The author of this opinion piece is a friend of mine, and my opinions are nearly identical. He says it better than I can. My readers know I am against electric cars, especially when the all-powerful hand of Government mandates that we buy them (this is a total failure so far). Here’s what my friend has to say about the even-more-farfetched idea of electric aircraft.

Reality Coming Back Into Focus

The last few months have seen an almost-radical wrenching of the industry back into the direction of underlying fundamentals. All the silly fun that was had pursuing distractions (and worse) has come, or is coming, to an end.

We see this: ideas that we knew were terrible are coming to an end. After spending $1.4 billion and achieving a public valuation of over $3 billion, the eVTOL company Lilium has entered bankruptcy (https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/lilium-subsidiaries- insolvency-evtol-aircraft). Readers will know we have been predicting this outcome since the beginning. And the exact same thing will happen to each and every other eVTOL company (Joby, Archer, Volocopter, Vertical, Wisk, Eve… everyone listed here (https://aamrealityindex.com/aam-reality-index) in turn. Because, as we have pointed out time and again, the technological approach simply does not make sense (https://airinsight.com/the-coming-evtol-collapse/). Airplanes are not shoes or electric cars for which personal preferences can overcome a general inferiority in practicality, because there are direct and substantial penalties for reduction in range or payload or speed.

(Electric cars, of course, are also in deep trouble (Ford, losing $50-$100k per EV sold, is “pausing” production; Volkswagen margins are at 2% and they are considering closing German factories for the first time in their history; Porsche is looking at re- engineering electric cars as conventional ones, etc.) because while electric vehicles certainly do work, they are not, on the whole, better tools than the combustion-engine vehicles they sought to replace.)

Reality is reasserting itself. Vanity aside, airplanes are tools. And while some people may cerakote (https://www.cerakote.com/) their tools and customize them in various ways: most people, most of the time, simply want tools that do the best job for the invested resources that go into them. Airplanes are tools, and they have to make sense.

Even conventional takeoff vehicles that are battery powered are facing a reckoning. Pipistrel’s little trainer (https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/products/velis-electro/) is niche, while Eviation (https://www.eviation.com/company/)’s aircraft, launched with enormous fanfare, managed a single 8 minute flight and is now “waiting for battery technology to improve.” Here (https://leehamnews.com/2024/11/01/45651/) is a very solid top-level analysis of the battery issues.

An electric and conventional (runway, not vertical) takeoff aircraft, Beta, works and is popular – but also as a vanity project as it is not a fundamentally superior product to any other conventional takeoff airplane. It certainly looks cooler and makes a statement – making it more in the realm of shoes and electric vehicles for signaling one’s credentials. It is not a world-beater.

Even hybrid-electric aviation, which has the strongest technological argument, is on the ropes. “To date, NO-ONE has demonstrated any verifiable gain from hybrid system flight tests (https://leehamnews.com/2024/11/01/45651/).”