Hacker News Reader

Electric planes have very few parts and are easy to maintain. The main cost of flying is fuel. Electric will make it a lot cheaper.

The battery as with all electric vehicles is still an issue, but for short air taxi distances it will be fine. Switch out the batteries on arrival and go again.

View on HN

It's unlikely that switchable/swappable batteries will be a thing in aviation.

Even in the smallest aircraft, the batteries weigh hundreds - or thousands - of kilograms, comprise the bulk of the aircraft's dry weight, and are likely to be tightly integrated with the rest of the airframe for structural and safety reasons.

Most aircraft spend enough time on the ground between flights to make fast DC charging quite practical, and certainly much more so than swapping out huge batteries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com