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Electric Aircraft: Are They For Real?

Electric aircraft will get bigger in 2016, but probably no more accessible. Its not for lack of trying. Above and below the surface, there's semi-furious developmental work to bring electric airplanes to market, driven by a mix of a parallel market push in the automotive world, a war on noise and emissions, demand for drones and the faint outlines of an energy transition away from oil and toward electricity for everything.

In 2015, somewhere in an airless office tasked with keeping track of such things, a dot was placed on a spreadsheet graph. It represents year one of the next big thing in aviation: electric airplanes. The graph will march forward from there, rising gently into the future. Or so it is hoped.

Never mind that you can’t readily buy an electric airplane right now and you’ll have a time even finding one to fly, as I did last summer. It took a trip to Slovenia to experience the tingle of raw voltage coursing into a brushless DC motor at the touch of button.