Yeah unfortunately this is only viable for extremely short flights 100-200 miles as the article says. Batteries are just too heavy and planes needs too much power for anything more.

These would be the perfect private jet for the ultra rich who take a jet to work a few minutes away, or to go shopping, but for commercial flights they’re basically not an option until we have a huge breakthrough in battery tech. We need the mythical “coming next year” for the last 20 years “solid state batteries”.

IIRC take off and landing is using a huge portion of the fuel needed in regular planes. If you can use this new technology to do those manoeuvres, it would also be a big win for general flights.

Yes and hopefullybreduce pollution and noise levels around airports

Yeah that’s it. It’s not a matter of “catching on”, it’s a matter of better battery tech emerging which is more affordable.

Personally I think high speed rail is a better bet. All the tech already exists and the weight of the batteries is less problematic.

It looks great for small commercial flights between islands and such, even just for urgent freight, fuel has more complicated logistics and avgas has lead in it.

As I said in another comment, this is a step towards making a more efficient hybrid plane for trips under 500 miles, of which about 4 million are made per year in the U.S. alone. Having enough battery power to take off efficiently makes those trips a lot more economical. On longer flights, fuel for takeoff is a lot smaller portion of the overall costs and doesn’t matter as much. Except for all the fossil fuel burned, of course.

People who insist on domestic flights in Germany are really critiquing the train network which is vast, but way to slow and the on time performance is terrible. If they would fix the trains there would be much less call for flights.

Better than the US is not an endorsement.