Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes and attack Europe's short flight market (which is already cheap). Now we need bigger planes or more frequent planes and the next startup to solve the energy needs.
I'm not sure how building an electric aircraft would help with this. Are people going to suddenly switch to commuting by plane?
Fixing America's commute problem is primarily an urban planning one (ie, putting all the homes nowhere near anything) and not an insufficient-electric-aircraft one.
I happened to be in Plattsburgh the day of this flight, on my way to a fishing trip on the lake. They used that facility for the long former SAC base runway, but I think it’s also appropriate given the nature of the NY North country that an ultra low operating cost aircraft would see flight there.
The death of most industry really hurt these regions, which are largely cut off from the prosperity of the normal economy. The ability to affordably link places like Plattsburgh or Watertown NY to the broader world. That region in particular prospered with rail links driven by iron and timber.
90 minute flights to places like NYC metro or Boston Metro would be transformative, and may even create new airline operating models.
Or is the noise from turbulence through the air or something? I honestly would think they'd be minimising turbulence anyway for energy efficiency.
For people commuting from suburb to suburb you put bus connections at the train station. Buses are lower capacity but cheaper to purchase and operate so you can run a bunch of them in low density[0] for improved coverage. If demand is really bad[1] you create a "microtransit zone" - i.e. offer shuttle taxi service to the rider's final destination.
What I'm describing is basically how UTA's FrontRunner commuter rail service works; but it's not materially different from, say, the NY MTA's LIRR or MNR besides the larger scale of the NY systems and the fact that New York is weirdly bad at buses. For various reasons America has actually done decently well at retaining the commuter rail systems that worked and rebuilding the ones that got scrapped. This is primarily because these systems tend to be small-scale enough that state & local governments can fund them with their own money and the meager amount of FTA funds available.
The comment you replied to confused "rail commute" with "commuter rail"; but the grandparent was specifically talking about intercity travel. Here is where America is actually malincompetent[2] at building anything. Our primary intercity rail operator, Amtrak, was built as a last-ditch service preservation measure as railroads were bleeding money on passenger traffic. It doesn't own most of the rail it operates on, and that rail has been actively getting worse as Class I railroads have been destroying their own infrastructure (especially Union Pacific). The two-and-a-half attempts at building high-speed services in the US have all been various flavors of bad:
1. The most successful, the Acela, works primarily because Amtrak owns most of the corridor. Even then, it barely gets up to speed because "high speed[4]" (80+ mph) trains have to be grade-separated in the US, which is expensive, and the Acela was sold on the promise of incremental upgrades that haven't really panned out
2. BrightLine partnered with a freight railroad that wanted to get back into the passenger market, and it's actually operating at "higher speed[4]", but it's also bleeding money. They have a second route planned from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, but it's a project they bought out because it was... also bleeding money.
3. California wanted to build their own Acela, with blackjack and hookers, and wound up massively overselling it to voters. At least in terms of how much it would cost and how quickly it could be built. They bet the farm on FTA funds that got impounded the moment Trump retook office. I have no idea if this will ever happen.
You'll notice I never mentioned population density, and that's because it doesn't matter for intercity travel at all. The vast majority of flyers get a taxi to the airport and a rental car at their destination, and it still works out anyway. The only difference to those kinds of travelers between a train and a plane is time and whether or not they have to take their shoes off before boarding the vehicle.
[0] Or, if you're New York, you run way too many of them through medium and high density areas that really SHOULD have a subway but don't anyway build QueensLink and NO WAY WITH QUEENSWAY
[1] From a customer perspective, anything less frequent than an every 30 minutes bus probably could be served better with on-demand taxis.
[2] Malicious? Incompetent? Why not both!
[3] I am going to use "commuter rail" to refer to both commuter and regional rail systems as they are roughly the same scale. The difference comes down to scheduling patterns: commuter rail is scheduled around 9-to-5 rush hour traffic while regional rail is built to be more broadly useful.
[4] Strictly speaking, "high speed rail" means 125mph or higher and anything less is conventional speed. Rail just was already pretty fast even before Japan decided to make really fast trains.
More likely, this replaces the turboprop or commuter jet from Colorado Springs to Denver to catch the connecting fright to any other major airport.
A piston or turbine powered aircraft can run all day.
Odd added benefit: the potential ability to jettison a huge part of the weight in extreme emergencies to increase flying time by the backup ICE system.
Likewise, if you're a nerd, you can spend your free time building stuff you thought you would never get around to.
Yes, AI as marketed is a bit of a snakeoil, but much more real and meaningful than crypto and social media. And math nerds finally can get a high paying job that's not about peddling ads or figuring out how to make a hedge fund even richer.
tl;dr I have a few qualms with this app[1].
Now, this thing might take off (pun intended) anyway, for one simple reason: a theoretically faster train does not compete with it if it doesn't exist. The midwest and west are chock full of towns whose rail connections were either abandoned or never existed in the first place, but have regional airports. This thing would be perfect to service feeder flights from hub airports to regionals or as a charter plane.
That being said I wouldn't expect this to revolutionize air travel. You're still going to be packed into a sardine can and made to pay extra for the privilege of bringing a reasonable amount of toiletries with you. And all the long-haul flights are still going to be using fossil fuels because the energy density of batteries sucks. But still, I'd rather have this than 10 million AI companies.
[0] 500 miles for hybrid operation on SAF, because the FAA would not certify a plane with such a small range
The key thing question is whether smaller more frequent flights eat up too much runway time to be economical.
This is utterly 100% false!
The US made the decision to focus rail roads on freight. You never think about freight because you never use it for anything personal, but it is still there. The US beats any place in Europe for Freight and few countries even come close to US for freight rail.
There was a decision made to get rid of passenger rail. However most of those destroyed routes are routes that nobody sane would put passenger rail on today even in high rail mode share countries. There are only a small number of routes should return - for most of the lost routes a bus is better. That isn't to say passenger rail is bad. However the routes we had were bad.
1. Freight customers spend longer waiting for their deliveries, and pay more money for them. As a result, a lot of mid-size freight customers have moved to trucking instead, and the market has shrunk.
2. To save money as less-valuable cargo is pruned from their networks, freight railroads have been downgrading their infrastructure from double- to single-track with sidings. This would be acceptable, except...
3. Freight trains have gotten longer and longer in order to reduce the crew needed to attend to a given amount of freight. Sidings on single-track routes are rarely long enough to accommodate mainline freight trains, so passenger rail gets delayed, and grade crossings stay closed for way longer.
That last bit is actually why I personally complain about freight railroads. I am someone who has spent a good chunk of his 2026 lobbying Utah's state representatives to adopt the Rio Grande Plan[0]. You see, Salt Lake City is divided in thirds by UP freight mainlines, which get hourly freight through-traffic that paralyzes car and pedestrian traffic across the various sides of the city. The railroads themselves don't inconvenience passenger train traffic[1], but they absolutely make it miserable to walk, bike, or drive across the city, and we can't run any transit services parallel to the railroad for obvious reasons. Everything that has to cross the tracks reliably has to go over one of two rail-crossing bridges in the entirety of downtown.
The reason why you are saying "a bus would be better" is primarily a matter of federal infrastructure spending. Buses get to ride on the Interstate Highway System for cheap, and government-provided highway infrastructure is significantly better for both freight and passenger traffic than the privately run railroads can offer. But at the same time, buses are a demonstrably worse answer to the question of "how do we get a bunch of people from one city to another" than trains or planes.
Personally, if money was no object, I'd call for the government to run intercity rail corridors along highway rights of way with open interconnection, overhead catenary, passing tracks, and passenger-priority dispatching. These would specifically be open to both passenger and freight rail, specifically because both are suffering under the weight of hedge funds that moonlight as Class I freight railways.
[0] The Rio Grande Plan is a citizen-led initiative that calls for building a train box in downtown Salt Lake City along 500 West and burying all heavy rail freight and passenger traffic inside of it.
[1] ...because we built our own railroad parallel to the UP mainline. Amtrak's California Zephyr service is absolutely inconvenienced by Union Pacific, though - in fact, it's the worst delayed route in the entire network!
A bus is better because you still need roads for last mile freight, trades and other things that can't run on transit. May as well also run a bus when those roads are not congested anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
Latvia, Rusia, Estonia and Switzerland have a higher modal share of freight than the US.
But the US is higher than the countries many people think about when they think about Europe in Germany, Italy, France, the UK and others. Which is really significant. US freight rail is also super efficient and cost competitive.
US freight rail is definitely unappreciated.
125 mile range is also far from being suitable for all <2 hr flights. I don't think there are many sub 125 mile connections either.
Love to see this work out. 100 pax and 500 mile (electricity) range minimum is where I see it having a (good!) chance for mainstream.
Now, I think this is very neat, but I doubt we'll ever set foot on an electric plane this century.