What advantages will replacing fossil fuel aircrafts by electric-powered ones bring?

With batteries being too heavy and draining too soon, the goal of powering airlines by electricity instead of fossil fuels seems to be decades away. 

However, an electric aviation pioneer and former US aviation pilot, George Bye, believes flight training to be a market where an electric aircraft can thrive, so he used the arid plains outside Denver to flight-test his “Bye Aerospace (or the two-seat eFlyer 2)” which he designed particularly to slash the costs of flight training lessons that normally last for an hour or a little more in the sky.

George wants his battery-powered plane to operate at a fifth the cost of traditional training aircraft as electricity for an hour’s flight would cost less than $3 compared to a $50 fuel bill for the Cessna 172 Skyhawk airplane. This, George says, will make flight training more affordable for an increasing number of pilot trainees over the next two decades.

With his eFlyer2 costing $23 per flight hour compared to the hourly cost of $110 for a Cessna 172, George believes the electric propulsion can bend the aviation’s cost curve back down as it will not only lower energy bills, but also reduce electric motors maintenance costs.

“It’s not incrementally better, it’s disruptively better,” Bye says.

The eFlyer 2 could be the first passenger aircraft designed from scratch around an electric propulsion system to be certified as airworthy.

Bye, who believes he’s less than two years away from winning certification under the FAA’s new Part 23 standard for the eFlyer 2, is convinced that its performance and operating cost advantages, as well as its lower environmental and noise impacts, will bring him enough orders to attract more investment to cover the hefty costs ahead. “We’re innovating for a purpose,” he says.

The greater thing is that Bye’s planned four-seat version, the eFlyer 4, has received 100 orders and “several hundred” orders, respectively, from California-based startups BlackBird and Quantum XYZ, which intend to use the planes for air taxi services.