Big aircraft are a thing because small aircraft are very expensive to operate. In GA there's a thing called the 100$ hamburger which is basically pilots doing short flights to grab a burger and spending about 100$ on fuel to get some air time. These are short hops and the handful of companies operating flights commercially for this kind of distances charge similar amounts (or way more) for the privilege per passenger. The main reason that this market is so small is the fuel cost. If you drastically cut that cost, you create a new market.
What electrical flight will do initially is enable the 5$ hamburger flight and create that market. Same distance, same speed, fraction of the cost. GA is currently prohibitively expensive mainly because of fuel. Operating that kind of flights commercially offers similar advantages though you still have to account for the pilots.
And while pilot cost is a factor, their availability is a much bigger problem. There simply aren't enough of them to operate the tens of thousands of mass produced electrical planes that on paper could out compete commuter jets on cost, scale, noise, flexibility, ability to land just about anywhere, etc.
The solution to that is self flying planes, aka. drones. This will likely happen long before we train up hundreds of thousands of new pilots. Like self driving cars there are challenges for this and like self driving cars those challenges are increasingly of a legal rather than a technical nature. It's technically feasible but getting permission to actually start doing this will take time and is happening very slowly despite e.g. Waymo 'drivers' actually needing to touch their controls is now becoming a once every few tens of thousands of miles kind of thing.
The list price for the Eviation Alice (projected to hit the market in 3-5 years) is around 3M and flies 9 passengers. The list price for an A319 is around 90M and flies about up to 160 passengers. So, ballpark it's not unthinkable to fly similar amounts of people using 20-30 mass produced self flying electrical planes competing on most 1-2 hour hops that these jets are typically used for. That will take decades to happen but it is entirely feasible with today's level of technology.
Small planes are not fundamentally hard. Cessna nailed mass production decades ago and electrical planes are vastly simpler (way less moving or combustible parts) And as Tesla and other battery manufacturers are showing, there's nothing fundamentally hard about producing a few hundred kwh of battery at a reasonable weight. A small plane with 500-1000khwh of battery will have a very usable range. With increasing energy densities, that will eventually extend into longer ranges as well. The Eviation Alice manages close to 600 miles on 900 kwh of what is essentially similar to the current energy density of mass produced EVs i.e. hardly the state of the art in battery tech. They are holding back here to get this thing certified ASAP instead of opting for already existing newer battery tech.
The impressive thing about this particular announcement is that it is a cost effective conversion for planes that are 60+ years old with a very well understood mission, which is very short hops. The reason that is economical is because combustion engine economics for that are so spectacularly bad and always have been. Electric flight is going to kill that market first and very soon because it hardly was a market to begin with. Small electrical planes crossing the Atlantic is going to happen at some point in the next decade or so. From there to that becoming a routine thing will take more time. But once that happens, it's likely to challenge the economics of dong the same in a 747. There's no fundamental need to scale electrical planes to that size even though that will probably eventually actually happen as well; but that will indeed require decades of improvements in energy density in batteries.
The only questions around electrical flight is when, not if.
What electrical flight will do initially is enable the 5$ hamburger flight and create that market. Same distance, same speed, fraction of the cost. GA is currently prohibitively expensive mainly because of fuel. Operating that kind of flights commercially offers similar advantages though you still have to account for the pilots.
And while pilot cost is a factor, their availability is a much bigger problem. There simply aren't enough of them to operate the tens of thousands of mass produced electrical planes that on paper could out compete commuter jets on cost, scale, noise, flexibility, ability to land just about anywhere, etc.
The solution to that is self flying planes, aka. drones. This will likely happen long before we train up hundreds of thousands of new pilots. Like self driving cars there are challenges for this and like self driving cars those challenges are increasingly of a legal rather than a technical nature. It's technically feasible but getting permission to actually start doing this will take time and is happening very slowly despite e.g. Waymo 'drivers' actually needing to touch their controls is now becoming a once every few tens of thousands of miles kind of thing.
The list price for the Eviation Alice (projected to hit the market in 3-5 years) is around 3M and flies 9 passengers. The list price for an A319 is around 90M and flies about up to 160 passengers. So, ballpark it's not unthinkable to fly similar amounts of people using 20-30 mass produced self flying electrical planes competing on most 1-2 hour hops that these jets are typically used for. That will take decades to happen but it is entirely feasible with today's level of technology.
Small planes are not fundamentally hard. Cessna nailed mass production decades ago and electrical planes are vastly simpler (way less moving or combustible parts) And as Tesla and other battery manufacturers are showing, there's nothing fundamentally hard about producing a few hundred kwh of battery at a reasonable weight. A small plane with 500-1000khwh of battery will have a very usable range. With increasing energy densities, that will eventually extend into longer ranges as well. The Eviation Alice manages close to 600 miles on 900 kwh of what is essentially similar to the current energy density of mass produced EVs i.e. hardly the state of the art in battery tech. They are holding back here to get this thing certified ASAP instead of opting for already existing newer battery tech.
The impressive thing about this particular announcement is that it is a cost effective conversion for planes that are 60+ years old with a very well understood mission, which is very short hops. The reason that is economical is because combustion engine economics for that are so spectacularly bad and always have been. Electric flight is going to kill that market first and very soon because it hardly was a market to begin with. Small electrical planes crossing the Atlantic is going to happen at some point in the next decade or so. From there to that becoming a routine thing will take more time. But once that happens, it's likely to challenge the economics of dong the same in a 747. There's no fundamental need to scale electrical planes to that size even though that will probably eventually actually happen as well; but that will indeed require decades of improvements in energy density in batteries.
The only questions around electrical flight is when, not if.