While there is not yet a battery that can power a passenger jumbo jet, aviation is looking more and more likely to go electric at some point.
The Alice plane is a plane that when carrying passengers can sit around 20. In cargo mode it can fly around 500 miles. It can be flown by a single pilot, and can fly about 1200kg. Travelling at just short of 300 miles per hour, and taking roughly 30 minutes of charging for every hour in the air (it can only stay up for about 100 minutes) it is thought that using these planes will save about 70% of the cost.
Also, being simpler engines with far fewer moving parts, the planes are expected to have higher reliability and lower costs for maintenance.
Even more exciting, these ranges are doable on current batteries. As there is huge amounts of money going into battery research it is highly likely that in the future, the range of these planes will be able to be increased.
