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BETA Technologies' electric aircraft at the East Hampton Town Airport...

BETA Technologies' electric aircraft at the East Hampton Town Airport before its demonstration flight to Kennedy Airport. Credit: Gordon M. Grant

Flying high has deep roots on Long Island.

Aviation is as much a part of our history as any industry or pastime in a region where taking to the air has been almost as important as getting in the water.

So it was appropriate that Long Island again found itself at the center of the aeronautics world last week when the first fully electric passenger-carrying plane to land at one of the metropolitan area's major airports took off from East Hampton and landed at JFK.

The battery-powered ALIA CTOL aircraft, a fittingly sleek and futuristic piece of machinery, might have created more noise in a metaphoric sense than it generated in flight. That's because its successful trip with four passengers aboard was proof that the future we know is coming might be closer than we thought. It's a future where air travel gets quieter, cheaper, more environmentally friendly. 

How close is that? The flight left some experts wondering whether — given realistic timelines to complete testing and obtain final Federal Aviation Administration certification — we might see commercial electric air taxi flights by the end of 2026.

The East Hampton flights joined a long list of Long Island firsts that began in 1911, the infancy of aviation, when Long Island already had three airfields on the Hempstead Plains populated by the likes of famed aviator Glenn Curtiss. The first official airmail flights and the first transcontinental flight took off from Long Island that year, according to the Cradle of Aviation Museum, followed later by the first flight across the Atlantic Ocean and the first nonstop flight across America.

Speed records were broken at Mitchel Field in the 1920s, Charles Lindbergh's historic solo flight to Paris took off from Roosevelt Field in 1927, and Jimmy Doolittle made the first "blind" flight using only instruments at Mitchel Field in 1929. By the early 1930s, Long Island was home to the nation's largest nonmilitary airfield, Roosevelt Field.

Meanwhile, a host of aircraft manufacturers sprang up on the Island, beginning with Curtiss, Sikorsky, Sperry and Fairchild, and followed later by the likes of Grumman and Republic, whose fighters were instrumental in winning World War II and maintaining our nation's military dominance of the air for decades to come. And, of course, Grumman built the lunar lander that ferried humans on and off the moon. 

That Apollo 11 module, nicknamed Eagle, embodied the real significance of aviation on Long Island. It was a source of dreams, a fount for imagination. It was a metaphor for a vibrant region that seemed to be always bursting at the seams, reaching for the next thing, aspiring to something more.

It is tempting to take a more somber lesson from the fact that those iconic manufacturers are gone now and that the plane that took off from East Hampton was built by a Vermont-based company, BETA Technologies. But Long Island still has more than 200 companies producing aircraft parts and hundreds of private planes that call the Island home, so it's clear that at least a vestige survives of the industry's ability to inspire.

The flight from East Hampton did just that. One can compare the $8 cost of the battery power for the trip to the $350 cost for fuel for a conventional flight and envision cheaper and cleaner air travel. One could compare the 45-minute trip with a two or three-hour car ride and see better uses of one's time, more productivity, and less congestion on our roads. One could anticipate a diminishment of decibels.

One also could see the flight as proof that American ingenuity and brainpower are thriving, and a reminder that we need to keep funding and encouraging the dreamers who do great things and then inspire our own dreams.

Let's keep nourishing our high-flying roots.

Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.

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