[tedsanders]

Thanks for the detailed response! Do you think there's any chance that these electric planes will used for cargo/passengers? (Or do you think they'd mainly fit into the recreation/tourism/short-hop flights? Are there other current/future plane uses that I'm not thinking of?)

[marvin]

I'm agnostic in that regard. Some very smart people (notably, Elon Musk) have said that electric propulsion is the future also for passenger aircraft in the more distant future, but I have not seen any detailed reasoning or numbers to indicate how this would work.

Presumably, there would have to be huge efficiency gains over combustion jet propulsion since the energy density of batteries would in any concievable circumstance be much smaller than hydrocarbon fuels. One possibility would be to fly higher, utilizing the smaller air resistance and the fact that battery-electric propulsion does not have the oxygen limitation with altitude that combustion processes have, but I haven't seen a detailed argument regarding how plausible this is.

If we ever build a "flying car", it will have to be electric and use fixed wings in addition to propellers since this is required for generating energy-efficient lift. In the "short-hop"/low-speed/personal transport category, there will definitely be possibilities.