The article mentions the industry took a hit during Covid. It's interesting to note that a company like Air Lease Corporation (which buys aircraft and leases it to airlines) basically soldiered on unaffected by the pandemic [https://valustox.com/AL - there's a big dip in profit a year ago, but that's due to the Russian war sanctions].
It seems there needs to be a radical price difference between electrical and chemical energy before the virtues of the rocket equation are overcome for airline travel.
Fossil fuels are literally dead animals pressurized by Earth... all that energy went into the fuel. Planets work on massively larger scales of energy than human society right now and we're using stored energy created by planets to fly.
By mass, fossil fuels are mostly from plants, algae, and bacteria rather than animals.
Turning a fossil fuel based plane carbon free has the same weight problem
A Tesla's battery pack weighs ~3.2 nanograms less when it's fully depleted. Think of the weight savings with a bigger battery pack for a plane! /s
Because governments bailed out airlines so that leasing companies wouldn't go default which would then have caused the banks to get into trouble. It's ~180 billion dollars each year just for new airplanes - with ten or fifteen years worth of active contracts, a collapse of the industry would have let the 2008ff crisis look harmless.
Barely any airline actually has physical or real estate assets any more in their own name. It's all leased, rented or otherwise not on their books anymore, which was contributing to how badly airlines were losing money during COVID.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/airlines-b...
We know how to make zero carbon jet fuel today using WWII technology (which has been improved on since, and can be improved). The hard part is cost: synthetic fuel generally costs 4 times as much as pumping oil. (synthetic fuels normally use coal or natural gas for the energy but the process would work with renewables). Still this is very promising: we know from experience it scales up to produce very large volumes of great fuel, and there is reason to think we can make it better/cheaper.