The all-electric aircraft e-Sling has successfully completed its first flight. The four-seater aircraft was developed and assembled over a period of two years by 20 students from ETH Zurich located at the Innovation Park in Dübendorf as part of their bachelor's degree program. e+a sponsored the project by contributing the electromagnetic and mechanical design as well as the manufacturing of the motor elements itself for the aircraft propulsion system. Several hundred thousand motor variants were calculated on e+a's computer cluster to identify an optimized design providing maximum torque per kilogram.
With a take-off power of 110 kW at 2300 min-1 the motor element has a torque-to-weight ratio of 24 Nm/kg and a power-to-weight ratio of 5 kW/kg.