Electric passenger planes could take off by 2030
Battery-powered aircraft are edging toward short-haul routes, but airports and rules aren't ready
Nine seats, a 400-kilometre range, and no kerosene – those are the pitches aircraft makers are racing to deliver by the end of the decade. It won't replace the Boeing you flew to Lisbon on this summer. But the shorter hop after that one might not burn any fuel at all.
Vaeridion from Munich is currently leading the race, and its numbers are what make it do so. The company has already signed a pre-application contract with EASA, the European aviation safety regulator, and thereby committed itself to achieving commercial certification of the aircraft rather than demonstrating technical feasibility in the laboratory.
The test flights are scheduled for 2027, with the deliveries being expected in 2030.
As Otto Verhoeff, the company's Chief Business Officer, puts it, the nine-seater aircraft when fully loaded can fly 400 kilometres, while reducing the number of passengers to four plus one pilot allows the company to achieve 550 kilometres of flight range – enough to go from Heathrow to Düsseldorf.
The company expects the price per seat to range somewhere between €150 and €300. But Vaeridion is not the only company targeting the year of 2030, with the US company Wright Electric working on its own 186-seater jet with an 800-mile range.
Electric passenger plane routes
Vaeridion says 132 aircraft are already spoken for through letters of intent across eight companies, roughly four in five earmarked for passengers rather than cargo.
Verhoeff points to Dublin–Liverpool and Jersey–Cardiff as realistic early routes, alongside London to Dublin and Amsterdam, journeys short enough that today's battery range covers them without a recharge mid-journey.
Tom Taylor, aviation policy manager at Transport & Environment, says the engineering has moved faster than expected. The obstacle now is everything around the plane: airports need charging infrastructure built at a scale well beyond a car park's worth of chargers, and current landing fees, tied to aircraft weight, often penalise heavier battery-powered planes over kerosene ones.
