High Times in the Electric Zoo

Countless ideas fly about in the airspace of today's technology.

Friday, January 27, 2023 at 03:38 PM ET

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The Beta Technologies Alia-250 eVTOL aircraft seats six and has a single pusher prop on the tail. [Courtesy: Beta Technologies]

Key Takeaways:

The electric aircraft sector is experiencing an innovation boom, especially with eVTOL projects, but faces fundamental challenges due to current battery limitations in achieving both long range and high speed.
Electric aircraft are categorized into conventional transports (most likely to succeed soon), winged VTOLs (complex designs), and multi-rotors (limited by high power demands for hovering and range).
Despite heavy investment, many current electric aircraft projects make overly optimistic claims about performance and commercial timelines, leading the author to believe most will fail or require significant evolution.
Certification for novel electric aircraft, particularly eVTOLs, is a lengthy and complex process, with definitive standards and optimal configurations predicted to take another two decades to settle.

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We’re in a period of innovation that resembles the one from 1908 to 1915, when countless ideas—many harebrained—were tried, a few of which evolved into the airplanes of today.

Now, it’s all about electricity. Electricity is an unlikely way of propelling airplanes—you can store enough of it to go either far or fast, but not both—yet hundreds of projects are currently in development. A lot of them are in the electric vertical takeoff and landing or eVTOL category, for which electric power is, if anything, even less appropriate. A list of eVTOL proposals takes up several pages online at evtol.news/aircraft. Several surprising names pop up. Cadillac? Aston Martin? Really? Good luck trying to tell the sheep from the goats.