the engineering behind it is not. A handful of highly publicized turboprop accidents in the United States in the early 1990s made American passengers wary of propellers
"And it was not something inherent to their design. It was just kind of a random thing."
Two other things happened at the same time. The market filled with Canadian regional jets that passengers found more exciting, and oil was cheap, so jets became aspirational
The aircraft that won were the wrong tool. "But guess what? these aircraft are not really built for that mission." On his account they ended up killing off successively smaller aircraft
"So, we're catering to this massive market that got disrupted because of cost because people did stupid things like building regional jets and jets did not really make sense for short flights"
The design cycle is why he thinks the perception flips back. "Like the design is 40 years old." He said the turboprops still flying are 40-year-old designs, and that what was not cool yesterday becomes cool again
His pitch to a passenger is sensory rather than technical. "They're going to experience the aircraft sitting in it, feeling the lack of vibration, the lack of noise", plus a modern connected cabin and a virtually silent taxi
Calacanis's own reference point was the Pilatus PC-12, which friends of his prefer to a jet on short runs for its operating cost and its smoothness
7. 5,000 Airports, No Planes
The infrastructure argument is the one Forslund returns to, and it is about supply rather than demand.
He counts 5,000 airports in the United States and said the shortage is aircraft that can serve them profitably, not runways
"I mean, I think 98% of the populations lives within 20 miles of an airport."
The behavior change has already happened at the small end. He pointed to the revival in Part 135 charter operations — the smaller-aircraft category of US commercial flying — and named JSX, which flies out of Santa Monica, as one of Heart's partners
His explanation is avoidance rather than luxury: passengers do not want LAX, the parking, the ride-share or the security line
Calacanis's contribution was a pricing critique of the same business. He said he had told the JSX team the product is mispriced and should be a membership club at $10,000 a year for ten flights, and that the executive he told found it interesting
He put the experience at 90% of flying private, because a passenger arrives ten or fifteen minutes before departure and walks through a hangar to the aircraft
8. $200M In, $1B to Go
Harris asked how far along the company is, given how much time and capital a ground-up aircraft takes.
"So, we raised about $200 million so far", Forslund said, and that money produced the demonstrator that flew
The next aircraft is the one with the hybrid system in it. He said the pre-production version is being built now, with the goal of flying in 2028, timed to the Los Angeles Olympics
Certification runs in parallel with that. The conformance and certification work for the production aircraft is under way, with the aircraft itself due in 2031
The remaining bill is five times what has been raised. "And this is about a billion dollar project in terms of the equity that is required for company like this."
Manufacturing loans and other debt sit alongside that equity, he said
9. A 70-Yr-Old Design Paradigm
Harris asked why Boeing is not doing this, and why commuter aircraft have not changed in decades.
Forslund's answer is that engineering stopped paying. He said jet engines are about as good as they can be and are approaching the limit of thermodynamics, so for decades better engineering has not added much to these companies' bottom lines
What the industry optimized instead was commercial. Sales, customer relations and order books he described as ten-year backlogs
The consequence is who gets promoted. Management has not been selected for launching new programs, is disincentivized from doing it, and faces a technology wall as well — which he called a textbook innovator's dilemma
"We need to rearchitect the plane." His comparison was to what has already happened in rockets and in cars
The aircraft flying today descend from a 1950s design. Forslund said the industry is working inside a 70-year-old paradigm built around the 707, hardware-first, with the technologies underneath it optimized ever since and the aircraft itself never reconsidered
10. Regionals Feed the Hubs
Calacanis asked whether the business case rests on cost, given that regional tickets already look cheap, and whether it assumes $100 or $200 oil.
Forslund said cost is the driver and always has been. His point about cheap tickets is that the visible fares are the routes that survived
The flights that are not happening because the economics do not work are the market, and they do not show up in a fare comparison
The strategic value of regional flying is not its own margin. "So they play a huge role for the bottom line of the large airlines and these are United Airlines Air Canada are our anchor customers."
He described regionals as the tributaries feeding the big stream, and said the large carriers tell him they need the flow into the hubs
The cost that breaks them is maintenance, not labor. "But it's just hard to make the economics work because like jet engine maintenance is such a big ticket item."
"It's not the pilot salaries that is the main driver." The problem, he said, is running technology that was not built for the mission
Bonus Insights
Forslund lives in Santa Monica and wants the airport kept open. He said he wants to see electric planes flying from his backyard, called the closure question one with a lot of interesting movement in it, and argued the field's history — Douglas Aircraft, and Amelia Earhart landing there — makes a case for preserving it
Calacanis's view was that a small airport in the center of town could be an extraordinary resource, and that Santa Monica is a unique place politically
He thinks electric aircraft and electric air taxis are complementary rather than competing. The vertical-takeoff aircraft solve a different mission, he said, and getting 30 or 36 passengers onto one aircraft is what reaches the most people
His sharper point is that vertical takeoff may not be the advantage it looks like — there is no shortage of airports, only of planes that can meet those airports' requirements, so he expects air taxis to end up flying regional-airport to regional-airport too
Calacanis and Harris spent the segment's tail on the route map they want. Santa Monica to Truckee for Lake Tahoe, San Carlos, Santa Barbara and San Diego — the routes Surf Air flew with Pilatus aircraft — and a San Antonio, Austin and Dallas triangle where Harris said the aircraft would compete directly with a high-speed rail line
Calacanis's argument for it was labor mobility: a tradesman flying to quote a job for the day, and executives and staff able to live in smaller communities
Harris noted Austin's own airport is being doubled in size
Forslund's bottom line is that electric aviation is not a range technology and should not be judged as one: the batteries have crossed the threshold that makes regional flight work, the charging equipment was paid for by the trucking industry, and a 40% cost advantage on a 30-seat aircraft is what reopens the hundreds of American communities that lost scheduled service when regional jets priced them out.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Heart Aerospace (Forslund's company; the demonstrator that flew on $5 of electricity and the 30-seat hybrid airliner behind it)
United Airlines and Air Canada (Named as Heart's anchor customers, and his evidence that the majors need regional feed into their hubs)
JSX (A Part 135 operator flying out of Santa Monica, a Heart partner, and the business Calacanis says should be sold as a $10,000 membership)
Tesla (The Semi, cited as the source of the charging technology an electric aircraft inherits rather than invents)
Pilatus (The PC-12, Calacanis's example of a turboprop that beats a jet on short runs for cost and ride quality)
Cape Air (The operator he named as having run exactly the small-aircraft service out of New York that he is designing for)
Surf Air (Which flew Pilatus aircraft out of San Carlos and around Southern California, in the hosts' list of the routes they want back)
Boeing (The incumbent whose 707 defines the 70-year-old design paradigm he says nobody has revisited)
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