H55 is on tour with the Bristell Energic in the United States, starting in Florida. It’s nice to see a new electrified aircraft in North American airspace!
We’ll go through flight data for the Bristell Energic we’ve seen in Europe, and what we’ve seen in Florida so far, including range and top speeds. We’ll also do some charging analysis for the Florida stops based on the data we’ve collected.
The Bristell Energic will cruise at 110 kts (200 km/h), a bit better than Pipistrel’s 98 kts. While I haven’t seen autonomy or range specs for the Energic, In AirCharge’s data we’ve seen flights that exceed
250 kilomters, maxing out at just around 2 hours. These are likely dipping in to the 49 kWh pack’s reserve somewhat. So far in Florida, they’re taking it easy - we haven’t seen them exceed 47 km or 30 minutes.
Charging analysis
We don’t know much about Energic’s charging. The one little factoid I can find is AeroVolt announcing their charging partnership, and stating on H55’s behalf that they’re focused on CCS, and the Tour website appears to confirm they’re selling CCS1 equipped B23E’s in the States that can DC fast charge at 50 kW. Nice!
Even if HB-SXD is CCS2 (given that most of what they’ve produced so far is flying in Europe, not North America), they could fairly easily be carrying a Level 2 charger with a Mennekes type 2 adapter; or, possibly an adapter that allows plugging in a Schuko 240V Level 2 charger in to a NEMA 14-50? And if its CCS1, then good old J1772 can take them up to 19kW if they have a 100 amp circuit and an 80 amp EVSE.
In either case, I can pretty easily imagine getting Level 2 AC 40 amp charging, which gives you 9.6 kW. Given the 49 kWh pack, that’s a little over 5 hours to go 0-100% - and if they’re leaving 30% for a reserve, and charging all the way to 100, they can recharge in 3.5 hours.
So I did some analysis, and put together a spreadsheet that compares the following:
layover (labeled “charge time” here);
SoC Used (computed based on flight time);
compares how much charge they need to out back in the battery to how much time they had;
and then computes what kind of charging would be sufficient.
Findings:
8 sessions (including all overnight sessions and a few more) could have completed even with a 16 amp 120V Level 1 AC charger would be sufficient. This can be plugged in to the same outlet you plug your laptop in to.
24 of the charging sessions (about two-thirds) could have completed with a 40 amp 240V Level 2 AC charger - this is a “normal EV charger” found in many EV drivers garage.
6 of the sessions would have required something fancier; 4 of them could have managed with 80 amp level 2, but 2 of these sessions could only have been done with a 50 KW DC fast charger from what I can tell.
Here’s the spreadsheet with the analysis. (Feel free to check my work!)
All of these “quickest turn around” charging sessions happened at Space Coast Regional Airport (KTIX) - so, does this mean there’s an airside 50KW charger on the apron? PlugShare doesn’t show one at the airport or anywhere nearby; but this isn’t unusual, they don’t have Beta’s airside chargers either.
I’ll keep working on figuring out how they’re doing it.
It turns out, that while certain AC charging situations would be sufficient from a pure time perspective like I talked about in this article (https://skyzero.substack.com/p/h55-usa-tour), that H55 doesn't do AC charging. In fact, neither does Pipistrel, they use the DC GB/T standard. I'd guess that Beta Joby and Archer are in the same boat, though I'm working to confirm that. Aviation seems to be sidelining AC charging - I'd assume this is because of the extra weight they'd have to carry to install an AC/DC transformer and the relevant charging equipment on the aircraft. We may never see aviation touch AC - no J1772, no type 2. Interesting!