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:

Electric aviation is in an early, highly innovative phase, with numerous experimental projects, especially electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, despite the fundamental challenge of battery energy density limiting either long range or high speed.
The article categorizes electric aircraft into conventional transports (most likely for near-term service), winged VTOLs (which face complex design trade-offs between vertical and horizontal flight), and multirotors (limited by high hovering power requirements and regulatory hurdles for urban use).
A fundamental problem for electric aircraft is balancing battery weight with performance, leading to compromises in speed and range, while the industry is characterized by significant hype and unrealistic timelines that suggest many current projects will fail.
Certification for novel electric aircraft is a long and complex process, with widespread commercial viability and settled standards for design and regulation estimated to be decades away, heavily dependent on future battery technology improvements.

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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.