Fantastic Skydiving vehicle.. If you can get 9 people (+ gear) 12'000ft on a 30 minutes flight, then you can glide all the way down for the next load. at $6 worth of fuel it would be a game changer.
Even a much smaller plane like a 172 can easily burn $50/hr just in fuel. Much lower flow rate, but it’s leaded a gas at about $4.50/gal
“In airline service, operators would need to recharge the batteries between flights, with charging times correlating closely to flight times, says Ganzarski. That means the batteries would need about 30-40min of charging following a 30min flight. The weight of the batteries makes swapping spent cells for fresh cells unfeasible between flights, he says.”
Could even combo the two approachs...have a large high altitude solar "mothership", that beams directed power at the drones.
Realistically a skydiving flight would be more, as your climbing at full power much more than a short hop commuter flight normally would.
It's these costs, not fuel costs, that account for a big percentage of the cost of flying. There's no meaningful way to reduce the cost of flying without reducing them. Perhaps electrics will incur much lower costs in maintenance, reducing costs somehow.
I had the oppurtunity to spend an hour in a T-6 trainer a number of years ago. This was the primary trainer used by Air Force in WW2. Big radial engine. At full throttle (which we were mostly at, as we were doing acrobatics), that eats through fuel at about 40 gallons/hr. That's $200/hr just in gas, for a plane that carriers 2 people and isn't really all that powerful.
The 747 for example eats about 1 gallon per second (~3600 gallons per hour) according to this source: https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/qu...
1: https://www.iata.org/contentassets/ebdba50e57194019930d72722...