(February 2011) — It has been seldom in the history of aviation that a single technology has revolutionized the way we fly by addressing multiple problems facing the industry and solving them all. The most important such event was the widescale adoption of the turbine engine in the 1940s. Turbines, as you know, remedied (and continue to remedy) commercial, military and business aviation problems of reliability, cost, range, speed and power, while also bringing with them a number of infrastructure advantages associated with using a single fuel type.
Though it’s still in its infancy, electric propulsion seems to promise to solve a similar range of problems in light GA. But in the case of the electric motor, the potential advances might be more sweeping and more compelling, though almost certainly on a smaller scale economically.
