Heart Aerospace's X1 becomes the largest electric aircraft ever flown

Heart Aerospace is a Swedish-founded, Los Angeles-based electric aircraft manufacturer developing the ES-30, a 30-seat hybrid-electric regional airliner for FAA Part 25 certification, and using its full-scale demonstrator X1 to validate the technology.

Heart Aerospace bet a clean-sheet hybrid-electric 30-seat airliner could beat jet costs on short routes — and that proving it at full scale would win airline orders.

Heart Aerospace had raised $145M through its February 2024 round — $107M in that Series B — from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, United Airlines, Air Canada, EQT Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Norrsken VC and Y Combinator (Kaptena, 2024-02-06).

Heart Aerospace, founded in Gothenburg by Anders Forslund and now based in Los Angeles, set out to prove electric propulsion works at airliner scale, not just in small aircraft. Its answer was X1, a full-scale battery-electric demonstrator representative of the planned 30-seat hybrid-electric ES-30, built to gather the flight data and regulatory experience a Part 25 airliner program needs.

In July 2026 the FAA issued X1 a Special Airworthiness Certificate in the Experimental Category after structural, propulsion, systems and taxi tests. On August 12, 2026, the piloted X1 flew for 27 minutes from Plattsburgh International Airport in New York, reaching 1,100 feet with more than one megawatt of electric power, using about $5 of electricity; the profile covered taxi, takeoff, climb, maneuvering and landing.

Heart Aerospace called the flight the first demonstration of electric flight at commercial airliner scale. Customer commitments stand at $9.4B from carriers including United Airlines, Air Canada and JSX; ES-30 entry into service is targeted for 2031, with the first pre-production aircraft being built at Heart's Los Angeles pilot plant and flight testing planned for 2028.

Regional flying runs short, fuel-heavy routes where electric propulsion attacks costs directly — an argument Heart had to prove at airliner scale, not on slides.

The FAA certificate and X1's flight data give the ES-30's Part 25 certification effort a real technical and regulatory baseline before the production program begins (AVweb).

Carriers committed early: United Airlines and Air Canada, which also invested, plus JSX, make up $9.4B in customer commitments tied to hardware milestones like X1 (Heart Aerospace press release).

The economics are the wedge: about $5 of electricity powered a 27-minute airliner-scale flight when jet fuel cost $3.50 per gallon.

A full-scale flying demonstrator is the pitch a paper design cannot make: X1's flight turned Heart's clean-sheet program into $9.4B of carrier commitments and a credible Part 25 path.

Since X1's first flight on August 12, 2026, Heart Aerospace has been collecting flight-characteristics and electric-propulsion data from the demonstrator while building the first pre-production ES-30 at its Los Angeles pilot plant. The company targets ES-30 flight testing in 2028 and entry into service in 2031, with $9.4B in customer commitments from United Airlines, Air Canada and JSX. The remaining question is whether hybrid-electric economics hold up in certification and airline operation, and whether Heart can convert commitments into firm orders before capital runs out.