Electric Plane + F150 Lightning: Help Needed!

[roktay]

Hello Lightning Owners,

I am a student at Lafayette College and in coordination with the Office of the President I am planning the first electric plane flyover of a sporting event at the Lafayette-Lehigh football game on November 19th, 2022. The plane that we will be using is based in Hartford, Connecticut and to get it to Easton, Pennsylvania, it will need to stop to recharge 3 times.

There is currently no charging infrastructure at these airports but since the plane charger can take 240v 30A AC input, we realized we could use a F150 lightning as a chase truck to recharge it from the outlet in the bed of the truck. The plane is a Pipistrel Alpha Electro.

We are working with corporate contacts at Ford headquarters to see how they could provide vehicles for getting the plane to PA in November, but we need to run through the charging operation next week to gather charge time data to build out the logistics plan. We are planning to do this on Wednesday Oct 5th at the Hartford-Brainard airport, and are hoping to connect with a Lightning owner in the area who might be interested in helping with this project. This run through will only work with a Lightning that has the 9.6 kW Pro Power package.

Thank you for your willingness to consider this opportunity.

If you are interested, please PM me.

If you would like to learn more about me and the projects I have previously done as a student at Lafayette College you can find me on LinkedIn.

Thanks,
Remy Oktay

PS my apologies if this is not the appropriate page to post such inquires to.

 

[roktay]

Hello all,


I first want to thank those of you who responded to my initial message. I also wanted to give everyone an update on the electric airplane flyover.

We successfully charged the electric airplane with two seperate Lightnings (pictured below), thanks to Mel, a local Hartford Lightning owner, and Monaco Ford. Having tested the charging process numerous times on two separate vehicles, we are confident in the reliability of this charging method.

We received a letter from Bill Ford, The Chairman of Ford Motor Company, in response to our request for two trucks to be loaned for all the events associated with this flyover. Unfortunately they do not have trucks available for the timeframe we require. However, we are discussing with them the marketing and media coverage of the event and hope they will be able to participate in that aspect of the project.

After I sent the initial forum message 10 days ago I received numerous responses from interested Lightning owners and am hopeful that we can put together a team to do the trip from Hartford, CT to Easton, PA and back with privately owned Lightnings.

The journey from CT to PA will be covered by aerial and ground based film crews to create a short documentary on this first-ever EV recharged electric plane flight, and first-ever electric plane sporting event flyover.

We will need two Lightnings for recharging the plane, each stopping at two of the four airports, because the plane will fly faster than a truck can drive. The hope is for each recharging truck to have a support/filming truck that will carry the film crew and allow people to go get meals while the charging truck is recharging the plane. In total, we are looking for 4 Lightning owners to help.

Weather permitting, this trip will take place on Saturday, November 12th, 2022 and will take the entire day. The return trip is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, November 22nd, 2022. Please let us know if you are able to help on the 12th and/or the 22nd.

If you are interested in helping showcase the electrified future and would like to learn more, please direct message me so I can share my phone number and we can speak on the phone.

Cheers to such a great community!

Sincerely,
Remy Oktay and team