Norway's Plan for a Fleet of Electric Planes
Electric planes still have a few challenges ahead but basically technical progress seems to make short haul electrical flight feasible within the next decade.<p>The reason this is being pursued by so many companies is that electric planes solve a lot of problems and represent an enormous disruption to the aviation industry. Modern air planes are very complex and expensive to operate and need a lot of maintenance. The cost of operating them is completely dominated by fuel cost, maintenance overhead, and expensive taxes and fees at airports related to noise and pollution.<p>With electrical engines, all of this changes. They are light and simple and tend to have a long operational life with very low maintenance requirements. Recharging batteries is extremely cheap compared to burning tons of fuel (literally). Filling up an A321, which takes 24K liters of kerosene, will take you somewhere between 10 and 15K and gets you a range of around close to 8000 km. Most flights are much shorter than that meaning a lot of their weight and range is redundant. Also, you burn a lot of fuel on takeoffs and most planes need to get up high to get to an economical fuel burn rate to cruise. So you pay a huge price for getting all that weight up on every take off.<p>Electrical planes don&#x27;t need to get up that high and can cruise efficiently at both low and high altitudes. Once cruising, operating them as a glider is actually feasible as well because you can safely turn the engines off and on again (unthinkable with a jet).