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 industry is experiencing a speculative boom, with numerous projects (especially eVTOLs) across conventional, winged VTOL, and multirotor designs, despite electricity's inherent propulsion limitations.
Key challenges for electric aircraft include the heavy weight of current batteries, the trade-off between speed and range, and the high power requirements for vertical flight.
Most current projects are overly optimistic, with many unlikely to succeed due to unrealistic claims, lengthy and complex certification processes, and the need for significant advancements in battery technology, pushing widespread adoption decades into the future.

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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.