Electric Aircraft may have more potential than We thought

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Batteries are doing such a great job replacing petroleum in car engines that it's natural to think they might do the same in the skies. Efforts to make a working airplane prototype, however, perennially come up short. Kitty Hawk, the startup backed by Google co-founder Larry Page that hoped to make an electric flying car, quietly abandoned the project after five years in 2020. Last year, two separate proposed battery planes being developed by ventures including Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc and Nasa were dropped within a month of each other.

That's led most people (including me) to be dubious that electric planes will ever take off. The reasons are pretty fundamental: batteries are heavy, and aircraft need to be light. Kerosene stores more than 40 times as much energy per kilogram as lithium-ion cells. To carry as much power as its fossil-fuel equivalent, a seven-seater business jet would need to be carrying a battery as heavy as an Airbus SE A320 fully laden with fuel, 180 passengers, and cargo. That's obviously not going to work.

There's an unexamined assumption in that scenario that's worth looking at more closely, however. Designing an electric plane isn't a simple matter of plugging a battery into the back of a jet engine: You need instead to return to first principles and sketch things from the ground up. Start with a blank sheet of paper, and you might find innovative designs you'd not previously thought of.

That's the pitch of Elysian Aircraft BV, a start-up working in partnership with Delft University of Technology, one of the world's leading institutes for aerospace design. In two separate papers published this month, the company's founders and Delft academics argued that previous studies of electric planes were neglecting an opportunity to take a significant bite out of the industry's carbon footprint. They have proposed a design for a 90-seater that would depend on batteries alone for normal flight. 

“Planes as they are made now are very efficiently designed for