Hangar wits at a loss for an original joke sometimes fall back on the time-tested quip that a liquid-cooled airplane makes as much sense as an air-cooled submarine. When several of them (wits, not submarines) are present, the observation that the problem with electric airplanes is that the extension cord gets twisted cannot be far behind.
Nevertheless, in April I attended a day-long symposium on electric airplanes in San Francisco. It was the second annual meeting of its kind — I missed the first — put on by the CAFE Foundation, which does a lot of good work, some of it in collaboration with NASA, investigating ways to improve the efficiency of personal aircraft.
