[bronco21016]

I'd debate the 'more available' statement. It is more widely available overall but not in the places you'd want it. Of course that can be fixed but someone will have to build out that infrastructure to make electric planes viable.

It's a bit like Tesla. Prior to them building out their charging network, electric cars had a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. You might buy a car but have no where to charge it, but nobody wanted to build places to charge them because nobody has an electric car.

[harg]

That’s not the case at all. Everyone has electricity at their home. You can charge basically any electric car from a domestic wal socket and higher power chargers are easily available. Commercial charge points only really need to be used for long distance travel. Most EV owners can do the majority of charging at home.

[lacksconfidence]

One confounding factor is parking arrangements. If you have a garage then a wall socket is reasonable, but for many years the only place i could park a car was somewhere on the street, hopefully within 100m of my address. In that situation commercial charge points (hopefully near my employer, if lucky) would be the only reasonable charge point.

[tuatoru]

> Everyone has electricity at their home.

I do. But I can't get the car up the stairs. :-(

[bdamm]

Yeah basically all airports that have commercial service also have access to power. There are exceptions like seaplane bases and small country strips, but there are more than enough airports with access to commercial or even industrial grade power to make electric airplanes that require charging viable. The final step of linking up the airport power supply to the airplane charger is peanuts in the world of aviation. Almost all airports have a fleet of fuel trucks, therefore, the cost of buying a fuel truck is the low end of the acceptable cost for ground infrastructure investment to open a new route for an airline.

[bronco21016]

I just reread what I wrote and I think maybe I wasn’t very clear.

There’s electricity at every single gas station in the US. Why can’t we pull into any gas station in the US and charge an electric car? Even now that electric cars are gaining market share and becoming more common.

Someone has to build, supply, and hook up high power charging systems. You can’t just fly your $5 million eJet into any airport in the US and run a 100’ extension cord into the FBO. If that’s the plan, you certainly can’t hope to leave the same day. It will take at least 3 days for your 1 MWh eJet to finish charging.

We’re in the pre-Tesla days of electric aircraft. There’s a few players working on the aircraft and they’re getting close. However, until a ‘Tesla’ comes along where they also install charging infrastructure at the airports their customers are planning on using, we’re not going to see a commercially viable electric aircraft.

[ramses0]

The best way to do it would be start in the corners and cross in the middle. Seattle/SF/LA => { colorado? vegas? texas? chicago? } => NY/DC/Miami

If you can link up some sort of route(s) to deal with range-anxiety / weather, and can criss-cross the country, you're in business.

Once your route is built, it's straightforward to manage capacity/flight-plans (reservations / networks / routing), and then you move directly to demand-generation, but you'll have a real tough time competing directly with coast-to-coast direct flights.

[bdamm]

Yeah, I think you're mostly right. I suspect it's going to start with seaplanes (oddly) because they fly short hop routes that are ideal for electric aircraft. Then you'll start to see new routes made economic by electrification, such as; Marin County->Palo Alto, SurfAir routes (like linking up the dozen airports sprinkled around Los Angeles area), generally linking up small hops. At the beginning electric aircraft won't be competing with existing airline routes, they'll be expanding coverage and reducing prices for local area hops.