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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

Electric cars and batteries are by no means my area of expertise, but I'd have to believe that the size and weight of the batteries needed for an electric plane would be totally unfeasible for efficient flight. Just for a comparison, a Tesla Model S weighs 4600 pounds, while a BMW 5 series weighs 3900 pounds, so the Tesla is about 20% heavier.

Plus, Jet A (kerosene) is relatively cheap compared to the cost of electricity and batteries.

Finally...imagine the range anxiety of a battery powered 777.

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You're better off using nuclear power or renewable energy to create carbon-neutral jet fuel than anything else. I doubt there's any other way to fly than hydrocarbons (or equivalent chemical energy). Nuclear planes are also a joke (I believe they are theoretically physically possible, but have to be huge, and of course there's the little issue of flying nuclear reactors around in the sky), all the other alternate energies are right out, and none of the non-rocket alternate thrust methods have anywhere near enough specific impulse to get a plane off the ground, to say nothing of the unpleasantness of something like ion drives taking off in the middle of populated metropolises all the time. (Any ion drive that could drive a plane would sterilize quite a bit of landscape in the process.) Rockets might theoretically work but obvious jet engines win out in practice in this use case.

The range anxiety is based on not being able to fill up anywhere (electrically) even through there is plenty of alternative energy (gas) at every exit. There aren't any jet fuel stations in the sky, so planes already have this problem.

I don't think we'll see electric planes anytime soon since I see the future being a mix of all types of energy, but range anxiety isn't the problem.

Some ideas I've seen involve microwave power beamed down from space and/or up from ground stations. No batteries.

That sounds like a lot of birds would be wiped out, if it's adopted at scale.

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