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This article is idiotic.
$5 cost. 25,000 pounds. BUT OVER WHAT FUCKING DISTANCE?
$5 gets me 23 miles in my Delica. It gets me 100 miles on my motorcycle. It gets me 30 miles in my Porsche 914. But the article says nothing about distance.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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I'm guessing it mostly flew in circles, since it's a test flight that happened "at Plattsburgh International Airport" instead of between two locations. 27 minute flight, whatever that's worth.
i just got back from a week in bali. we rent a mini ev 2 person car to get around and in the span for the whole trip we literally spend $0 because we charge them off the wall plug of the villa we stay at
but if we want to be pedantic the car is Wuling airev and iirc it has 17 kwh of battery. that is quite enough for us for the whole week, we only need to charge it once at 60%. so lets say its around 7 kwh. in Indonesia a kwh cost around $0.1. so for a whole week it only need less than a dollar for 'gas'
I can understand a hybrid train because of certain sections of track electrification issues and the fact that diesel electric is how even trains that run entirely on diesel operate so you're essentially just toting around a generator to operate your already electric engine. I understand hybrid cars with regenerative braking and range extension. I don't really understand hybrid planes.
Like I can imagine electric is more efficient for takeoff because electric engines produce more initial power generally than what fossil can match per engine size(a big part of both hybrid trains and cars both using batteries for initial acceleration) and then you cruise with jet fuel. I'm just having a hard time imagining it is worth it from a defossil fuel perspective or from a straight efficiency perspective.
Combustion engines have maximum fuel efficiency at a specific RPM. A Hybrid has the advantage that you can run that engine at maximum efficiency 100% of the time and using the generated electrical energy to generate motion. The gains by being able to keep the ICE at peak efficiency are more than the loss you take from the conversion. That's the same principle as in hybrid cars - look up Technology Connections video where he analyzes the behavior of his hybrid car. It is for sure preferable to than just the ICE directly, losing a lot of efficiency and therefor fuel because of differences in needed power output. Combining this into a plugin-hybrid makes - as you said - the takeoff use no or just the default amount of jet fuel at all.
This will not eliminate the need for jet fuel, but even a reduction is preferable to the status quo. Until we get batteries that are light enough while keeping energy density at least as high as now (preferably higher), purely electric long-range flight is not an option that's available.
I don't think you'll ever get there for flight personally. Just need to accept synthetic aviation fuel as the only real option for energy density (both volume and weight) and accept certain modalities being absolutely priced out of air transport.
I guess my main issue is you're now flying around with those takeoff batteries and extra engine components. Is that really ever going to be worth it for anything but those short hop flights this is designed for? And if not why are we even investing in this because those short hop flights frankly need to be eliminated for trains anyway.
But why you dont believe it? OP gave a detailed rebukal of your initial post, and then your answer is "I just don't believe, just accept that ..."
You want to know why I don't believe we'll get batteries with enough energy density for sustained long haul flight? I was responding to their last sentence. Ya know, acknowledging that batteries more dense than hydrocarbons isn't really on the radar so for that aspect of things synthetic aviation fuel is pretty much what you gotta accept to go for zero carbon.
An experimental plane to help develop a future hybrid still another experimental phase away that will still be limited to regional travel due to autonomy issues. Still pretty awesome, but still some time away.
I really hope this will catch on for once, it could be a great solution for all those people who insist they have to do domestic flights... (in countries like Germany which aren't that big comparatively speaking)
Yeah unfortunately this is only viable for extremely short flights 100-200 miles as the article says. Batteries are just too heavy and planes needs too much power for anything more.
These would be the perfect private jet for the ultra rich who take a jet to work a few minutes away, or to go shopping, but for commercial flights they’re basically not an option until we have a huge breakthrough in battery tech. We need the mythical “coming next year” for the last 20 years “solid state batteries”.
IIRC take off and landing is using a huge portion of the fuel needed in regular planes. If you can use this new technology to do those manoeuvres, it would also be a big win for general flights.
Yes and hopefullybreduce pollution and noise levels around airports