Pipistrel Velis Electro

The Velis Electro is the first electric airplane anyone ever type-certified. EASA issued it a full Type Certificate — EASA.A.573 — and its motor, Pipistrel's own E-811, holds a separate type certificate of its own as the first certified electric aircraft engine. That is the reason this page exists: not because the airplane is the best way to learn to fly, but because it is the first one of its kind that a regulator signed off on, and everything that follows it will be measured against it.

What it is, in the manufacturer's figures: a two-seat high-wing trainer, 1,323 lb gross, 88 KTAS in cruise on 35 kW, 647 fpm of climb, stalling at 45 knots with flaps out. It shares its airframe family with the Virus SW — this is the SW 128, where the Virus SW is the SW 121 and the Velis Club the SW 121C.

And then the number that defines it: 50 minutes of typical endurance, 56 maximum plus reserve, against an 80-minute recharge.

That duty cycle is the airplane. Everything else on this page is secondary to it. One Velis Electro covers roughly one lesson per two hours of calendar time. A Cessna 152 on the same flight line covers three or four, because refuelling takes five minutes. A school replacing a piston trainer one-for-one would halve its throughput; a school adding a Velis alongside pistons, for pattern work and first lessons, is doing something that makes sense.

Why the mission scores are so lopsided. Cross-country is a 1, business travel a 1, backcountry a 1. Not because the airplane is bad — because 50 minutes of endurance means the nearest airport you can fly to and return from is about twenty minutes away. This is a pattern and local-area airplane, and it is an excellent one: quiet at 60 dBA, no mixture, no carb heat, no fuel management, and an operating cost per hour in energy of under six dollars.

Every figure here is Pipistrel's own, from one technical table at one weight (600 kg / 1,323 lb MTOW), which is the cleanest sourcing situation this catalogue gets. There is no mixing of power settings and no unit ambiguity.

Two things the table does not contain and a reader should know are missing.

No landing distances at all. Takeoff is published for grass and asphalt — 807 and 791 ft of ground roll, 1,470 ft over fifty feet — and nothing is published for landing. On a trainer that is a real gap; the stored takeoff figures are the asphalt ones.

No V-speeds beyond the stalls and Vy. No Vne, Vno, Va or Vfe, and no best glide speed — which matters more on this airplane than on a piston. A flat battery is a certainty at the end of every flight rather than an unlikely failure, so the glide is a number the pilot uses by design. EASA.A.573 would state the limits and was not retrieved; it should be, before anyone treats this page as complete.

The cruise figure comes with its own power setting, which is unusually honest. "Cruising speed (at 35 kW)" — so the 88 KTAS and the 35 kWh/hr are the same condition, from the same row, which is exactly what the cruise/burn triple is supposed to be and frequently is not elsewhere in this catalogue.

Range is deliberately blank. This airplane's limit is minutes, not miles. At 88 KTAS, 50 minutes is about 73 nm of still air before any reserve — and publishing that as a "range" would invite someone to plan a 70 nm trip in an airplane that cannot come back. endurance_minutes carries the real constraint.

Parts: fair. Mechanics: specialist. Both ratings are about the powertrain, not the airframe.

The airframe is a conventional Pipistrel composite, shared with a family that has been in production since the 1990s and supported through a global dealer network from Slovenia. That part is well understood.

The E-811 powertrain is not like anything else in the catalogue. It is liquid cooled, runs at 345 VDC, and charges through an onboard port from an external charger. High-voltage work is a separate competence from piston maintenance — closer to EV technician training than to an A&P curriculum — and the number of shops in any given country that can do it is small. Identify yours before buying.

Pipistrel is now part of Textron (acquired 2022), which cuts both ways: more corporate durability behind the warranty, and a product line that now competes for attention inside a company that also sells Cessnas. Our other two Pipistrel pages predate the acquisition and still describe the pre-Textron support picture.

The battery is a scheduled replacement, not a repair. Treat it the way a piston owner treats an engine overhaul: a known future expense that should be funded per hour from the first hour. The difference is that an owner can get an O-320 overhaul quoted by five shops this afternoon, and nobody has published a number for this.

No used market exists to quote and the reason is structural, not just scarcity. A large share of this airplane's value sits in a battery pack whose remaining life is difficult to verify and whose replacement cost is unpublished. Until both are routine disclosures, pricing a used one is guesswork — which is itself a reason to be careful about being the first buyer of a second-hand example.

Pipistrel publishes no new price; the site is contact-sales only. The price_typical_usd used in the cost model's insurance band is not stored on this page for that reason.

What should hold value: the type certificate itself, which nothing else electric has; a composite airframe with a long production family behind it; and Textron's balance sheet behind the warranty.

What will not: the pack. Assume it is a depreciating consumable and ask, for any specific airframe, how many hours and cycles are on the batteries currently fitted and what it costs to replace them.

No airworthiness directives are known against this type. Because it holds an EASA type certificate, the mechanism here is genuine EASA airworthiness directives rather than the manufacturer-bulletin regime that governs a light-sport aircraft — a stricter and more transparent arrangement, and one more reason the certification matters.

Pipistrel publishes service bulletins, a technical publications portal and an illustrated parts catalogue, and runs a safety-occurrence reporting channel. Get the full compliance record for the serial number at prebuy, and specifically the battery pack's own history: cycle count, any thermal events, any pack or module replacements, and the date of manufacture of the cells currently installed. On this airplane that record is the equivalent of engine logs, and it is the one a seller is least likely to volunteer.

With a type certified in 2020 and built in small numbers, there is no owner community large enough to have surfaced pattern faults. Early operators are finding them, and several of the world's flight schools running Velis Electros publish their experience — worth reading before buying.

Nobody has a loss history for this and the $4,000 figure is extrapolation, not a quote. There is no electric aircraft binder in reference/insurance-costs.md, and the light-sport band it is drawn from describes piston airplanes.

Three things an underwriter will ask about that have no established answer: battery thermal risk, which is the question carriers are actively working on across every industry that uses large lithium packs; hull valuation, because a large fraction of this airplane's value is a consumable whose remaining life is hard to assess; and repair cost after a minor event, since damage near a battery pack may condemn parts that look fine.

Get a quote before getting attached to the airplane, and from a broker who has written one before. The honest expectation is that it costs more than its hull value suggests, not less.