How electric planes are changing flight

Would love to see more about this! I and my team researched VTOL and electric aircraft in grad school, including analyses for Uber Elevate. Battery electric VTOL aircraft max out at about 6 seats (pilot included) because of the weight scaling limitations you mentioned. My colleagues now work at various VTOL companies, large and small.

 The best companies in the space are Joby Aviation and Lilium. Especially Joby. Beta's rotor configuration is really impractical. Easy to design, but basically useless for actual commercial service and very inefficient, not to mention unsafe. The company is likely fueled by cheap money from low interest rates and it'll die on the vine with today's restricted investing. This is somebody with a great sales pitch and a fundamentally flawed engineering concept using people with no track record of getting an aircraft certified.

There's also active research into Lithium Sulfur (LiS) batteries, which would allow larger or more performant aircraft, maybe 8-12 seats. Anything bigger will be hydrogen fuel cell when that starts getting deployed in European commuter routes (25-50 pax, short haul), and full size airliners will remain on jet fuel, maybe being regulated into using biofuel, and we'll use carbon capture to offset it.