Are Hybrid-Electric Planes Possible? (Feat. CEO of Ampaire)

Manav: I recently got the opportunity to interview the CEO of Ampaire, a company that makes hybrid airplanes.

Kevin: Hybrid-electric — hybrid-electric.

Manav: A hybrid-electric plane can reduce fuel costs by 70 to 90%. Imagine what that would do to the cost of flying — it could revolutionize air travel. We talked about how hybrid airplanes can save the airline industry.

Kevin: The aviation industry has a big issue — emissions — and the problem is growing. Imagine if a plane came along that required no jet fuel at all. Carbon-neutral technology in aviation — hybrid flight is where the future is.

Manav: You might have seen a lot of electric airplane companies in the news lately, but Kevin's company is solving a very unique problem. You might be wondering what a hybrid airplane actually is — but before I explain, please do me a small favor and subscribe, it'll take you a second and it helps us educate a lot more people.

A hybrid airplane is somewhat similar to your Toyota Prius — it combines electric propulsion with a combustion engine. That combination can actually increase the range and endurance of an aircraft, meaning it can fly much longer distances, because the combustion engine can also keep the batteries charged while flying. The electric component is particularly effective during takeoff and landing — the phases when a plane demands the most energy. The main idea isn't to stop using airplane fuel entirely, but to use a lot less of it.

But why do we need hybrid and electric airplanes in the first place?

Kevin: If you have this bimodal, or two-phase, propulsion system, you have one system that can be optimized for takeoff and climb — high power — and another system optimized for modest cruise power. That's exactly what we do with our hybrid systems. The combined electric-plus-combustion setup gives you all the power, and more, that you'd need for takeoff and climb, and then you're able to cruise on one system or the other, depending on the type of flight. That gives you really good fuel efficiency and incredible range, along with good payload, across all phases of flight.

Manav: By 2050, aviation emissions are expected to triple, and we really have no other option but to transition toward electric and hybrid airplanes to address that. The biggest problem with fully electric planes is range anxiety — their limited range makes them well-suited for short trips, but hybrid airplanes solve the problem of longer-distance flying.

Kevin: One of the beauties of hybrid-electric is we've already flown one of our hybrids 1,400 miles. One of the real benefits there is also that, as a hybrid, you don't need charging infrastructure at every airport at all.

Manav: Just like driving a hybrid-electric car on the ground — for 20 years now, hybrids have led adoption in ground transportation, specifically because of range anxiety and a lack of charging infrastructure. There's also a bit of a weight issue involved.

Kevin: That's correct. Let me give an example — the airplane Ampaire is bringing to market as hybrid-electric is a Cessna Grand Caravan. It can carry roughly 2,500 pounds of payload. Our hybrid-electric system, which replaces the engine in the plane, still allows it to carry that full payload for standard operations. Our hybrid-electric plane uses about 500 pounds of batteries — if I tried to make that same plane fully electric, I'd need over 2,000 pounds of batteries just to get it flying with even reasonable performance. The problem is, with 2,000-plus pounds of batteries on board, you can't carry any useful payload. Adding a regular engine alongside the electric components means the plane can actually carry far more payload — more cargo, or more people.

Manav: This is particularly useful for commercial operations, especially cargo — think island-hopping routes, or serving rural communities in Alaska. I actually found out the real reason most airlines struggle with razor-thin profit margins.

Guess what the single most expensive cost is for an airline. It's not pilots — it's fuel.

Kevin: Fuel is a significant cost for airlines, so if you're able to eliminate a large chunk of that cost through electrification, that's a huge economic benefit to those operators.

Manav: Fully electric planes will likely stay limited to ultra-short routes within a city — imagine flying from a helipad in downtown Manhattan over to JFK. Cutting down fuel costs by using hybrid airplanes is genuinely smart — it means ticket prices for the end consumer can come down, which is great for everyone. Hybrid airplanes are also cheaper to run overall, since electricity costs far less than jet fuel, and you don't need special charging infrastructure installed at every airport.

I really like the business model behind Ampaire — they're not just building brand-new planes, they're upgrading existing ones to make them better for the planet.

Kevin: Look, there are two ways to bring new technology into the market. Way number one is, with a big dream, you design a brand-new, clean-sheet plane that incorporates all the new technology — and those planes will eventually come to market, but it might be five, ten, or more years before a brand-new concept aircraft actually reaches commercial scale.

Option two is you take the planes that are already flying — there are hundreds of thousands of airplanes in the air today that need a sustainable solution — and that's exactly where we're starting with Ampaire. We take our propulsion systems, these hybrid-electric powertrains, and put them into planes that are already flying, or coming fresh off the factory line, and that gives a new life to sustainable, lower-carbon, fuel-efficient aircraft that are both economically and environmentally better, helping the operators and all the existing aviation assets already out there in the world today.

Manav: I'm always genuinely curious why entrepreneurs choose to work on such difficult challenges, so I asked Kevin why he chose this particular problem — and his answer was genuinely inspiring.

Kevin: It's about people seeing what you're doing, caring about what you're doing, providing additional resources — and that opens up opportunities to have an even greater impact on other meaningful, challenging problems. Ampaire is really the confluence of three factors, more than anything else I've worked on in my life: meaningful, challenging, and visible, all the way to the extreme — and I think we're having a huge positive impact on the world around us.

On that second criteria, the challenge — building a company, building a vision, taking something from idea through to reality, that is genuinely hard. You run into roadblocks left and right, and it can feel like the world is constantly shooting bullets at you that you're dodging. It's not that the world doesn't want you to succeed — it's just a genuinely challenging environment to build anything that's truly going from zero, where no industry even exists yet, all the way out to commercialization — especially in an industry that has to be so fundamentally safe and trusted.

Manav: If you enjoyed watching this video and learned a thing or two, don't forget to check out our other video on spatial computing.