US uni student uses Ford electric utes to charge his electric plane in “world first”

US engineering student Remy Oktay is planning the first ever electric flight to be charged from an EV, and has already successfully completed a test run.

Oktay will do a flyover at the Lafayette-Lehigh football game on November 19 in a fully electric Pipistrel Alpha Electro, he had to get the plane from its home in Hartford, Connecticut, to Easton, Pennsylvania.

With no charging infrastructure at any of the airports in between, a distance of about 240 kilometres as the crow flies, he had to look for other options.

His plan? To enlist owners of Ford F-150 Lightning trucks to charge the plane.

“We have four Lightning drivers who’ve committed to doing the trip with us,” he told The Driven.

“The reason we chose to have four is we need to have two teams of Lightning drivers because the plane flies faster than the trucks can drive.”

The plane charger can take a 240v 30A AC input and has a 21kW battery. Oktay realised the F-150, with a 9.6 kW Pro Power package — a system that can also power a house — has enough power to provide a full charge to the two-seater aircraft.

The official support crew includes the trucks, three Teslas to make sure the air and land crews are well catered, and a Cessna 182 and a helicopter will be taking video for an upcoming documentary.

The original plan was to fly on 12 November, but weather may see the trip pushed to the 13th, a week before the football game flyover “just in case” of delays.

From three stops to five

FAA regulations mean Oktay and his co-pilot Philip Smith, an instructor with the Hartford Learn2FlyCT flight school, must land with 30 minutes of reserve battery.

Under the original plan of three stops that meant they had 60 minutes of usable flying time at 85 nautical miles. A full recharge from the F-150 would need to draw about 10kW.

However, the excitement generated by the idea of a truck charging a plane means they’ve had to add two more stops “for predictability”, reducing the legs to 30 nautical miles.

It means the aircraft battery will never dip below 55-60 per cent, and recharging will take 1.5 hours each time.

Connecting both is an inverter, supplied by the plane manufacturer Textron eAviation, to switch the truck’s AC power supply to DC for the plane.

But the plan wasn’t without its hiccups. The Pipistrel is designed in Europe but the US-designed F-150 uses a different Amp standard.

Oktay says they had to work with the team in Slovenia who builds the aircraft to modify the firmware to make the plane’s slightly higher Amp rating work with that of the truck.

A test run on 5 October to make sure Oktay’s plan to charge from an F-150 would actually work ran — against his expectations — perfectly.

“I was expecting there to be some issue so I built a whole flow charge of ‘okay, if this doesn’t work how do we modify this set up’,” he said.

“We drove eight hours for it to work perfectly the first time.”

Aviation is going electric

Airline emissions make up about 2.5 per cent of all emissions globally and on current growth trajectories will take up some 27 per cent of the world’s carbon budget by 2050, according to Deloitte.

Today, electric planes are limited to small aircraft but with the pressure on for aviation to massively reduce its emissions, companies from Airbus to Sydney Seaplanes are working on how to get larger models into the air.

Hearth Aerospace, for example, is designing a 19-seater electric aircraft that it wants to get in the air by 2026.

Oktay began learning to fly alongside his sister Chloe in 2020 as a way to spend more time with their pilot-grandfather. He has now added instrument and multi-engine ratings to his private pilot licence qualification and, as an engineering student at Lafayette College, says combining the two passions in the EV-powered flight is pushing him towards a career in electric aviation.

“I’ve never felt so passionate about something in my entire life, or so driven about something,” he said.

“I see myself who can bring those two together and help develop the new age of aviation, and that’s the whole goal of this project. It’s to demonstrate this technology, get people excited about it, and spur more interest, innovation and investment in hybrid electric planes and more sustainable aviation.”

For keen aviators (and F-150 owners) the flight is being tracked via the Twitter account @lafgetselectric.