The hangar belongs to Heart Aerospace.
The Swedishstartupis building a hybrid-electric 30-passenger airliner called the ES-30.
It could offer a cleaner, cheaper alternative to short-haul flights on routes across the world.
A lot of companies obsess over how an electric aircraft will look.
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If successful, the ES-30 will be by far the largest electric plane ever to take to the skies.
Building it will test the limits of whats possible with todays technology.
Battery packs located in the underside of the ES-30 will give it a range of around 200 km.
And if needed, a reserve engine boosts the range to a maximum of 800 km.
Electrifying cars, trucks, boats, or even snowmobiles is difficult.
But powering flight using batteries alone is an entirely different ball game.
Aircraft have to be as light as possible any excess weight exponentially reduces speed, range, and manoeuvrability.
It also means a plane will use a lot more fuel.
Putting bulky batteries in lightweight aircraft is an engineering nightmare.
However, this does not necessarily mean that electric aviation is doomed to fail.
The electric aviation runway
Even with todays batteries we have a solid business, says Forslund.
And as the technology improves, so will our business case.
Norways mountainous terrain and vast archipelagoes mean short-haul flights are often the fastest way to travel.
Many of these flights are under 200 km well within reach of the ES-30.
Thats when we saw an opportunity, says Forslund, who founded the company that very same year.
Heart already has a big order book to fill.
Air Canada, which is also a minority shareholder, has placed pre-orders for 30 planes.
American carriers United Airlines and Mesa Airlines have booked 100 a piece.
Now all Heart has to do is build all these hundreds of planes and make them fly.
But for the finished version, we will have to wait until 2028.
Thats when the company plans to acquire bang out certification from theEuropean Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
This rigorous, and expensive, process determines whether an aircraft meets the EUs stringent safety requirements.
With aviation emissions coming under the spotlight, pressure to decarbonise air travel is mounting.
Thankfully for Heart, it has access to technologies the Wright brothers could only dream of.
Such rapid prototyping allows the company to fail fast and build quickly.
I was just fascinated with the simplicity of the electric motor design, he says.
I asked myself: could we scale this up to the size of a small jet engine?
This simplicity means electric planes can get away with using far less components than their fossil-fuelled counterparts.
They are also much cheaper to maintain.
But nothing really came of it.
Jet engines were just too expensive.
Thats why aviation today is the realm of just a few companies like Boeing and Airbus.
And its almost never profitable, he said.
While there are a few companies like Heart building electric passenger aircraft, they all remain prototypes.
Either way, this transition will take time.
The climate benefits of Hearts ES-30, on the other hand, are more concrete.
Planes also emitnitrogen oxide, create vapour trails, and even create clouds.
Scientists suggest these effects add to theclimate impact of air travel.
However these flights only contribute 5.5% of aviations greenhouse gas emissions.
Longer flights have an exponentially bigger impact.
Supplies of the SAF that the company plans to use to power the reserve motor are essentiallynon-existenttoday.
But I didnt get the impression all these question marks bother Forslund and his team all that much.
Being a first-mover comes not only with risks, but also with doubts and countless doubters.
Our planes will keep on improving along with the technologies it depends on.
No one really knows how technology will evolve.
It plans to fly the ES-30 on three routes starting in 2028.
No pressure, Heart.
It will be used for experimental flight testing.
Story bySion Geschwindt
Sion is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy.
