The Harbour Air ePlane, magniX and the Electric De Havilland Beaver That Turned a Ninety-Year-Old Bush Plane Into the First All-Electric Commercial Flight

In December 2019, on the Fraser River outside Vancouver, a De Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver floatplane lifted off the water on electric power and flew for about three minutes, becoming the first all-electric commercial aircraft to ever fly. The airplane, nicknamed the “ePlane,” was a joint project between seaplane operator Harbour Air and electric-motor maker magniX. Its real lesson wasn’t that electric airliners had arrived - it was that the winning strategy for electric flight is picking short-hop missions where limited range doesn’t matter.

What Was the Harbour Air ePlane?

The ePlane was a retrofitted De Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, a rugged, radial-engine bush plane design that first flew in 1947 and has been hauling passengers and freight across the Canadian wilderness ever since. Harbour Air took one of these seventy-plus-year-old airframes and replaced its combustion engine with a battery-electric powertrain.

Two companies made it happen. Harbour Air is one of the largest seaplane operators in the world, carrying roughly half a million passengers a year on short coastal hops around British Columbia - Vancouver to Victoria, Vancouver to Nanaimo, and similar 20-to-30-minute routes.

magniX supplied the propulsion. The company doesn’t build airplanes; it builds electric motors. The unit bolted to the Beaver was the magni500, and it replaced the aircraft’s original engine entirely.

The first flight was a test flight flown by Harbour Air’s chief pilot - historic, but the beginning of a certification journey rather than the end of one.

Why the Electric Motor Is the Easy Part

A conventional aircraft engine is mechanically complex. The Beaver’s original Pratt & Whitney R-985 radial has hundreds of moving parts - pistons, valves, magnetos, carburetion or fuel injection, oil and ignition systems, and cylinders containing thousands of controlled explosions per minute. Burning fuel is hot, violent, and vibration-heavy.

An electric motor, by contrast, is essentially magnets, copper windings, and one spinning shaft. The magni500 uses an axial flux design - a compact, pancake-shaped geometry that produces high torque and turns slowly enough to swing a propeller directly, without the heavy reduction gearbox many turbine installations require.

The performance numbers favor electric. The magni500 produces about 560 kilowatts at peak - roughly 750 horsepower - which is more power than the original radial made. And like every electric motor, it delivers full torque from zero RPM, with near silence.

The maintenance advantages are just as real: no mixture to lean, no carb heat, no shock cooling, no oil analysis. As one Harbour Air maintenance lead put it, a piston engine means constantly fighting heat cycles, vibration, and combustion byproducts - while an electric motor just spins.

Why the Battery Is the Whole Ballgame

If the motor is the easy part, the hard part is energy storage - and the reason is basic physics.

Jet fuel and avgas are extraordinarily energy-dense. A kilogram of jet fuel holds roughly 43 million joules of energy. That’s why a fuel-heavy airplane can take off heavy and grow lighter as it burns fuel off into the sky.

The best lithium-ion aircraft battery packs available today hold around 250 watt-hours per kilogram at the pack level - about 900,000 joules per kilogram. Do the division, and jet fuel carries roughly 50 times more energy per kilogram than the best aviation battery.

That 50-to-1 ratio is the wall. It’s not a software problem or a clever-design problem - it’s chemistry and thermodynamics, and no amount of funding changes it.

There’s a second penalty pilots grasp instantly: a battery-electric airplane doesn’t get lighter as it flies. Charged or empty, electrons have mass, so you carry the full weight of your energy storage from takeoff to landing. You land as heavy as you launched.

That wall dictated the ePlane’s design. Early flights demonstrated only a few minutes of endurance, building toward an operational target of roughly 30 minutes of flying plus required reserves.

Why a Floatplane Operation Was the Smartest Place to Start

Thirty minutes of range sounds like a punchline - until you realize 30 minutes is exactly the Harbour Air route map.

Harbour Air’s bread-and-butter routes are 20-to-30-minute hops, flown low over water many times a day, with aircraft returning to a dock where they could sit and charge. The airline already owned the ideal use case for an airplane with terrible range. It didn’t need to invent a new kind of flying - it just needed to electrify the flying it already did.

That’s the strategic insight worth remembering. The winners in electric aviation won’t be the companies trying to beat jet fuel on long cross-countries. They’ll be the ones that find missions where 30 minutes is plenty, and where quiet, cheap, and simple beat range:

Short-hop island flying
Flight training in the pattern
Pipeline and powerline patrol
Sightseeing and coastal commuting

Harbour Air was sitting on top of one of the best of these beachheads on the planet.

Why They Retrofitted an Old Airframe Instead of Building New

The other smart decision was to modify an existing certified airframe rather than design a clean-sheet airplane.

The upside is large. The Beaver’s structure, stall behavior, handling, and float characteristics were already well understood after seventy-plus years. By swapping only the powerplant, engineers changed one big variable while holding everything else constant - exactly how you want to run an experiment.

There was even a helpful weight coincidence. The electric motor is lighter than the original radial, freeing up weight in the nose - which gave engineers somewhere to place heavy batteries without wrecking the center of gravity. It wasn’t a perfect trade, since the batteries are still heavy, but the airframe left room to work.

The downside: you’re still flying a 1940s airframe that was never optimized for electric propulsion. A clean-sheet design could put batteries in the wings and refine the aerodynamics around the new reality. The retrofit is a bridge - a way to fly and learn now instead of waiting a decade for a purpose-built machine. Given the energy-density wall, flying and learning now was the right call.

Why the ePlane Isn’t Carrying Passengers Yet

The 2019 flight was a milestone, but certification is where the honest timeline lives.

The path Harbour Air is on is a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) - the approval for a major modification to an already-certified aircraft. A type certificate is the government’s stamp that a design is safe; an STC covers a significant change to it. Swapping a radial engine for an electric powertrain is about as major a modification as exists.

That approval requires Transport Canada, working alongside the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), to write rules for an electric powertrain that no rulebook was originally designed to cover. Nobody had certified a commercial battery-electric powertrain before, so regulators and the manufacturer are partly writing the standard as they go: How do you inspect a battery pack for airworthiness? What are the fire-containment requirements? How do you define reserves for an airplane that can’t burn a little extra fuel? What’s the inspection interval on a motor with almost no moving parts?

These are genuinely new questions, and getting them wrong costs lives - so the process is deliberately slow. The demonstration happened in 2019, additional flight testing followed with more of the battery system installed, and the target date for carrying paying passengers has repeatedly moved as certification reveals how much there is to prove. The airplane is real; the certificate is hard.

Who Else Is Building Electric Aircraft?

The Beaver is one branch of a crowded field. magniX went on to power other electric conversions, including a larger test aircraft - an electric Cessna Grand Caravan flown in 2020. On the battery side, the Swiss company H55, founded by veterans of the Solar Impulse round-the-world solar-airplane project, has been a key partner developing certifiable aviation battery systems for exactly this class of aircraft.

Beyond batteries, the wider industry spans hydrogen-electric developers trying to beat the energy-density wall with different chemistry, and eVTOL air-taxi companies chasing an entirely different mission profile.

Key Takeaways

The Harbour Air ePlane, a retrofitted De Havilland Beaver, made the first all-electric commercial flight in December 2019, lasting about three minutes.
The electric motor is the easy part. The magni500 delivers about 560 kW (≈750 hp) - more than the original radial - with fewer moving parts and far less maintenance.
The battery is the real limit. Jet fuel holds roughly 50 times more energy per kilogram than today’s best aviation batteries, and electric aircraft don’t get lighter as they fly.
That physics caps practical endurance near 30 minutes plus reserves, which happens to match Harbour Air’s short coastal routes perfectly.
The future of electric flight isn’t long range - it’s choosing the right mission, where quiet, cheap, low-maintenance electric power beats range every time.