Is a 63-Year-Old Seaplane With an Electric Engine the Future of Air Travel?

Update This month, a Vancouver-based airline tested a vintage plane retrofitted with a battery-powered engine. The goal is an all-electric fleet, the first in the world. 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. Eisenhower was in the White House, and flying icons like the Boeing 747 hadn’t yet been invented.

Sixty-three years of bush flying, commuter travel and made-for-Instagram sightseeing later, the aircraft received a trailblazing retrofit. 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. The move gives the vintage plane a new and sustainable lease on life. 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.

“I was an early adopter of the Tesla car and so impressed by their innovation,” Mr. McDougall said. “When I got the car five years ago, I wondered if we could transfer similar electric engine technology to our planes. Someone was going to do it someday, so it may as well be us.

” The regional airline with 40 seaplanes operates half-hour flights carrying up to 19 passengers between Vancouver, Seattle and communities in coastal British Columbia. 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 aircraft will be able to fly for 30 minutes with a 30-minute reserve on a one-hour charge. 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.

Mr. McDougall flew the 10-minute test flight himself earlier this month, a first step required by regulators. 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. “On the environmental plus side, there is zero carbon burn.