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Regulatory review in the United States and Canada will take two to three years, at which point Harbour Air can install the engines and begin accepting paying passengers on all-electric aircraft. McDougall flew the 10-minute test flight himself earlier this month, a first step required by regulators. They will plug-in and charge at the Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre dock, and pull from BC Hydro, the provincial energy utility’s hydroelectric power grid, itself a renewable source of energy. The aircraft will be able to fly for 30 minutes with a 30-minute reserve on a one-hour charge. The short flights make it well-suited for a battery-powered engine, said Roei Ganzarski, the chief executive of magniX, the electric-propulsion designer and manufacturer that developed the engine. The regional airline with 40 seaplanes operates half-hour flights carrying up to 19 passengers between Vancouver, Seattle and communities in coastal British Columbia.
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Someone was going to do it someday, so it may as well be us.” “When I got the car five years ago, I wondered if we could transfer similar electric engine technology to our planes. “I was an early adopter of the Tesla car and so impressed by their innovation,” Mr. Greg McDougall, Harbour Air’s founder and chief executive, is the driving force behind the project, one that would make the Wright brothers proud - and possibly Elon Musk, too. The move gives the vintage plane a new and sustainable lease on life. Harbour Air, a Vancouver-based seaplane operator, earlier this month swapped the six-seater’s gas-guzzling, exhaust-emitting engine for a modern, battery-powered electric one. Sixty-three years of bush flying, commuter travel and made-for-Instagram sightseeing later, the aircraft received a trailblazing retrofit. Eisenhower was in the White House, and flying icons like the Boeing 747 hadn’t yet been invented. When Harbour Air’s de Havilland Beaver seaplane first lumbered into the skies in 1956, Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel” topped the charts, President Dwight D.