Electric flight is coming, but the batteries aren’t ready

The idea of electric powered flight has been around for decades, but only recently has it begun to take off. There are over a dozen startups and companies today that are pursuing battery-electric and hybrid prototypes, with some suggesting we could all be nibbling on pretzels and scrolling through in-flight entertainment from within zero-emission, battery-powered aircraft sometime in the next decade.

The concepts under development today look nothing like the retro-futuristic models from the pages of old issues of Popular Science, nor do they resemble the gravity-defying vehicles seen in Blade Runner and Back to the Future. Rather they mostly appear to be slim, futuristic, plane-helicopter hybrids made of lightweight carbon fiber. But the...

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